Focus on Business Priorities to Unlock New Sales Opportunities

Many Cisco Partners are well aware that Line of Business and Operations technology budgets are growing much faster than IT budgets. Many have expressed a strong interest in selling solutions to these new buying centers. So how can Partners capitalize on this trend, grow revenues faster, and become more strategic within their customer base all at the same time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvWhzFEViWc&index=1

Figure 1: Michael Lin from Promedia Technology Services, Inc. shares his perspective on selling to Lines of Business

Solution Central is a new tool designed specifically for the enterprising Partners who understand the need to increase business relevance. The concept is powerfully simple – link Cisco solutions to key customer business priorities.

How do we identify these priorities? We’ve surveyed more than 3,500 business, operations, and IT leaders in many key industries to understand what their top 10 priorities are – by vertical, region, department, and more. The intelligence from this Cisco Business and IT Survey is updated quarterly in Solution Central, so you can see which priorities are most relevant for your customers, based on current business trends. If you’d like a synopsis of these business trends, just request it in the comments area below.

Each of these business priorities is linked to a specific Cisco Enterprise Networks solution, and it includes relevant solution capabilities, case studies, overviews, and links to key assets that will help you create new opportunities.

For example, let’s say you have an upcoming meeting with a customer in the Retail space. Using Solution Central, you can see, not surprisingly, that growing revenues is a key concern. With a few clicks you can see how to position Connected Mobile Experiences to specifically address this priority.

Figure 2: Top Retail priorities linked to Cisco Solutions

You can also see your IBLM opportunity for mobility, for a list of all your customers who may be interested in that solution, along with promotions, demo details, and relevant campaign assets, so you have both the context and the content to make the most of your opportunity. Partners who are already using IBLM extensively will be happy to know we just added a vertical filter, so you can now see migration opportunities by industry.

Figure 3: You can now see your opportunities by solution using the “Campaign URL’s” tab of Partner IBLM.

How well does this approach work? Quite simply, the personalization enabled by the customer business priorities Solution Central can take your customer engagements to a new level. Trial programs that personalize the customer experience using this approach at some of our recent events have yielded some great results, including higher lead conversion and larger average deal sizes.

This new tool is just one important step toward engaging more line of business and operations leaders in your customer base. There’s a great opportunity to personalize demand generation, demonstrations, and much more. We’ll cover those topics in the next installment of this blog.

See how Solution Central can help your business today: http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/tools/use-case-tool/index.htm

There’s also a customer-facing version of Solution Central on Cisco.com, with links from the partner to the customer versions, so you can see which resources to use directly or to send to your customers: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/assets/sol/ent/use-case-tool/index.htm

Good selling!