We launched the Partner Experience Platform (PXP) last year to simplify the partner experience and arm you, our partners, with all the information you need to grow your business, in one place, with a single login. Each quarter we continue to make enhancements to this new “digital house.” I am delighted to share the following additions to PXP, which advance our journey to predictive planning, connectivity, and collaboration.
Integrated Partner Planning (IPP)
Integrated Partner Planning (IPP) is a powerful new planning component within PXP that will replace previous planning processes and become the catalyst to predictive, prescriptive, and collaborative planning, driven by a common set of data and metrics.
We designed IPP to personalize your planning experience. Our goal is to arm you with actionable insights that enable you and your Cisco team to model your desired growth. Together, you align your strategy, goals, activities and milestones to achieve the desired outcomes. You will review and track progress with your Cisco partner teams to continually identify gaps and opportunities and optimize your plan as needed.
We launched IPP under the stewardship of the Cisco partner teams for FY’22 planning beginning in August. Later in FY ’22, you will have direct access to it in PXP.
Sales Opportunities
We have expanded the original Renewals tab into a comprehensive opportunities view across all the sales motions: service attach and renew, software renew and enterprise agreement penetration, and hardware refresh and last-day-of-support visibility. Together with the Service Metrics scorecards, you now have a flexible view of your top-line growth opportunities for recurring revenue, and ways to maximize your rebates to support bottom-line profitability.
Peer Benchmarking
I’ve heard from you that you would like to know how your performance compares to your peers. What is best-in-class performance? What is average? PXP gives you this intelligence for bookings by product type, architecture, market segment, and industry. This way you can prioritize goals, discuss your plans with your Cisco teams, and take quick action, guided by other PXP insights. Try Peer Benchmarking today and let me know what you think.
Customer Lens for Actionable Insights and Recommendations (CLaiR)
CLaiR, already used by our commercial and global enterprise sellers, is migrating to PXP in FY22.
Later in FY22, CLaiR will be a self-serve feature. Until then, you can access these insights through your Cisco partner teams.
CLaiR takes the guesswork out of selling decisions by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to Cisco customers’ buying habits going back to 2010 to derive a customer propensity-to-buy score. PXP will arm you and your Cisco partner team with the same intelligence as Cisco internal sales: actionable recommendations about what to sell, cross sell, and upsell by customer.
Partner Connect
Whether you are seeking technology expertise, management services, or to expand your customer base, you cannot underestimate the importance of connecting with our global ecosystem of partners. Partner Connect, available now by invitation in PXP, can make partner matches based on your selection criteria and advanced analytics, and will support meetings, and one-to-one or one-to-many chats with those partners. My expectation is this will help you drive co-selling opportunities, increase your deal size, and create differentiated solutions for your customers.
What will these changes bring to our partnership?
- Faster innovation. Better intelligence, powered by AI algorithms, will speed up your response time to rapid market changes, and drive selling and co-selling.
- A clear path to revenue growth and improved profitability. Through the power of predictive analytics, you will be able to identify:
- the most promising renewal and upsell opportunities to meet profitability goals
- the customers with the highest growth potential
- the capabilities your teams need to sell new architectures
- A continuous planning process. Plans will not be static. They will be updated as soon as new business performance and market information becomes available. We will track performance against targets real-time, year-round, and correct course as needed. The collaboration channel between you and Cisco will remain open.
- Connectivity and benchmarking across Cisco’s partner ecosystem. PXP will connect you with partners globally and display your performance compared to your peers so you can set your priorities.
As always, our focus is to simplify, digitize, and personalize your experience. I will share more news here and on SalesConnect as PXP continues to grow with your input.
Check out my recent interview with CRN: Cisco Partner Experience Platform Turns One: What Partners Need To Know
Want to share your thoughts? Contact me directly below.
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