Ever since Dell has made its presence felt in the Indian market, the company has made all possible attempts to topple the competition in the market and it has done so in a very quick time. It’s indirect go to market and retail strategy have helped the company to achieve the milestone. Sanjib Mohapatra of SME Channels spoke to Sanjay Yadav - Director Sales and Distribution, CSMB, Dell India to know more about its retail focus. Excerpts.
What purpose Dell retail strategy solves?
With increased focus on SMB and consumer segments, Dell recognized the need to offer customers an opportunity to touch and feel the product as well as for greater ground coverage in a country like India. This led to the opening up of the retail and channel in India, as in many other key markets. Our business strategy is to reach out through our hybrid National and regional Distribution model (for the consumer segment), where we have appointed dedicated regional partners to drive distribution to channel and retail.
The retail segment has been a very effective medium to reach out to customers and showcase our products. The 2 tier distribution system also ensures that Dell can partner more closely with the retail channel and is quicker to respond to customer needs. Dell also has an affiliate program wherein the agents of Dell directly interact with the end customers and sell the products. Currently our consumer products are available at about 53 Dell exclusive stores in India, large format stores like Croma and Staples and a few thousand resellers and sales affiliates spread across tier 1/2 and 3 towns and cities.
Dell has continually expanded its retail presence in order to reach out to an increasing number of customers across India. We will continue to invest in our marketing efforts and retail infrastructure.
The retail model ensures to make buying Dell products simple and easy. The availability of customized products at retail showrooms like Croma & Staples: Consumers can browse, touch, feel the products yet customize and order a Dell product to be delivered home within a week.
What is your marketing strategy?
Our sales representatives from both the direct and indirect business are trained to help customer identify products to meet their needs. To make things easier for consumers, we have created customized product solutions designed for the needs of specific customer segments like Families with kids, students, gamers and mobile professionals to find the system that best suits their needs. The breadth and focus of our product line is primarily because our customers’ needs and wants are changing: The Inspiron line of notebooks and desktops is primarily targeted at families and students, while the new XPS brand answers the needs of mobile professionals and the Alienware brand is for gamers and users of extremely high performance machines.
Which products come under your retail strategy?
Dell’s unique distribution model, comprising of direct and indirect channels, wrapped with the service standards ensures availability of all products from the Inspirion, XPS laptops, Desktops, All in ones to our phones and Tablets.
Our hybrid National and regional Distribution model, comprises of dedicated partners to drive distribution to channel and retail. The 2 tier distribution system ensures that we can partner more closely with the retail channel and are quicker to respond to customer needs.
How different the strategy is within Dell go to market?
At Dell we constantly listen to customer feedback and found that, to effectively reach out to a wider customer audience, the retail channel was an important avenue to ensure physical presence, penetration and visibility of the brand and the product. The idea is to offer convenience and the touch and feel experience to Indian customers who are looking at buying Dell machines.
Our business strategy is to reach out through our hybrid national and regional Distribution model (for the consumer segment), where we have appointed dedicated partners to drive distribution to channel and retail. The retail segment has been a very effective medium to reach out to customers and showcase our products. The 2 tier distribution system also ensures that Dell can partner more closely with the retail channel and is quicker to respond to customer needs. Dell also has an affiliate program wherein the agents of Dell directly interact with the end customers and sell the products. We aim at providing our retail customers with an unmatched experience by making available to them expert advice on the right Dell products that can be customized as per their requirements. We will continue to optimize our retail reach by launching more Dell exclusive stores and ‘Shop in Shops’ in India. Dell has continually expanded its retail presence in order to reach out to an increasing number of customers across India. We will continue to invest in our marketing efforts and retail infrastructure.
How do You empower the partners?
We believe in providing our channel community with the choice of what to buy as per consumer demand. This has been in keeping with Dell’s intentions of creating a simple and robust channel program that does away with the complexity and helps the channel partners’ progress. Furthermore we have the Sales Affiliates program – This program enables smaller partners who cannot invest heavily in inventory to sell Dell products directly. This has played an important role in enhancing the confidence we enjoy with the retail and channel community.
What are the incentivization programmes Dell is running now?
Early in May this year we launched Dell Empower program which is a two-fold incentive program for the channel partners. This one-of-a-kind channel program is aimed to provide differentiated experience to the customers and will keep enhancing the benefits to the channel and end-consumer. As part of the Empower program, the last tier of channel (Resellers/retailers) is required to give demo of the product, explain the features and record the end customer details during the retail sales. This data is then 100% verified and fed into the Dell systems to update the warranty in the name of the end customer. The Dell sales affiliate is then rewarded for every valid customer information.
What is Dell’s B&C class city presence strategy?
We have our presence across the country through our retail and channel network and Sales affiliate program. We also have the capability to support customer service for our consumer products in over 700 cities across the country through our onsite service program.