Coaching our Channel to Success in the Sports, Retail & Hospitality Industries!

College Football is the Best!

I love College Football. I once was a College Football coach. I watch with passion College Football each week, and my wife probably says I breathe College Football. And now, with the college football bowl season upon us it reminds me of the preparation, planning, recruiting, and “coaching” that goes into being ready for these big games.

Cisco Coaching

At Cisco we are helping “coach” our partners to realize the business opportunity in front of them, selling into two industries in full gear this holiday season; Retail & Hospitality & Sports & Entertainment!

Our “gameplan” breaks down into three parts: Recruiting, Strategy, & Plays; all critical to successfully coaching a team!

Recruiting

“It’s not about the X’s and O’s but the Jimmies and Joes”.

This expression implies that regardless the strategy and plays you run, you have to have good players to execute. I apply this in my world regarding the partner ecosystem we have created and continue to expand.

It takes world class channel partners with a variety of services, solutions, and outcome based selling to tackle (pardon the pun) industries. It also takes a robust Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner community to help solve business use cases, refine value propositions, and bring line of business selling opportunities with Cisco to bear through the Cisco Solution Partner Program. Partners like Phunware, EVS, Local Measure and Wait Times are examples of the power of our ISV partner ecosystem and how we are applying our recruitment efforts to drive success.

Strategy

Each time we talk to our channel partners about the retail, hospitality and sports & entertainment industries, we want to make sure that we are clear on the latest industry points of views, market research, and data.

Tulip Retail’s data here confirms these trends:

71% of respondents use company-issued mobile devices for catalog and product information

35% stay in touch with customers through email, text messages

24% use mobile devices to collaborate with coworkers

Think about how this data would apply to a big box retailer, a basketball arena, or an amusement park! Powerful data is just one example of how we are trying to “coach” our channel in these industries. You can drill into additional info on our strategy reviewing our Consumer 2020 data here.

Plays

Every whiz kid coach has the latest and greatest playbook, we all know that. Coaches spend countless hours trying to come up with those core plays that make up the identity of who you are as a team.

We at Cisco have done this in both Retail & Sports, creating plays and offers that scale so our channel can sell and are ready to go, offering real value to our customers.

Sales plays for you:

In Sports we have 3 flagship partner plays that have each garnered huge traction for nearly 10 years including:  Cisco Vision, Connected Stadium Wi-Fi, and Connected Stadium. A great example is from our partner Telus, who in 2013 built out a Digital Fan Experience practice focusing on stadiums as you can see here in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StCUpJl2zhg#action=share

In Retail & Hospitality our core solutions and plays line up to the trends in the market: Store Fabric, Store Mobility, and Secure Store. As you can see in this article, WWT is an example of our channel partner applying these plays and the logic into their daily operations as they work to win in the retail & hospitality market.

So like any good coach, you can see at Cisco we’ve recruited a great partner ecosystem, showcased our strategy, and are ready to run the plays that each of you as channel partners can embrace. We’ve created a great “all in one” playbook for you to leverage here in Sales Connect for all your needs on Digital Industry transformation here.

Enjoy this season of shopping and football in the meantime!