New Sales Motion, Designed for Small Business, Focused on Security

Do what we do best, help customers.

Sometimes, when we help someone, we end up benefiting ourselves in the long run. Cisco has launched a series of sales motions designed to do just that for Cisco distributors and partners – help small business customers and at the same time scale your own businesses. These new sales motions are called Scale Plays, and the first in this series is our Security Scale Play, designed to help small businesses strengthen their cyber security simply and dramatically.

Small Business – A Sweet Spot for Cybercrime.

When economic changes throw businesses off balance, small businesses are normally hit harder than larger organizations. To make matters worse, small businesses don’t customarily have the IT staff to make a nimble transition to virtual operations while at the same time strengthening security around those operations to protect themselves from cyberattacks. Cyber security has always been a primary risk for small businesses. By 2021, cybercrime is projected to cost the world $6 trillion, and cybercriminals have found a sweet spot—small businesses (Forbes, Jan 31, 2019).

We chose cybersecurity as our first Scale Play to remove the worry of a cyber breach from small businesses. They have enough to handle right now. We’re providing the messages, tools, and resources for our distributors and partners to speak with small business customers and help them simplify their approach to security with Cisco.  And that’s how we plan to design each Scale Play, to offer a quick but comprehensive solution to an immediate small business pain point.

Immediate Help for Distributors, Partners and Customers

We recognize that some of our distributors and partners need help themselves, so we wanted to provide tools that allow them to scale their own businesses even as they help customers. Our goal is to design offers that give a boost to our distributors and their partners along with immediate relief to small business customers.

Here is our overall strategy for Scale Plays:

• We build Scale Plays to drive results fast – for distributors, partners and customers – by designing an immediate solution that addresses a critical small business pain point and by targeting opportunities that distributors and partners can turn into revenue in fewer than 120 days.
• We simplify ‘solution selling’ with compelling offers for small businesses and with packages of products and services that work perfectly together.
• We design the offer to scale, with digital marketing-led motions, such as a digital playbook, throughout the customer journey to ease the burden on sellers and to get the message out clearly and quickly to customers.

Please take a look at this FAQ and watch my short video to learn more about Scale Plays and how they will benefit distributors, partners and customers.

Doing what we do best

I want to emphasize that our goal right now is to support our small business customers, not to sell to them. This is a tough time to ask customers to make an investment, so begin your conversation with our free trials. Small businesses always need to secure their access and data, especially when they are doing more daily activities virtually. This unique moment has given us a unique opportunity to do what we do best – take care of our customers as we take care of each other.

Stay safe. Stay healthy.

 

Andrew