169. What Consumption-Based CS Looks Like Inside a $100B Company ft. Jared Collins (Dell)

We want that to kind of come to them and say, hey, something’s happening here based on this data. We need to take an action. And then that’s where the playbook comes in. What do you actually do about it?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast Network. 16 years at one company in a world where most CS leaders change jobs every 2 years. Jared Collins watched Dell transform from a PC company into a $100 billion infrastructure giant and bet his career on building customer success inside a business that still ships physical hardware to data center floors. But here’s the thing: when your lead times are measured in months, not milliseconds, you can’t just push a button and deliver value. You have to see around corners. I’m Josh Schachter. And today on Unchurned, how Dell’s Apex team is writing the playbook for consumption-based CS, where data triggers, hardware logistics, and AI all have to work in sync before the customer even knows what they need. Hey everybody, and welcome to this episode of Unchurned.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m your host, Josh Schachter, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Market Development at Gainsight., and I’m very delighted to be here today with Jared Collins. Jared is the senior director of customer success at Dell. He focuses on their Apex product unit. Jared, thank you so much for being on the show.

Jared Collin:
Great to be here. Thanks, Josh.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Tell us, tell us a little bit about, you know, you’ve been with Dell for only 16 years. Tell us a little bit about, um, I think most people know Dell, but you could tell us a little bit about your BU there and, and what it is that you do.

Jared Collin:
Yeah, most people are familiar with it from the PC and laptop side of the business, right? That’s what we all know about. There’s actually a, which is accurate, we sell a lot of that, but really at a high level, Dell has two major sides to our business, PC and laptops on one side, the other side is data center infrastructure. So think servers, data storage, data protection, all that kind of good hardware and software that, you know, enterprises need to run their data centers. Customers want— and that’s the side of the business I’m on— customers want access to that technology in a lot of different ways, right? So they can still do a traditional purchase. You pay for it upfront, you own that equipment, and you host it on your data center floor. But we also offer a lot of consumption-based options so customers can pay for that equipment, that technology over time, manage it more like a subscription. And those offerings are what we brand as Dell Apex. And that’s the part of the business I’m in.

Jared Collin:
My customer success team manages the post-sales experience for those Apex offerings.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’re not selling computers, you’re not selling screens, you’re, you’re, you’re not selling servers, so to speak, as far as the hardware. It’s a subscription model. You’re measuring consumption and that’s the business model. That’s the monetization of it.

Jared Collin:
Yeah, you can think of it as kind of the best of both worlds. Customers still host and manage the equipment in their own data center environments. They get, you know, they can manage performance, the security benefits, all on-prem, but they pay for the usage in a way that feels more like you might be used to in the public cloud environment. It’s a subscription-based, consumption-based model. So in that sense though, it’s very different from the— it’s not a ship-and-done relationship anymore, right? We’re an ongoing partnership. We ship the equipment, it’s there, and we manage that kind of partnering with the customer. Throughout the life of the agreement.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And apparently we’re all going to consumption-based with Agentic AI. So you’re just a step ahead of us.

Jared Collin:
That’s going to be consumption-based on, yeah, exactly.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So how does it work? How do you, tell us, like, help us write the playbook here together for consumption-based customer success at Dell Apex. What’s in your wallet, so to speak? How do you guys run your ops there for CS?

Jared Collin:
Well, one thing that’s different about our Apex offerings that a lot of your audience may not be familiar with is we’re not a software-only SaaS offering, right? We have hardware, which physical hardware that we ship out, we own it, Dell owns the equipment, but it’s hosted at our customer data centers. And that creates, as you can imagine, some unique aspects that we manage as a customer success team. And those Hardware assets don’t travel at the speed of light like the bits and bytes of a software deal, obviously. So part of the experience when a customer signs one of our Apex agreements, first job is to, hey, what hardware do you need, where do you need it, and how do we get it to you in an efficient and effective way? And we kind of help provide a white glove experience for that customer. How do we, you know, make and coordinate with them? Like, how do we make sure that equipment arrives at the right place? How do we We need to make sure we know what the customer’s looking for and do that. Simple things like space on their data center floor. Do we have the right cables? So you can start thinking very tactically and specifically about some of those things. But beyond that, you know, with that said, it’s not that different from how you’d be used to approaching the customer journey for any SaaS or subscription offering, right? There’s still onboarding, we still need to understand what that customer’s looking for, what that value is.

