WebEx Social Community Boosts Cisco Salesforce Productivity and New Product Launch Bookings

Keeping more than 20,000 Cisco salespeople in 87 countries up to date on our hundreds of products and solutions is a critical and challenging task. Just ask members of the Global Virtual Team Program. They are responsible for bringing SMEs from various business units together to provide product and related training directly to the salesforce, which is mostly done through WebEx conference calls, webinars, recorded content on shared topics, hands-on labs, and live events at Cisco’s San Jose campus.

The live events, held twice a year, are by far the most popular. Multiple telepresence screens allow groups of remote members to attend and present content. The sense of community, level of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and ongoing dialogue generated at these events is invaluable, and the Global Virtual Team always looked for ways to keep the collaborative learning momentum going between live events. Last year they found a very good way by creating a community on the WebEx Social enterprise collaboration platform.

Now the team members can consolidate and organize critical sales content, learning assets, and various forms of Web 2.0 content such as discussion forums and blogs in a centralized environment that is easily accessible by the entire salesforce. WebEx Social software functionality enables just-in-time, asynchronous collaboration between SMEs and the field and faster time to content for salespeople.

So far the benefits of collaboration and consolidation within the community have garnered impressive results, including an estimated increase in bookings by the sales teams of $35 million per product launch. Faster time to content has also resulted in significant time savings and productivity gains for the salesforce.

Check out the Global Virtual Team Community case study to learn more about this WebEx Social implementation and its business benefits.