 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2020, the virtual Dell Tech World and of course, the virtual CUBE with me is Allison Dew. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there Allison, good to see you. Hi David, good to see you too. I'm gonna see you in a live but it's so good to see you on the feed. Yeah, I miss you too, it's been tough but we're getting through it and it's at least with technology, we're able to meet this way. And for us to continue theCUBE, for you to continue Dell Tech World reaching out to your customers. But maybe we could start there. It's like, I said the other day, Allison, to somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a COVID expert in the last six months. But it changed so much, but I'm interested in, well, first of all, you're a great communicator. Many, many members of your team, they're a really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic, your communications? Did you increase that? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? So obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications but in this instance, the two most important are our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof reels going around the internet of, here's how not to talk to customers, right? So you saw early in February and in March and April, all of these communications that started within these troubled times. We are here to help you. And we're all already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications anew. So for example, in our small business space, we were just about, days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it. And we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisors lower production values than working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative to look for what's appropriate now, what's tone deaf. And that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do. And I'm really proud of the work we did to pivot quickly. Then on the employee side, if you'd asked me in January, was team member communications, the most important thing I was doing? I would have said, it's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, but it's not the most important thing I'm doing where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said, it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend to working from home. You had all of the demands of homeschooling, the chaos, the stress, whilst also we're obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting with them through more informal means like Zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications. So that's what we did and continue to do. Well, you've done a good job and you've struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't, you did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off or like you said, sometimes tone deaf and we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters, you know, like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something and it was sloughing it off and then it really comes back to bite them, sometimes security breaches are like that. So it seems like Dell has a, I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good, good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say, is it, is there some super method that you use? I'm just like cautiously optimistic and the superstitious part of me is like, don't say that. Yeah, okay, I'm not going to. All right, right here. So it's both, it's experience obviously and then what I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus data and creativity and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles, those two things can be sometimes pitched as competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity or it's all about the data and I think that's a silly non-argument and it should be both things. And this timeline, this point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re-traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not, in 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis. When we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who'd seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times and then we went on to talk about how we could take out IT costs and we targeted IT makers who basically we first played to their fear function and then we said, and now we're gonna put you out of a job. So there's this years of learning around where you get the sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do as a company and keeping the institutional knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last two and a half, three years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with a third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget, to repivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not, we were able to now do in a manner of hours something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data and then real getting to real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know, the book Michael Lewis Moneyball, the famous movie, you know, for a while it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought were going to win, but it really is a balance of art and science. And it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much, how much, I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. Absolutely, Dave. And one of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years. So we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time. And one of the things that we have learned from that is it's a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The culture and then the processes, right? So when you have the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about, this is a marathon, this is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pandemic was on the technology side, even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had work from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really. So there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running. And then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership, we've been able to have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff, the other parts of the leadership team, me together to have a conversation. And one of the benefits of the fact those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years, as I know you have as well, suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation. So that's, we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months. You know, and you guys actually have some work from home street cred. I think Dell, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home pre COVID was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. It wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating coming to the office and the clear that they were on the wrong side of history. I mean, that surprised me actually. And you know what also surprised me? I don't know, I'm just going to say it is there were two companies running by women and I would have thought there was more empathy there, but Dell has always had this culture of, yeah, we could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the heritage or your founders still chairman and CEO, I don't know. You know, those companies, obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was you don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you have a trust problem with your employees. And so yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances, they've been on the wrong side of history on many things. Sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't want to be mean about that. But the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is it opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas as an example. And that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce, to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that realization. And as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in, now we're all basically not 100%, but mainly all working from home and we're still learning. So there's an interesting ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very core to the Dell culture. I want to ask you about the virtual events you had the choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled. And you would have got a COVID mulligan. I mean, we saw some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on yourselves. And I guess, we saw this with VMware, I guess it was just recently, this last couple of weeks. Yeah, and so, but they kind of raised the bar. They had some great action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but kind of what went into that decision? As I say, you put more pressure on yourself because now you, but you also had compares. What are your thoughts on that? So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful. It's kind of wake up and think what not just on the events front, but as I said on the creative front, what work that my team has been working on for the last two years, am I going to destroy today? Was sort of, I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about, we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in-person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May. And what I did together with my head of communications and head of events is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States. And we thought, this is not going to be a great moment for the US. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really very quickly repivot that. And what I was trying to do was not churn my own organization. So make the decisions, start to plan and move on. And at the same time though, what that then meant is we still had to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning curve for my team. I feel really good about that. And hopefully it helps us in what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. Yeah, well, so not to generalize but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot of the marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of a virtual, but the sales guys love the belly to belly, close the deals, but so where do you land on that? How do you see the future of events we expect to continue to have a strong virtual component? I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think at the same time, people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation I would like to be having this discussion with you live. And I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in like, let's go to Las Vegas, who knew? But so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you can do more safely. And then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event and we're gonna continue to build on it. But there's places in the world, if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held an overabundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this we could say, well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting. You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter, engineering and sales. And that's all, anything else is a waste of money in their minds. When you, and all I talk about is lead gen, lead gen, lead gen, you don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels and ways to communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, lead gen is important, demand gen is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be as effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? So one thing that I've always been a little bit Ken Tankers on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of brand versus lead gen because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short-term business results, maybe even in quarter or in half or in year. And there are things that we do that lead to long-term business results. First one is demand gen, the second one is more traditional brand, but we have to do both. We have to, if you think about our legacy as known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker in order for us to be successful in the businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story, you got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in-person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long-term and short-term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to leads and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years. And I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now if we hadn't invested there. Well, it's interesting, you're right. I mean, Dell of course, you know, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then of course the EMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you look to the future and of course we're hearing this week about as a service, new pricing models, just new mindsets. I look at, and I wonder if you could comment I look at Dell's futures, you know not really a product company becoming a platform essentially for digital transformation is how I look at you. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves. And I won't go through the whole thing but if you look at started as a direct to consumer company then went into servers then and started to go into small business, meaning business, blah, blah, blah, blah when private acquired EMC. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now. So as, even with all of that context in place the horizon that we're facing into now is I believe the most important transformation that we've done, which is as you see historical IT models change and it becomes yes about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have but we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models and the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation and that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service and that's super exciting for us. Well, I was saying before you're sort of in lockstep with your customers, maybe we could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. So you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the IT work and in fact, you actually have to make it about the IT the business process change and the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the EMC acquisition and the fact that there was a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not going to be able to absorb that and keep the business running and in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things, the technology, the culture and the business process change and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization just to use the data-driven transformation of marketing, historically we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative breath bent. Well now increasingly we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about, okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them and how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, et cetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic. And I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward in companies real transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. Well, I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down to the middle management and to the field. And congratulations on how far you've come. And also I'm really impressed that you guys have such huge ambitions in so many ways, changing society, obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So Allison, thanks so much for- Thank you, Dave, great to see you virtually. I'm very grateful. Great to see you, hopefully. Hopefully see you soon. It's hopefully next year we can beat together. Until then, virtual hug. You'll see, virtual hug. See you later. Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Dell Tech World 2020 will be right back right after this short break.