Partner blasts Dell Premier portal at US forum

Growing pains are to blame for reseller portal problems, according to Cheryl Cook

Growing pains are the reason Dell's Premier partner portal is not up to scratch, Cheryl Cook, VP of global channel and alliances at Dell, has told ChannelWeb's sister US publication Channelnomics.

The comments came in response to a catalogue of complaints about the portal listed by an audience member during Cook's keynote at the Dell Security Peak Performance gathering in Orlando last week.

The partner asked Cook if there are any plans to deal with the "myriad problems" with the portal.

"I often find products that have been discontinued that are still being advertised for sale," the partner told Cook.

"Or you place an order and you find out 45 days later it still hasn't shipped. I often find pricing on the public website that is actually lower than the pricing that I see on Premier, or I find the partner portal is down.

"It's very, very embarrassing when a customer actually takes your quote and says I can get this cheaper by buying it directly from Dell. We really don't have much of a retort for that."

Cook told the partner, along with the other 600 delegates, that Dell was "by no means done" when it comes to ensuring the organisation has the infrastructure and the partner experience running through the company in place.

"We have under way right now a pretty intensive IT road map to address just what you're describing, and we've been launching in the US, in Q3 and Q4, online solution configurators absolutely driving to a unified Premier site such that you'll be able to ultimately get your quotes and your configurations there, and ideally I'd like to be able to transact there," she told the partner.

She added that the notion of pricing and getting a coherent pricing strategy across all the multiple platforms is "absolutely on [her] agenda and being worked on".

She continued that Dell has a one-price strategy and that if the same concerns the partner raised to her had been raised to her a year ago, it would have been one of several "escalations" per week. These have become a couple a month, Cook (pictured) said.

"So we are making progress," Cook told the partner. "We're not perfect yet but we absolutely are driving what we call an omni-channel approach, and that means that as a partner you should absolutely ensure you're best-positioned in front of our customers to be that representation for our buyer.

"So we know we have work to do and we're going to continue to make investments. There have been considerable investments actually in our IT automation this year."

Speaking to Channelnomics, Cook described the issue with the Premier portal as growing pains for Dell.

"This is how I describe it to the team: that sometimes we're going through growing pains; they're painful but they're growing pains. I think right now we're just trying to ensure that as our portfolio is expanded, we really try and educate and engage the partners on those areas of the portfolio that make the most sense. How do we bring that enablement training, support automation in the way of configurators to them in the easiest way?"

She said the firm is making progress, but that the comments made during her keynote drew her attention to the fact that perhaps the progress isn't fast enough.

"We've got our strategic list of priorities. I think we have them identified and know what they are. I think we've made really good progress on the sales engagement side. Even though we may not be perfect yet, we're working tirelessly at simplifying our coverage so that [our partners] know who to turn to.

"We want to go faster but we want quality and then we want to try and keep it simple. It's not always easy."