Dell is lowering the minimum dollar value needed for its Canadian partners to use its deal registration system, a bid to make the service more attractive to SMB-focused solution providers.
The company will drop the minimum deal price from $25,000 to $15,000, effective immediately, in what Paul Shaffer, director of global channel marketing and operations at Dell, called a response to reseller requests.
“We heard from our partner advisory council that in the SMB space, the deal often doesn’t go up to $50,000 [in the US],” Shafer said. “The request was that we lower the minimum to a more manageable deal size for them.”
The deal registration tool, part of its overall
PartnerDirect reseller program, allows solution providers to register specific sourced opportunities that include any Dell product, software, service, or any combination of the three.
At the $50,000 mark in the US and the $25,000 mark in Canada, Shaffer said the deals partners were finding were pretty much exclusively for Dell’s “enterprise” products, namely servers and storage. By dropping to a more consistent $15,000 across the board – the change is also being announced in Dell’s PartnerDirect European theatre – Shaffer said the company hopes to find a sweet spot that includes both servers and storage and client machines in the small business space (Dell defines small business as fewer than 500 seats), but still stays above the “onesies and twosies” side of the business.
“We think $15,000 captures more than just pure run-rate business,” Shaffer said.
Stuart Crawford, vice president of business development at
Bulletproof Infotech of Calgary and Red Deer, AB, agreed with Shaffer’s assessment. Although a Dell partner since its inception, Crawford said Bulletproof has not to date made use of the deal registration tool. Crawford said this was both because the company did not often find itself in openly competitive bids, and because most of the deals it does fall below the $25,000 threshold. But with the new bar set at $15,000, Crawford said Bulletproof would be more likely to register deals.
