Las Vegas – Linda Connly, the vice president and GM, SMB division and inside sales, Americas at EMC, (Nasdaq: EMC) told a packed audience at the VARNex conference her three-year goal to make SMB a billion dollar business for EMC.
Connly is already one year into her three year journey in the SMB and announced to the many Synnex channel partners that the largely direct vendor will shift to a 100 per cent channel model strictly for SMB sales.
“We shall be 100 per cent channel. There will be no direct sales and we have solution specialist and market development programs and training for this sales opportunity. We are committed to this road to a billion dollars and the only way is through the distribution channel to get to that billion dollars,” Connly said.EMC has not played down market, but Connly said that the fastest area of growth is in SMB.
According to her statistics, there are 2.9 million addressable accounts in the SMB today. EMC defines the SMB as 250 employees or less, but Connly admitted that there are plenty more with 100 employees and below that are targets for the company. “The SMB segment is growing the fastest at a 30 per cent rate.
This market is hotter and growing faster than the mid-market and the enterprise and now is the time for EMC to partner with Synnex,” she said.
She said that Synnex with their emphasis and programs on virtualization and cloud align well with EMC. Connly admitted that EMC does not have the distribution capabilities to get at the SMB market and must align with a distributor that has the same focus if the company wants to achieve its stated goal of a billion dollars in SMB sales by 2012.
Part of the plan with Synnex is for the distributor to sign up four times as many channel partners as they have today and build demand generation and other marketing programs for EMC’s channel. “When you talk about bets; we’ve put a big bet on Synnex,” Connly added.
The market opportunity as Connly see it is for EMC channel partners to tap into the 9,000 plus customers EMC has now and the more than 90,000 prospects.
With that EMC has made changes to its Velocity channel program. The changes have been made to create new opportunities for partners to differentiate and be more profitable. Velocity will have four levels starting with Affiliate, Affiliate Elite, Premier and Signature. Connly said that EMC has made the requirements to enter Velocity low because they want to sign up a lot of partners.
“Let me again state that I have a quarter of the channel I need to grow. I need a lot of channel partners (in the U.S. and Canada),” she told VARNex conference attendees.
Another objective will be lead generation for the partner community.
Under this new direction, EMC sales associates will be tasked to make 250 outbound calls and produce a minimum of 10 face-to-face sales meetings per week. “We have marketing efforts that bring in thousands of leads and the second way is through channel partners with focused campaigns,” she said.
Also for 2011 will be a new branding campaign for EMC in the SMB that will encompass print and online advertising along with press releases. “This will be a different year and we want to be simple, efficient and affordable,” Connly said.
Connly is looking to Synnex to capture channel partners with a minimum of $3 million in revenue up to $20 million for this SMB push. These VARs must also have a virtualization practice and have expertise in back up, security and data recovery.
