Enabling Partners with Listening and New Learning Opportunities

Every day we help our partners provide exceptional customer experiences by simplifying IT and delivering a faster path to value with outcome-driven solutions. This requires partner engineers to always be on point.

Partner engineers and technologists have long been responsible for guiding customers through the purchase, deployment, and activation of Cisco technology. Ensuring they are knowledgeable, capable, and energetic about Cisco technology is crucial to sales success. That means listening to our partners and providing timely and relevant learning opportunities.

In the past couple years, we’ve listened to feedback and focused our efforts on how we can better train and reward partner engineers. From focused sales support and innovation competitions to exciting rewards opportunities, we are always looking for ways to engage our partners, including:

• Business Outcome Sales Success (BOSS) program launched in 2021 provides a premium, high-touch partner experience that accelerates to warp speed your journey through the stars—a trajectory of support and mentorship that will help you solve for your customers’ business outcomes.
• Cisco’s Shogun rewards program is a premier Partner Systems Engineering rewards program designed for our global partner community. Shogun aligns our talented partner engineering resources with Cisco’s must-win technology transitions.
• Partner Innovation Challenge, now with Partner Bold Bets, is helping partners think Bigger, Better, and Bolder with Cisco. Now in the challenge’s fifth year, we’ve seen partners of all sizes and from all regions innovate thoughtful solutions – from networking game-changers to inclusive future solutions. We’ve awarded more than $1.5 million to partner winners, with submissions coming from all around the world. Our fifth challenge is now open to Cisco partners, so learn how you can get involved!

With this focus on learning, I’m super excited about the new Black Belt training track for partner managed services. But first, a little background. Cisco recently commissioned a study that surveyed more than 1,000 buyers in 18 different countries and regions around the world. The research revealed a massive $113 billion global managed services total addressable market (TAM) across Cisco’s addressable product markets by 2025. Where 45% of Cisco’s product TAM opportunity will be sold bundled with a managed service, making it the largest route to market (RTM) for Cisco and its partners. This growth in managed services represents a huge opportunity.

A new Partner Managed Services engineering track has been launched as part of Cisco’s Black Belt Academy to help partners grow in this space. Stage 1 of the technical track includes a concise curriculum that teaches about Cisco’s Managed Services solutions, complete with sales and presales learning maps and demos. In addition, this new training track will cover everything from drivers in the market to the Cisco solutions you can include in your managed services, as well as resources to help you accelerate time to market and sales.  This technical track kicks off with private 5G but will expand soon to include Managed Security, DevOps and Managed Hybrid Cloud. Be sure to check it out on SalesConnect for additional details.

Our Partner Sales engineering team is committed to making it easier for you, our partners, to not only consume, but also extend offers to your customers. And we want to hear from you how we can continue to improve your partner experience with Cisco.

If you plan to be at Cisco Live US in Las Vegas, come visit the Global Partner Solutions & Engineering booth (#1506) to learn more about BOSS, Shogun, the Partner Innovation Challenge, and the new managed services learning track in the Black Belt Academy. I hope to see you in Vegas!

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