Sparking Real Partnerships

 Partnership is not a posture but a process – a continuous process that grows stronger each year as we devote ourselves to common tasks.

— John F. Kennedy

Real Partnerships, Real Marketing

Here at Dell Technologies, it is our constant endeavor to build lasting relationships in everything that we do. This holds true for our engagement with our partner community as well. As we continue to grow as a business and work towards building better experiences for our customers, our partners play a crucial role in helping us define this journey.

83% of CEOs see marketing as a major driver of growth (McKinsey CxO Survey, 2018), and 70% of partners say marketing is important or critical to their future (The State of Partner Marketing by iPED Consulting). Conversations with several partner principals and their marketing leads regarding new marketing trends and the challenges around knowledge and enablement, sparked an idea. An idea, that led to the creation of SPARK – a unique platform where we come together with marketing leaders in our partner organizations to understand trends that are fueling the evolution of marketing and to share best practices, with the ultimate objective of building marketing campaigns that truly matter to our customers.

SPARK 2019

In Melbourne this July, we held the second edition of SPARK, hosting over 100+ partner marketers from Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan and Korea. Spread across two and a half days, the event provided us with the opportunity to exchange ideas, network and gather feedback.  There were presentations, workshops, discussions and breakout sessions with customized tracks for Distributors, Solutions Providers, Cloud Service Providers, System Integrators and Outsourcers.

Key presenters included Karinne Brannigan, Senior Vice President, Head of APJ Field & Partner Marketing, as well as Roelof Holwerda and Kimberly Lasseter from the Global Channel Marketing team.

Along with our partners, we learned the importance of leveraging brand purpose to grow the business, got insights on the latest trends fueling the evolution of IT marketing, and shared marketing best practices via ‘Voice of Partner’ sessions. We were challenged to shift our thinking to be more effective in today’s buying environment, received tips on finding better commercial insight, and even rolled up our sleeves to learn how to make good coffee!

Essentials for today’s Dell Technologies Partner Marketer

Based on what we learned, here are some of the recommended skill-sets that are a must-have in the market we operate in today:

  • Know how to plan, execute and measure Integrated Marketing campaigns; retooling old capabilities and developing new ones – leveraging digital, data & analytics, as well as account-based marketing
  • Know the best practices in Digital Marketing – gathering and acting on buying signals, data-driven customer engagement, leveraging AdTech
  • Know how to identify marketing outcomes that matter, be operationally ready, and maximise MDF funds and support for success
  • Learn the evolution of B2B Marketing – understand change in the buyer’s journey and leverage tech across the journey as well as align the seller’s journey.
  • Leverage the wide variety of assets in the Partner Demand Generation Center, on the complete Dell Technologies end-to-end solutions portfolio, to maximize business growth and make IT real for our customers.

Recognizing our partner successes

We were also incredibly proud to acknowledge and celebrate the accomplishments of our partners. These were partners who truly raised the bar across each of the award categories.

What our partners had to say

We are encouraged by the strong positive feedback we received from the attendees. Our post-event survey reveals that 97% of the participants found the topics relevant and insightful and 96% of them enjoyed the event. My inbox has been flooded with feedback and comments, some of which are captured below.

Partner from Australia: “On behalf of the Tech Data team, I would like to thank you for putting on such a fabulous event, not only was it engaging, but you and the team were also able to drive inspirational session and capture key channel feedback.”

Partner from Malaysia: “…the Dell team did a wonderful job and I am very appreciative of the work put in. Well done! As a marketing practitioner, I find that there are so few marketing conferences like this that are designed just for marketing practitioners and I really value the marketing trends, best practices, testimonials that were shared so that we learn what can be done, and what is being done to help us in our work. Well done!”

Partner from Philippines: “Thank you very much for the opportunity to learn new techniques and to network with fellow marketing practitioners. Since Marketing is also in charge of planning and staging learning sessions and events, it is such a rare and delightful treat for us to be on the other side.”

Beyond SPARK

We are committed to enabling and building future-ready marketers and are putting all rounded effort to engage, enable and empower our partner marketers. While SPARK is an annual event, we also hold quarterly marketing webcasts and newsletters on the latest marketing trends and campaigns in the channel space. We also produce a digital e-book, twice a year, to share marketing best practices undertaken by partners. It is indeed, as quoted John F. Kennedy said about partnership, a continuous process and we’ll continue to strive towards marketing excellence with our partners.

About the Author: Sudip Saha

Sudip leads the Partner Marketing team in Asia Pacific & Japan at Dell Technologies. He is responsible for developing and executing overall Partner marketing strategy and programs for Dell technologies ecosystem of solution providers, distributors, system integrators, cloud service providers and ISV partners. Sudip has 20 years’ of overall experience in marketing, strategy & operations, analytics and finance across multiple industries. He is a qualified Chartered Account from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons. In Accounting) from the University of Calcutta.