Jared Collin:
We still need to make sure that over the experience, over the life of the agreement, they’re getting the value out of it that they need. Our CSMs still operate in a way that’d be very familiar to any other CSM team, I think, out there. So that’s kind of how we think about it though, and the importance of being able to, you know, what the hardware piece means though is that we have to be looking ahead to what the customers need. You know, it’s not like we can just push a button and there’s the functionality. It takes many times months and months in advance of understanding what does a customer need, you know, at the end of the year, and how do we— what things do we need to put in motion now? And so you have to really have that deep partnership and relationship with the customer, that transparency, to be able to make that work effectively.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
How do you create that, that transparency further ahead?

Jared Collin:
Well, one thing is our CSMs don’t work in a vacuum, right? Dell’s a big company and the customers we’re working with are typically large enterprise, even Fortune 500 customers, and they have dedicated sales account teams who are very good at their jobs and really are the drivers of that relationship. You know, we do business with customers across— Dell does— across so many aspects of from PCs and laptops all the way to these big storage arrays, right? And there’s a lot of different touchpoints we have with those customers. So it’s really important that our CSMs are part of that ecosystem, but they’re not going to be successful on their own. And I kind of think about this as, see, if the, if the account executive is the CEO of that customer relationship, they’re really the ones driving the strategy and making those big decisions. The CSM, at least from an Apex perspective, is the COO, the chief operations officer, understanding and really delivering that day-to-day operational experience for the customer. And where that works the best is really when that partnership between the sales executive and the CSM and obviously the customer are all in sync. And we’re bringing to bear what we really understand about the Apex offering, the hardware delivery, the telemetry, all those things just have to be working seamlessly. And then we bring those insights to the account executive who then can translate that to, hey, what does this mean to the relationship overall? And what is that? And they’re bringing all these other pieces together.

Jared Collin:
So that’s kind of where you see that relationship really click where, and it works really well. Like literally they’re working arm in arm with each other on these broader Dell relationships. And when you bring all those, all the expertise and perspectives, together, it really works quite.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well. Are there any constraints of, of having a team that’s a smaller part of a much larger engagement with a customer?

Jared Collin:
There can be. I think there’s a lot of opportunities, though, too. You can kind of look at it different, a couple of different ways. One is, you know, Dell is a big company. There’s a lot of different touchpoints with customers. But the flip side of that is there are so many people and experts within Dell that we can access and bring into customer situations where needed. And we have to do that. We have to be good at that.

Jared Collin:
And so I kind of expect my CSMs to be generalists in the sense they need to be kind of dangerous about knowing a lot about a lot of things, enough to know that when, when they’re at the point where we need to bring an expert in. And the nice thing about working for a big company like Dell is that we’ve got teams of experts who we can bring in and resources that we can bring in to help customers. And not only that, but because we have such a breadth of touchpoints with the customer, we not only know them very well as a company, but we can see other customers with similar profiles, similar problems, we can bring all that to bear. So a company like Dell and working in a customer success environment like we did, that like you said, it’s a small part of that company, it’s really important that the CSM knows when to bring people in. They’re not going to own that really, nobody owns that customer relationship, is really important principle that, you know, everybody owns it., and the CSM is responsible for bringing the right people in at the right times.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’ve been there for 16 and a half years. In your experience at Dell, what separates the most effective CSMs from.

