Cisco Makes it Easier to Increase Your Marketing Effectiveness

The recent holiday season allowed me to spend time with my family and look back on 2018. Now that we’re in the new year, I have been reflecting on what I’ve heard recently from my other family, the Cisco Partner community, and how to turn it into action in 2019.

Since I began leading Cisco’s Global Partner Marketing organization in the fall, I have spoken with many of you. You have generously shared a lot of great feedback, and I’m excited to be part of a team dedicated to helping you drive your business forward.

For those of you I have not had the pleasure of meeting yet, please consider this blog an introduction, and an assurance that I am taking all your feedback to heart. My goal is always to help you increase your company’s marketing effectiveness.

I’ve heard some consistent themes from you and your peers over the past few months, notably:

• Co-branding and demand generation are two of the greatest values we can work together on, and we need to continue to invest behind.
• Training is key in helping you understand what marketing best practices and tactics to deploy. We also must continue to help you see how to best capitalize on all the Cisco marketing resources available to you – and make it easy for you to adopt these practices!
• Cisco’s marketing strategy should easily align with your marketing strategy. While this is always the goal, we’re committed to making this even more clear. In our business environment, sales, go-to-market and marketing alignment are critical in delivering the customer experience required from us.

Our team has been working hard to provide a solution for above – and here are a few areas where Cisco can help in the short term at little to no cost to you:

Co-branding and demand generation
One way to easily increase relevance to individual customers is by using the Partnership Logo Builder tool. When it comes to co-branding, this tool takes guesswork out of creating partnership logos. Simply access the tool with your Cisco.com username and password. This intelligent tool knows what credentials your company is eligible to use and will build your updated partnership logo in the file format you prefer.

That’s not the only opportunity to co-brand with Cisco. You can also use Lifecycle Advantage (LCA) to nurture your customers, accelerate adoption, simplify renewals, and facilitate upsells. Leveraging LCA can boost recurring revenue by guiding your customer through each stage of the lifecycle with an automated series of co-branded emails. The graphic below shows you a flow of how we work with you to reach your customers. And the best part is this process can be automated through LCA!

Training
Partner Marketing Central (PMC) is our industry-leading marketing activation platform. It is designed to help you attract and land new customers, digitally amplify your brand and message, execute customer campaigns and manage co-marketing funds. Check out this infographic to see what’s available on PMC and how to activate a campaign. And if you’re new to PMC, check out these training videos to get started on setting up your profile, uploading your contacts, and more.

All Cisco Partners can access a wealth of training information via our Marketing Velocity platform anytime, anywhere. In fact, training on key marketing tactics is immediately available on revenue marketing, digital marketing, and digital thought leadership.

In short, there is a lot to explore here, so don’t forget to visit the Marketing Velocity Hub for fresh articles each week on topics that are influencing the industry.

Strategy
Finally, we are excited to share a comprehensive overview of our recent SD-WAN Security launch, and our Catalyst Family expansion. These overviews let you know what the announcement signifies and what you need to know to sell to your customers. This one-stop approach should equip you with everything you need to claim your part of what we estimate to be an $8 billion market opportunity.

Stay tuned, there will be much more to come in this space. This is just the tip of the iceberg of resources available to you; I hope you will take advantage of them and keep checking back.  Each month you will hear from me on trends influencing the industry, insight into our marketing vision and strategy, and how we can best work together to deliver amazing experiences to our customers.

Have more ideas on how we can improve our marketing efforts together? Comment below!