New Orleans, LA. – Rob Lloyd, Cisco’s executive vice-president of worldwide operations, closed out the Partner Summit with a bang by doubling Value Incentive Program (VIP) rebates on core technology.
The VIP margin boost was part of Lloyd’s 18 month sales battle plan and vision. The vision will be based on a delivering a new customer experience through channel partners.
“Let’s not be naïve about how much of a major change we need to make to our sales process, our engineering capabilities and our go to market models. The same is reflected in your business,” he said.
The point Lloyd is making here is on core equipment such as routing and switching as the foundation for any big picture solution in the next 12 to 18 months.
With that he announced that Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) would be doubling VIP rebate payments on core technologies including catalyst 3560X, 3750X and 4500 series switches and ISR G2 1900, 2900 and 3900 series.
On top of that, Cisco will move its European program IBLN to North American and around the world. This program pays $2,000 for every assessment partners do with customers when you move customers to move an architectural solution.
Lloyd’s vision starts with a knowledge transfer. The former president of Cisco Canada said that the company will begin to take its expertise, experience, capabilities, resources, credibility in the networking and push that to the any customer, any where in the world and at any time they wish to have it.
He has a three-pronged strategy for this knowledge transfer and its starts with the collaborative sales model. The first course of action in this strategy is to equip channel partners with the same collaboration tool kit that is used internally at Cisco. “We want to extend the cloud reselling to all of you. That cloud reselling model will enable us to virtualize the ability to bring in the expertise and experiences to every customer around the world; all the time,” Lloyd said.
In essence Lloyd’s goal here is to build the world’s biggest collaborative sales process.
Part two is vertical conversation, which is about the relevance of Cisco technology to drive outcomes for customers. “Verticals are transforming around the world such as healthcare, public sector, financial services, retail and manufacturing. They are all transforming. Think about the vertical relevance of what we do and how the technology can support it because there’s a big opportunity in vertical industry transformations,” he said.
The last part of the strategy is on emerging market opportunities. Lloyd said that emerging markets are growing faster than the rest of the world.
“None of what I’m describing is easy, we’re going to have to put a lot more focus on our people and our partnership. That means we have to do a lot more in terms of marketing, demand generation and creating opportunities. You’ve heard the richness of the capabilities that we have, but we’ve been silent in describing those opportunities to our customers. We’re going to be doing a lot more demand generation. We’re going to a lot more in taking what we’ve learnt about the vertical application of our technology to you and generate scalable vertical programs. We need to invest more in your training and the enablement of your business, so you can capture these market opportunities and we need to make it much easier for you to access expertise,” Lloyd concluded.
With files from Julia Telavski of ARN