Jared Collin:
The rest? Um, I think it’s the ones who are, one is relationship focused. As much as we talk about, it’s important to know the technical aspects of our product, it’s important to know the contracts and the financing, the pricing, and all of those things are really important. But the most successful CSMs are the ones that spend time and prioritize building really strategic relationships, not just with the customer, obviously first and foremost the customer, but with the account teams, with the other specialists, all those people I was talking about. And that’s where we’re really trying to focus is how do we enable CSMs to have more time to do exactly that? And one of the, one of the evidences I look for is how many times is a CSM, you know, in person in front of a customer with the account team and how often are they meeting and having those in-person meetings. Not that that’s the only way to do it, but that’s certainly evidence that, hey, we’re adding strategic value, we’re being pulled into the right meetings at the right times to have those conversations. And I think that’s one of the ways where, as we evolve, as we modernize as a customer success team, we’re always looking for ways to how do we free up time for those CSMs to focus more and more on that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you’ve got the in-person meetings. Are you guys remote? Are you remote working or based out of the office?

Jared Collin:
We have a mix of remote and in-office. Okay. Okay.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What are some of the other high-value activities that your CSMs are.

Jared Collin:
Focused on? One thing we’re working a lot on is we kind of want to be data strategists as a CSM team, and we’re Again, in a large enterprise like Dell and a large company, one of the nice things is that we have the ability to scale and we have a, you know, a massive amount of data that is available to understand what a customer’s doing. The challenge is pulling all those pieces of data together and presenting it to somebody like a CSM, a CSM on my team, making it easier for them to know and see what those data points are and how they connect to each other. This is not anything that is unique to Dell. Obviously, we’re all kind of working through this, but we are building, we build customer health scores, for example, that help us look at these complex data center utility agreements and customers and relationships that we have in different aspects. And how are they, again, going back to the hardware piece, how effective are we at getting that hardware quickly to the customer on time when they need it? How are they utilizing it? How are we helping them optimize that utilization? But then we also look at things like, well, what’s the, what’s the CNPS score? How do we take things that have nothing to do with Apex but are important to that customer? We need to have kind of a.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Line of sight to that overall across the account, not just on your business unit.

Jared Collin:
That’s right. Yeah. Because it’s so important that we are at least aware of those because that could represent an indirect opportunity or risk to that Apex piece of it. And that’s where by presenting those data points in a consistent, standardized way, we can help CSMs kind of see those come up proactively, predictably, right? And then pull in and have those conversations early on with whether it’s account team or the customer or both.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I kind of asked this question before, but I mean, Dell is— you guys are around $100 billion in annual revenue, I believe, something in that general realm. And so a giant organization. I actually didn’t— I mean, obviously we all know Dell. I didn’t know it was that big. And so you’ve got some probably like monstrously big accounts doing lots of revenue. So again, like to what extent does that overlay become a constraint or an opportunity? How often are you running into situations where it’s, you know, your work on Apex is not just about your work with Apex, it’s about the broader view of the entire account?

Jared Collin:
Yeah, I would say when we’re doing it right, we run into those situations all the time. You can’t really separate what we’re doing with our side of the business from everything else because that’s not how the customer looks at it. The customer doesn’t look at it and say, hey, this is Apex, therefore I’m only going to talk to you about that. They just see us all as Dell and they expect us to kind of work together. And that takes effort. That doesn’t happen naturally or just without effort all the time. But I think that’s really important and What we do to help facilitate that, and it’s a lot of grunt work, honestly. It’s like, how do you take all the data sources across the company and standardize those? And not just the data though, like the data’s just a starting point.

Jared Collin:
The data’s only good if it tells you something. What do you need to do? What’s the risk or opportunity? So I always talk about in terms of data triggers and playbooks. Data’s a starting point,, but then you have to develop standardized ways of KPIs with triggers. Like, what does good look like for this particular KPI? Like, I’ll give you a simple example. We ship an asset out to the customer, we’re billing on usage, and then that asset’s going to fill up with data and it’s getting close to being fully utilized. That should trigger at some point, hey, we need to start thinking about shipping a new asset out. And that needs to take into account a lot of things like, What are our lead times? You know, we’re in a— currently our industry is in a memory shortage, right? Right. Supply shortage.

