Lenovo Sets Big PC Sales Goals for the Channel

… fundamental issues at the core of how we were coming to market with our services offering.”

The company is currently tearing down the problem to fix it — a work in progress.

What’s ahead for FY20?

Lenovo’s goal is grab 20% of the PC market within 3 years – largely channel driven – and be No. 2 in the PC market within 5 years.

The vendor is out to reinvigorate its brand, and is backing that up with big investments. The company is focusing on the corporate, public sector and SMB markets. Zielinski reports that Lenovo has doubled the size of its hybrid team and doubled the size of size of resources to help partners go after more logos.

The company’s commitments for the new fiscal year are to invest in the future, tools and enablement. It’s working on an automated best-in-class portal for partners, and to keep winning with them.

Kevin Hooper, president and general manager, North America, Data Center Group, is a newcomer to Lenovo, hired in February, about the same time as Nicole Roskill, executive director, global channels, DCG.

Lenovo’s Kevin Hooper

“I can tell you that from the very early stages of my career in the data center world, all the way through a two-and-a-half- year stint as a reseller, partners have been key to everything that I’ve ever done,” Hooper told partners.

Hooper worked at IBM for seven years, and for the latter part of that time, held executive channel positions. He also worked at HPE for five years and NEC for three. He shared with partner’s his three-point strategy for sales, a strategy he’ll use with his team: Be curious, have an opinion, and work with someone different.

• Being curious is a mechanism to change the relationship you have with customers. It’s about asking a different set of questions. He offered partners to have a conversation with his team to develop this skill.
• Having an opinion means asking customers about the path they’ve chosen to go down and bringing an opinion to the table that includes a specific set of Lenovo technology – five discussion topics, specifically: virtual desktop infrastructure, blockchain, augmented intelligence, IoT and edge, and DevOps.

“What they all have in common is each one of these is a mechanism to provide competitive advantage to your customers that requires fundamental change to the way they’re managing their data center infrastructure,” said Hooper.

Lenovo will help partners with this type of engagement in the field.

• The third piece of Hooper’s strategy is to work with someone different. He told partners that when he first joined the company, the way DCG went to market was to crowd around a small number of customers. He has fixed that by doubling the number of territories that the company covers in North America.

“The notion of working with someone different is challenging. It requires …