Cisco Partner Summit Momentum: Owning It in the Americas with the Power of 3!

Cisco Partner Summit often comes and goes in a flash with three days packed with sessions, networking and celebrating. However, I believe there was a palpable difference at Partner Summit in Dallas last week.

The momentum that continued to build over the course of the week and since the Americas session last Tuesday has been off the charts ever since I introduced the Americas Partner Organization’s strategic framework – The Power of 3. I received exceptional feedback from our partners around The Power of 3.  This framework will fuel us to OWN IT together with our partners by leveraging our unfair advantages – and succeed with Americas FY18 priorities!

Let’s take a look at a few highlights from the Americas session, where we must focus with our partners going forward, and how we can start winning with our partners today:

The Power of 3

I told a powerful Power of 3 success story about LaSalle Solutions’ LAMP platform and the company’s successful relationship with biotechnology company, Shire. When we truly unite as one team leveraging our unfair advantages, we can indeed beat the competition. We drive profitable sales in security, networking, software and services – ultimately delivering successful business outcomes for our customers.

We must continue to showcase The Power of 3 teams working as one: APO, Partners and Cisco Sales.  Our roles may differ, but our unique, unfair advantages will win the digital opportunity for our mutual customers – as proven with the Shire success story.

Americas FY18 Priorities

Alison Gleeson, SVP, Americas Sales, shared how our partners are our catalyst for growth. Through them, we can scale and have great impact on our mutual customers. The Americas growth priorities are highlighted below, with an intense focus on accelerating the Network. Intuitive with our partners. It’s about helping our customers maintain compliance and apply security policy in this multicloud IOT world. It’s the network that brings structure – the ability to intuitively segment and apply enterprise policy. That’s how we create the secure, intelligent platform for digital business.

It’s critical that we work with our partners to take our customers on this journey and deliver this continuous customer value. All our partners have an unfair advantage to disrupt and grow in an industry that’s changing at a pace we’ve never seen before.

 

What can Cisco Partners do now?

As promised, I announced 3 (that number will remain prevalent throughout APO’s FY18 priorities and beyond) offers for partners to start taking advantage of today:

1. Impact 2.0 – IMPACT has been a huge success since we announced it at Partner Summit last year. We’ve trained 1,500+ of our partner sellers on how to accelerate revenue by raising their business outcome-selling skills, and this training is still available We’re building on that success with IMPACT 2.0. This training will focus on recurring revenue/software practice building, as well as deeper security sales and technical skills development.
2. Unique Value Proposition (UVP) Workshop – Our Partner Consulting and Innovation (PC&I) team will engage with partners to define and communicate their unfair advantage when engaging with customers.
3. Accelerating Cisco Ecosystem Sales (ACES) @Scale – This program will connect partner sales teams with ecosystem partners, enabling them to create path-to-revenue plans designed to accelerate profitable partner revenue.

Partners can reach out to their Partner Account Manager today for more details on these offers.

Let’s continue to grow the momentum from Dallas last week – drive our unfair advantages, leverage The Power of 3 and execute the winning play!