Jared Collin:
So that introduces some new complexity. Those lead times are getting longer. Therefore, we have to shift those customer conversations up. We have to get more transparency what they’re doing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And that’s a variable itself, the lead.

Jared Collin:
Times that’s pulling from a different data source. Absolutely. It’s coming from a different data source. So you can start seeing how you have to connect all these dots together. How— what’s the manufacturing lead time? What’s the delivery lead time? And that’s just to get the customer, the asset, the customer’s data center floor. Just to get going really. So that’s an example of a trigger. We don’t want that to slip through the cracks of the CSM.

Jared Collin:
We want that to kind of come to them and say, hey, something’s happening here based on this data, we need to take an action. And then that’s where the playbook comes in. What do you actually do about it? And I think the playbooks, I think playbooks can get over-engineered. I like to think of a playbook as a practical checklist, and it, but it gives plenty of room for the CSM to breathe and kind of bring their own expertise into it and say, hey, I understand what this is, I need to go have these conversations, but you’re not trying to overly prescribe it. But once you have those 3 pieces, data, triggers, and playbooks, and working together seamlessly, that opens up all kinds of doors. And that’s the huge opportunity I think we have. We have so much data and untapped potential of what we can do with the, you sources of information and expertise at Dell with our customers that, that, you know, that’s going to be a never-ending process to kind of tap into.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
More and more value there. You were talking about freeing up your CSMs more time to talk to customers, build relationships, listen to customers. What are you doing to try to— I’m leading you into the AI realm here, Jared. Yeah.

Jared Collin:
Well, what do you guys think of that? Yeah, and it goes back to data triggers and playbooks, but that’s if you have that foundation, if you have standardized data sources, which I’ll be honest, it’s not fun work sometimes. Just standard, like, what are my data sources? How do I standardize them? I need standardized KPIs. It sounds like, well, that’s the opposite of AI. AI is fun. Doesn’t sound fun. Yeah, and, but it’s true. And one of the nice things about, again, working at a company like Dell is that we have scale to be able to do kind of the grunt work, the, the, the fun, not fun work, and we can do a really good job of it. So it starts that with that foundation of standardized the data, let’s get standardized triggers, let’s get standardized playbooks.

Jared Collin:
That all becomes raw material to work with AI. And then you put AI over the top of it, and then you can start bringing all these data points together more predictably, more proactively across. And that’s where it goes beyond AI is going to help, not just because it say, because the CSMs can do something that they know how to do, but they’ll do it faster. Certainly that’s a big part of it. And it gets beyond that. Once you get beyond that, it’s the AI starts helping you solve problems you didn’t even know you had in the first place because you’re, it’s starting to connect and create all these patterns and find patterns that you didn’t even know were there.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Are you vibing yet?

Jared Collin:
Are you vibe coding? A little bit. Excel vibe coding is what I’m doing so far. But yeah, I’ve actually encouraged my team though to play around with that and, you know, like a lot companies are, like what are the day-to-day tasks that you do repetitively? How do you bytecode that into something that just is a click of a button? How do you take a customer contract and take a look at it and what insights can AI help you drive out of that? You know, it doesn’t have to be these massive kind of enterprise-wide kind of initiatives to get that AI efficiency. It starts with just day-to-day work. And I’ve seen some great things coming out of just individuals who’ve just taken a few minutes to play around with it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I mean, it’s super interesting. It has just blown up in the past few weeks. I feel like it’s always been, it’s been around for a little while, but like something was unlocked recently. Those models performing better and now everybody.

Jared Collin:
It’S.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
All the rage. What’s your vision for the organization that you lead? You’ve got, I don’t think you said, but you’ve got lots of folks that are working with you on this. If you look out, I don’t want to look out too far because 3 years is just like so long in these days. If you look at a year from now, a year and a half from now, what is success for the Apex.

