Cisco and our Partners: Transforming together, today

Digital transformation is changing the way customers purchase technology and deliver experiences to their target markets.  And as our customers digitally transform, there are opportunities to sell to new buying centers that utilize line of business budgets. It also means customers have the opportunity to benefit from enhanced platform based outcomes as they deploy solutions that tightly integrate their IT stacks with Cisco APIs. And, it’s crucial that we deliver an excellent customer experience across the entire lifecycle to help our customers unlock the full value of our products and services.

But we can’t do any of this without our Partners. In the past, we’ve focused on selling hardware to the IT department; today, that’s not enough.

So how can Cisco aid you in helping customers transform into this new digital reality? Cisco is investing in ensuring your success to perform today, and transform for tomorrow. The Global Partner Transformation team that I lead – part of Cisco’s Global Partner Organization – exists to help you develop the capabilities to meet our customers’ evolving needs and continue to grow profitably.

This week I was in Las Vegas at Cisco Partner Summit 2019, and I shared how we’re helping our Partners transform.  You might have seen my video on Facebook with Oliver Tuszik and Jose van Dijk, or my Hub Talk on selling with Cisco Sales Plays.  As I mentioned in those conversations, Cisco can support you across three key transformation pillars:

New Buying Centers

This pillar is focused on accessing New Buying Centers across industries and segments. We’re helping you extend sales to Line of Business buyers.  This will help us address new vertical opportunities with access to faster growing budgets than IT alone.

Specifically, we’re connecting reseller Partners with ecosystem Partners and Cisco sales teams to create multi Partner-to-Partner (P2P) co-selling motions. We’ve found that when we do so, the average deal size is 2.4x greater than with a single partner, and we’re only continuing to expand that P2P motion.

Platform Based Outcomes

When you develop solutions on top of programmable infrastructure, you differentiate yourself by offering extended value. And the tools to help you to accomplish this are available today in Cisco DevNet.  DevNet provides the training, API libraries, and sandboxes you need to extend your ability to leverage Cisco’s network intelligence technologies.

Our team is making it simpler for you to build increasingly innovative solutions to meet our mutual customer’s needs as they digitally transform. We’re also supporting you with initiatives to enhance your go-to-market with the solutions you develop.

Customer Experience

When we enable our customers to harness the full value of our solutions across the customer lifecycle, we guide them from choosing, to using, to loving our solutions.  For Cisco and our Partners, this results in increased recurring revenue and renewal rates.

Together with you, our partners, we created the lifecycle partner model.  This model provides partners with more opportunities to deliver value to customers, ways to differentiate their businesses and a predictable path for profitable growth while ensuring customer success.

Partner Transformation SalesConnect Hub

To continue to build on the momentum of Partner Summit and keep you abreast of all of the latest developments, we launched the new Partner Transformation SalesConnect Hub.

Get started right away by bookmarking the Hub! As a first step, take our new Transformation Assessment to pinpoint where you are in your transformation journey. We’ll guide you to the resources most relevant to you within each of the three transformation pillars.

Also, be sure to check out Susie Wee’s blog on the new Cisco DevNet Specializations and latest developments related to Cisco DevNet Certifications. These can help you to build the software skills of your developers, DevOps engineers, automation specialists, and other software professionals.  They’ll also help you build IT teams skilled in automation and software.

We’re so excited to continue partnering with you. Together, we can harvest the huge opportunity presented by these new tech trends, and we will work with you to own your edge. Stay tuned. We’re just getting started…

And, of course, I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation! I’d love to know what you think in the comments section below. Let me know what you’d like to hear more about, your thoughts on my first blog, or just stop in and say hi.