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Stanimira Koleva, MD, APJC, Partner Business Group, Cisco, spoke to Sonal Desai, about the objectives and features of Partner Led, the company’s new partner engagement model
First of all, what is Partner Led?
Till last year Cisco was focused on Customer Led, although 100 percent of our business came through partners. But in sync with our vision of Next Cisco, we decided to focus our entire energy and resources on partners to enable and empower them to sell to customers.
We created a group within Cisco called Partner Led to drive this new partner engagement framework. Cisco’s entire commercial business—which consists of mid-market and SMB customers—will be completely driven by partners.
Since the launch of the program in August we have mapped 16,000 mid-market customers globally to our partners’ sales teams. 100 percent of our commercial business sales force, as well as technical and service teams, have been aligned to the new Partner Led unit.
The incentives of Cisco executives are now aligned with partner performance. They will share their goals with the partners, and in turn the partners will align their business with us.
We have earmarked $15 million (of the $75 million globally) for Partner Led for the APJC region. This investment will show up in the form of more partner-centric marketing resources, incentive programs for mid-market- and SMB-focused Cisco solution providers, a partner relationship management system, and access to a team of Cisco engineers put in place to help partners close deals more effectively.
In addition, we have simplified pricing and leveraged distribution support. We are now investing in building end-to-end solution capabilities, and partners are transitioning to the new model.
Could you provide some more details?
We have introduced two types of partner programs in Partner Led: Partner Led Named and Partner Led Velocity.
The Partner Led Named partners will cater to mid-market accounts chiefly for architecture managed and cloud services, services and migration, and collaborative selling. Partner Led Velocity partners will cater to the SMB segment, the Small Business Technology Group of Cisco, managed and cloud services, and speed and scalable solutions; they will focus on demand generation and innovative coverage.
Since launch we have aligned 350 existing partners with this new initiative across APJC. In India we have very few Partner Led Named partners at present. But the Partner Led Velocity program has been very successful here; it has grown more than 100 percent in the last one year, and we are also expanding the number of partners.
For India, Pramodh Menon has been appointed as the President, Partner Business Group. He is driving the Partner Led initiative, and is transitioning the partners to the new model. Currently, we are focused on transitioning our Silver and Premier partners to the new model.
What are the changes partners can expect?
We have increased the training three-fold. Under the new program we are sharing customer and business intelligence with our partners so that they understand customers, their needs and their future requirements.
We have increased support to partners through automation and a virtual center. Now we are asking partners to actively chase commercial enterprises in the SMB and mid-market. We are providing them with insights about productivity growth, market share, acquiring new customers, and core technologies such as the cloud, business video and secure mobile.
By the end of the year we will jointly develop videos on topics like ‘what the customer wants’ and ‘how to jointly sell.’ We will continue to invest in our Avant Garde Partner Program, and also offerings around services for applications, migration and integration.
We are identifying and rewarding partners based on their services capabilities. The service criteria are qualitative rather than quantitative. We are launching a set of collaboration professional services for telepresence, IP telephony and security and migration. We will weave our IP into these services, some of which start for as low as $5,000.
We have also launched a tech helpline called Partner Help. It is being piloted with tier-1 and tier-2 partners, and the results are encouraging. Besides information on pre-sales, products and pricing, the helpline informs partners about FAQs. It provides them access to peer profiles along with their projects and case studies. |