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EMC warns sales bods: Steal deals and it's no shoes for your kids

It's party time for resellers, so no pilfering of customers

EMC will strip commissions from its direct sales bods if they snatch deals from resellers and integrators.

This is one of the Rules of Engagement the storage giant has come up with to end conflict in the channel between its staff and third-party box-handlers.

Philippe Fosse, veep of EMEA channels at EMC, said his company is ring-fencing 150 enterprise customer accounts that it will continue to target directly - but all others are designated as channel-only.

"We are making sure partners are trained and enabled very early in the sales cycle and that no deals in a channel-only segment are taken direct. We will reinforce that, which means in the future if a deal is [erroneously] taken direct we will not pay commission to a sales rep," he told The Channel.

This covenant will not be introduced across Europe until January as EMC changes employee Ts&Cs.

EMC's new love for channel partners sprouted after the disk array giant's long-running reseller deal with Dell hit the rocks: the Texan PC maker made its feelings very clear by acquiring storage businesses EqualLogic and Compellent.

Fosse has clearly been reading chapter one of Reseller Management for Beginners as he repeatedly stated what should be fundamental to any channel strategy: simplicity, predictability and profitability. EMC has folded the Core Storage, Backup & Restore and the Isilon channel teams into one unit with one-point-of-contact per reseller, and has aligned channel resources under one leader in each country.

As a result, about 850 customers that used to deal with the direct sales team will be distributed among EMC's community of resellers under the Enterprise Select Account Programme banner. The rebates on offer to channel firms that manage these enterprises will rise, said Fosse, although he would not talk exact figures.

The EMC partner love is also extended to the services space: a global partner services team led by Daniel Coetsier has been formed.

"That organisation did not exist in 2011. Before if a partner wanted to sell services it had to engage with at least three local customer service managers, and these people were very busy. The vast majority of the services business was direct, we had people with a low focus on that [channel services] and that was a problem," said Fosse.

The blueprint includes hoisting resellers into cloud computing, and determining if they want to provide technical or professional services or want to back it off to EMC. ®

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