Cisco revealed this week that in the wake of a reorganization of its sales and marketing functions it expects to able to deliver qualified sales leads to partners within 15 minutes of a sales lead being generated by the Cisco marketing team.
Speaking at the Cisco Partner Summit, Karen Walker, senior vice president, and chief marketing officer for Cisco told attendees Cisco is already piloting this accelerated delivery of sales leads with four partners.
“These will be five-star quality leads,” promises Walker.
At the same time, Walker says Cisco will be shifting to fewer, but larger, product announcements in 2019 that will occur on a once a quarter cadence. As part of that effort, Walker says Cisco will increase the number of turnkey marketing campaigns it makes available to partners as part of a larger Bridge to Possible branding initiative being launched.
As a company that oversees one of the largest IT channels in the industry Cisco has been on a campaign to simplify processes. Cisco now claims enterprise agreement licenses can now be processed in 48 hours and that it has shrunk 50 separate deal registration processes down to two. Cisco is also making significant investments in customer experience management through which it intends to provide incentives that should motivate partners to invest more in this area as part of an overall effort to increase recurring revenue. Satisfied customers tend to buy more products and services.
With well north of 90 percent of all Cisco revenues flowing through channel partners Cisco this week made it clear it intends to play a more active role in channel marketing and sales. How each partner will respond to those initiatives may vary greatly. But given the sales and marketing challenges most partners face every day, any and all additional help Cisco wants to provide is likely to be well received by partners trying to achieve aggressive sales quotas.
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