Three Reasons to Grow Your Small and Mid-Size Customers with Cisco

Small and Mid-size businesses are investing in digital transformation for the future and represent a significant market opportunity. According to Anurag Agrawal of TechAisle, “Worldwide SMB IT spend is forecast to reach US$700B in 2020, growing at 6% over 2019.” Now, Cisco has three great new reasons to expand your business with small and mid-size customers.

Reason #1: Perform Plus Goes Live

In November 2019, we announced Cisco’s Perform Plus rebate program for partners, and I’m happy to say the program is now live globally. About 4,000 partners worldwide are eligible to participate in the program at launch—the quickest ramp of any incentive program in our history. Perform Plus rewards you when you grow your total business across all hardware and perpetual software regardless of whether you sell to public, private or service provider customers. The more you grow, the more you earn. It’s that simple.

In addition to the rebate for all growth, there are two bonuses—one for growth in small and mid-size business, and one for selling and growing your Enterprise Networking and Cisco Security solutions together. These are on top of the “you grow, you earn” quarterly cash rebates. With these bonuses, you can triple your earning potential by growing your overall business, selling solutions and expanding your small and mid-size business simultaneously.

Reason #2: Streamlined Deal Registration Expansion

We are expanding the deal size that qualifies for accelerated approval, so you can respond faster to your customers. U.S. partners who register mid-size (private-sector) and small accounts in our Opportunity Incentive Program (OIP) receive approval within 24 hours.

Reason #3: Partner Help Pro (Coming Soon)

Soon, partners with OIP-approved deals for all mid-size and small accounts can get access to Partner Help Pro (subject to certain thresholds). This additional pre-sales engineering support from Cisco over the lifecycle of the opportunity will help you build the best proposals for your customers.

Many partners are already looking to participate in the Perform Plus program, like Jason Doherty, who is a Cisco partner and director of sales for R2 Unified Technologies of Boca Raton, Florida. Recently, he said, “R2 is excited about the new Perform Plus Program because it rewards us for the growth of our Cisco business and offers bonuses in high focus areas: building and securing a solid, cloud-ready network. This encourages us to sell solutions which align both with Cisco’s initiatives, as well as customer initiatives. We’re excited about the program’s launch and what it can do for future R2 growth!”

We want our partners to be successful and profitable. Research shows that the most profitable deals involve selling solutions and providing value added services, such as security. All small and mid-size customers need secure networking solutions, so register your new opportunity, get pre-sales support to close it, and earn rebates along the way.

Be sure to take Jason’s advice and take advantage of all these Cisco programs to accelerate and grow your mid-size and small business starting today! Let us know what you think by commenting below.