Cisco Co-Selling Acceleration Made Simple

There is a major shift in the market that is hard to miss. In fact, a Gartner report recognizes this shift indicating that 82% of IT (Information Technology) spend is now being influenced by New Customer Buying Centers. This transformation requires targeting customer conversations, beyond IT, to determine requirements relevant to these new buyers. These new buyers include Line of Business Buyers (LOB) and Application Buyers who work with IT to develop the overall business outcome. These new buyers are tasked with driving a new set of outcomes that often require integration of multiple solutions orchestrated by a new set of partners to connect the last mile.

Cisco has solved for this market shift by investing in Co-Selling with our partners. Unlike partner reselling, co-selling is a multi-partner collaborative sales engagement between an IT vendor and its partner ecosystem to deliver a differentiated joint customer outcome. By surrounding customer challenges with the right Ecosystem of partners, the entire co-sell team builds relationships with new buyers in the accounts and can (on average) increase their deal size by 6X and software mix by 2x accelerating recurring revenue while streamlining solutioning the customers challenge through collaborative efforts and integrated tools!

On our path to investing in Cisco Co-Sell we have discovered there are three key steps for Co-Sell success: Activate, Accelerate, Scale

Activate – the first step in the Co-Sell journey sets up the digital accounts to track opportunities, digital sales plans to define GTM (Go to Market) and how to target sales awareness and sales enablement content to share joint offers to prepare building pipeline for the next step. At this stage we amplify the Ecosystem offerings internally and externally while introducing our PXP Digital Co-Sell capabilities to track joint opportunities.
Accelerate – the next step is to expand pipeline building activities with Ecosystem Partners, scale Ecosystem Co-Sell opportunities with Channel Partners and grow Ecosystem Co-Sell pipeline through Demand Generation campaigns and events.
Scale – finally we replicate winning solutions and strategies, amplify awareness internally and externally and scale winning approaches to new markets.

To ensure our Cisco Co-Sell teams have the knowledge, best practices, enablement content and tools to achieve a successful collaborative Co-Selling outcome, Cisco has armed its sales force with the essential “Co-Sell Acceleration Kit.” It walks through the Activate, Accelerate and Scale steps developed to simplify the Co-Sell motion. Our partners can reap the benefits of our Co-Sell expertise through engaging with their Cisco Business Development Managers (BDMs) or Account Managers (AM).

In conclusion, Cisco Co-Selling is a proven win-win for our customers and our partner ecosystem. It streamlines solutioning for customers business outcomes by surrounding them with the right partner ecosystem, saving them time, manpower and costs while increasing business opportunity for our partner ecosystem. There are billions of dollars in potential untapped new buyer revenue and Cisco Co-Selling is the key to accessing it!

Be on the lookout for the next Co-Sell blog in the series and in the meantime, check out our Cisco Co-Sell SalesConnect Page for more information on logging your interest in becoming part of Digital Co-Sell!