What I’m noticing:
- Big shift toward high potential college kids in our Next Gen Sales Academy.
- Not only does this training process focus more on emerging tech (AI, edge, etc) but also on financial and outcome-based selling techniques. Much more legacy EMC-style in nature (hopefully with less Boston frat boy swagger that alienated so many customers).
- Younger college kids simultaneously delivers a blank slate for sales training purposes but, obviously, (tale as old as time), a way to replace older, more expensive tenured talent.
- Huge push to drive low-margin end user computing business online and have field sales teams focusing on datacenter/edge/AI. Like it or not, there are still pockets of, especially, legacy Dell field sellers that spend far too much time on notebooks and Chromebooks.
- big push of datacenter sales to the channel.
What I’m wondering;
Is Dell either getting ready to sell something or buy something? You have the obvious opex offloads built around rounds of layoffs and investment in younger talent. You have the maniacal focus on expenses right now. You have online push for client route to market. Yiu have the channel push for storage.
Some of it may be transitionary - market trends dictate a new way of doing business. Pay as you go storage consumption. The emerging success of Dell’s AI focused, gpu-laden server platform gives Dell glimmers of what’s possible in AI and also at the edge.
If I’m a Dell long hauler, I’m embracing what’s going down or getting out b/c it doesn’t feel like they are playing around. Dell’s changing.
But as a high performing but tenured salesmaker, I won’t say I’m not worried. I don’t feel old but I’m starting to wonder if I am too old in Dell’s eyes.