Cisco laid out its strategies at the recently conclude annual Partner Summit in Boston, to strengthen its position in the mid-market segment.The company defines mid-size businesses who have 100-1000 employees. The 1.4 million midsize businesses will be spending an estimated $25 billion on technology and $30 billion on services by 2016.
Faced with market trends such as mobility and cloud, today’s midsize businesses have rapidly increasing IT demands. They have many of the same needs as a big business, but smaller IT staffs and budgets to meet them. To remain competitive, mid-sized businesses need to be able to evolve quickly to address business challenges and prepare for the future. Cisco’s approach to midmarket starts with a deep understanding of midsize customers – what keeps them up at night and what drives their purchasing decisions. It’s from that perspective, Cisco has set forth a strategy built on the strong 3 pillar foundation of partners, product portfolio and demand generation.
Partner Driven Sales: Partners are at the core of Cisco’s strategy for success in the mid-market segment, and going forward the company aims to double its incentive to $150 million in FY14 from $75 million the year before. Efforts will be concentrated to support the partners with incentives and various training programs.
Cisco has also introduced updates to Partner Plus, a milestone support framework introduced last year to help partners grow their mid-market business, by way increased incentives [elite Winner’s circle launched] and technical support [Partner Plus partners will be able to grow their virtual engineering utilization by 100%].
- Made for Midsize Portfolio: The Cisco Midmarket portfolio delivers a wide selection of options to ensure customers are getting the right-sized, right-priced offering with the right set of functionality and compliment of services. The portfolio addresses the top concerns at mid-sized companies – business growth, workplace productivity, enhanced customer experience, and delivery of IT efficiencies. Products introduced include:
- The new Cisco Meraki Managed Services Dashboard, which brings together a number of features for Managed Service Providers (MSP) to offer cloud-managed networking as a service to their customers. This MSP dashboard features specific tools, analytics and monitoring capabilities and is built to allow our service providers to manage end-customer networks easily from a central location while still maintaining separation and security of each customer network;
- Next generation Catalyst 2960 Series Switch which is the world’s most deployed switch. The Catalyst 2960-X is a perfect fit for midmarket customers who are dealing with challenges associated with BYOD scalability and security – many of the same needs as a big business, but with smaller IT staffs and budgets to meet them.
The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X is also designed to reduce the total cost of ownership over comparative industry switches with energy-saving features that can reduce power consumption by up to 80%.
Demand Generation
Cisco is planning to generate $1 billion in sales-qualified leads through marketing for its partners in the next fiscal year. Using integrated global marketing programs that include a focused set of demand generation activities designed to help customers move from interest to purchase, competitive promotions and smart solutions, Cisco will be building pipeline in key focus areas like BYOD, Data Center and Collaboration.
The company to focus more on lead routing through our Sales Collaboration Platform for a simpler, more effective way of getting the leads.
Source:http://blogs.cisco.com/channels/how-cisco-partners-win-in-the-midmarket-2
