Build your bridge from IT to LOB buyers with Portfolio Explorer – Cisco Blogs

Are you still selling primarily to IT and seeing your revenues stagnate or decline? Are you looking for new opportunities to access line of business budgets? For years we’ve heard about budgets changing, and you’ve likely seen the IDC data noting that line of business CAGR has been two times greater than IT spend for the past three years.

While I have a title you may not have heard of before — Director of Transformation Amplification — I’m hoping you will soon become familiar with how my team and I are actively working to identify new ways you can maximize your growth and profitability. We’re working to help you perform and transform with Cisco. And one way is expanding your sales conversations to include lines of business.

We all know it can be extremely difficult to access new lines of business, especially when you most often talk with customers in IT. To help you address this challenge, my team works every day on the question of how we can help our Cisco partners transform their conversations to truly resonate with line of business buyers.

One answer is a unique tool from Cisco called Portfolio Explorer, which helps bridge conversations from IT to lines of business.

A main driver for Portfolio Explorer is the realization that no one company can be a single vendor that meets all the needs of businesses today. Not even Cisco–with its wealth of market-leading hardware, software, and services–can deliver everything throughout the customer lifecycle.

Rather, it takes a village of complementary partners co-selling with Cisco and its partners–such as ISVs, IHVs, developers, advisors, integrators, and managed service providers–to design, build, and manage the solutions our customers need to meet and exceed their outcome objectives.

“We have software development capabilities, we are a reseller and can be an ISV, but we needed something to help accelerate our industry use case solutions; Portfolio Explorer helped us find the right direction that made sense for our business.”
— Camillo Ascione, Director Strategic Alliance Manager & CTO, Italtel USA

And this is where Portfolio Explorer comes into play. In a nutshell, Portfolio Explorer shows you solutions that are relevant for your customers, categorized into use cases and spanning twelve industries. For each use case you’ll find business and technical overviews, along with example case studies. In addition, you’ll find the village of partners that you can engage to co-sell to the line of business buyers, presenting solutions that will make a difference to them.

“Portfolio Explorer helps us reach new customers, by clearly illustrating industry-specific use cases in higher education and healthcare that we jointly solve together with Cisco’s Calling portfolio.”
— Pat Scheckel, EVP Marketing and Product Management, Singlewire

Interested in learning more? Watch the short Portfolio Explorer demo above or visit the Portfolio Explorer and try it out for yourself.

In addition, if you’re a Cisco Partner looking for more details on Portfolio Explorer and other Transformation resources, please save the date and tune in to Cisco Live Partner Early Access Experience on 22 March.
And, of course, everyone is welcome to join Cisco Live starting March 30^th.

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