Jared Collin:
Org at Dell? Well, I think it’s interesting working in Dell. We’ve had the opportunity as a customer success team and part as the Apex business within Dell to like I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of experts and there’s a lot of functions within a company like this, and we have the opportunity to work closely with each of them. We work closely with finance, with sales, with product operations, you know, you name it. You know, there’s kind of— you can make an argument that customer success could belong in any number of these. And the reality is, I think the more you understand all of them, the more you can bring it together. The challenge— one of the challenges we have within Dell is kind of helping folks understand the fundamental differences between how an apex consumption-based, subscription-based business operates versus your traditional, you know, purchase upfront kind of CapEx purchase style of business. And it’s not that they’re not intelligent people, like it’s just, it’s perspective, you know, if you spend your whole career in classic CapEx deals, you might not naturally think about things like we do in the customer success space all the time about adoption or no risk, etc. Expansion, what’s a customer journey, even things like GRR, NRR, ARR, these are all kind of foreign concepts.

Jared Collin:
And I found that you have to start from the basics with a lot of conversations. Start and take a few steps back, explain here’s why we operate differently, here’s how we therefore drive value for our customers. And so getting back to your question, why is that relevant? Well, success to me, as I play it out for the next few years is we’re integrated in the way Dell thinks about our business. So when customers have, or account teams come across certain situations, it’s just natural for them to say, hey, let’s pull in our CSM, ’cause we know our CSM has a really good grasp of what that customer’s doing, what their challenges are, and they’re going to have a perspective that nobody else has. And just making that a, That’s what kind of good looks like to me. That becomes just a natural way for our collective teams across the company to pull us into those situations.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Like I said, you’ve been with Dell for 16 and a half years. You don’t see that all so often these days. You see a lot of people, especially in this, this Gen AI world of a lot of SaaS startups hopping around.

Jared Collin:
What’s kept you at Dell?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, it’s inevitable. I meant that in a good way, Jared. I think that came out wrong, but what have you loved about Dell? Like what’s, What’s kept you there all those days?

Jared Collin:
I’ve loved my experience at Dell and look, we’re in the IT industry first and foremost, so it’s constantly changing. This, the Dell I’m a part of now is different from the Dell, you know, from a few years back, let alone 16 years back. And we’re constantly evolving. Dell’s a 40-year-old company, over 40 years old now, and it’s evolved. And one of those few companies I think has been able to make these massive leaps through different IT transformations from the PC to the internet to AI today. So, I think it’s really exciting to be part of a company, especially at a time like this as we’re all navigating this. With that comes a lot of different opportunities. I’ve already talked about all the subject, there’s so many smart people that work at a company like this.

Jared Collin:
I can look to my left and my right, literally in the office here, and I just see people who have just depths of expertise on areas that I don’t, that I love talking to them, I love learning about it. From a customer success perspective, we’re kind of— another exciting thing is I feel sometimes we’re kind of a startup within a big company. Like, it does feel like a startup. We’re kind of educating and building out these frameworks and these muscles that the company hasn’t had or had to have as much over the last 4 years. Now, we’re not brand new to some of these post-sales experiences. Like, this has been, you know, these APEX offerings are something that’s been around for a while, but it was only in the last couple of years that we really collected all these post-sales functions and said, hey, this is really customer success and let’s call it for what it is and let’s kind of build more formally that framework around it. So that’s all been super exciting and I’ve, you know, frankly felt privileged to be part of that journey just in my 16 years here, let alone the 24 years that came before that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Awesome. Well, Jared, thanks so much for being on the episode today. Really appreciate your time. I’m wishing you the best of luck in all the data integration, synthesis, unification initiatives of 2026 and with the consumption model that you guys are running with and again, kind of trailblazing for the rest of us as we all enter into Agentic in the coming years. But appreciate hearing some of the playbooks and the stories.

Jared Collin:
My pleasure. Thanks, Josh. Thanks.