Top Gun 51 Profile: Dell EMC’s Cheryl Cook on Raising the Channel IQ Within the Organization

In the dynamic IT industry, experience can work for you or against you. For Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of global channels for Dell EMC, it has definitely been the former. This Top Gun 51 award winner has spent much of her career working in the channel and has the formula for evolving in her role and having what it takes to be a next-gen channel chief.

In a conversation with Channel Futures, Cook talks about relationship and partnership, three-dimensional thinking, and creating a win-win-win outcome.

Channel Futures: You talk about being an outside-in thinker and how that lends itself to being a next-gen channel leader. Please explain.

Dell’s Cheryl Cook

Cheryl Cook: I’m a big believer in being an outside-in thinker, meaning I always try to respect, understand and learn the partner’s perspective: How are they running their business? What challenges do they have running their business? One of the things that I find stimulating – and I love working in the channel side of the business – is that it requires three-dimensional thinking. You’ve always got to strike a balance for a win-win-win — that’s for the customer, the partner and, obviously, Dell. That takes work. You must understand all objectives.

CF: Not everyone taking a leadership channel role has all the requisite experience to draw on. Share some of your leadership wisdom.

CC: I think for anybody stepping into this, you must be motivated and stimulated to want to think three-dimensionally, you must be creative and innovative on trying to insure you get to that win-win-win. So for me, it’s listen, make sure you’re open-minded, and you innovate, evolve and adapt your practices and processes. The industry we’re in is, by definition, dynamic, and it’s always moving and changing, and our partners have to evolve and adapt as well, as do we.

You also want to be as consistent as possible and highly relevant and stay in tune with the business, both theirs and ours. The more relevant you are and the more consistent we behave when we show up, I think that earns us, over time, the trust, credibility and reputation with partners that strikes a balance — that’s how we all win. It’s not about achieving success at the other’s expense.

CF: One aspect of being a channel leader is being a channel advocate inside the organization. How do you get and maintain the attention of other corporate leaders?

CC: There’s a recognition and acknowledgement on the part of leadership on just how big the market opportunity is, and so, I find myself – and I try to develop my team, that leadership is – being the evangelist for partners internally. I’m always trying to elevate the channel IQ inside the company. Not everybody, depending on the part of the business they function in, does or doesn’t understand the dynamics, nuances or complexities of the channel.

So, I’m a big advocate, and we do a lot of internal intern rotations where we’ll bring different functions into my organization. They may spend a year or two, and then we rotate them back into the business. We’re a very credible, good-reputation team and organization inside the company, and you get an amazing education.

When you come into our team and you operate the global partner marketing facet, you touch and see every aspect of the business, whether its order entry, quoting and pricing, distribution or field marketing in the region, or campaign development with our product business units or product launches — it’s a fantastic education for people. I’m a big believer in …