not sure why people don't see this coming, somehow with this COVID, people don't expect on site sales no more, hence all goes to virtual, and proven this can also work. Hence onsite sales will be gone.. no more travel to customer site for these VIP.. my feedback from customer is that these sales people dont call them anyway after, the minute they made the sales and immediately gone and disappeared, going to next site to sell something else.... almost now all sales are done automated like renewal, there is less body needed and please expect to be cut.., all these outrages sales bonus are gone also with it.
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I worked for a company in the late '90s that was a catalog sales company. While they had other customers, if you remember the days of the Sear's Christmas catalog or Wish Book, this company was the call center and the pick, pack & ship fulfillment center for that catalog.
After years of successfully handling that, they decided to go public and the new exec's and board decided to sell of the call center and warehouse parts of the business and focus on the business-to-business (B2B) part of the software side. They failed miserably to keep the company afloat and within the first year, they got rid of all the project managers, immediately following the sales team.
How do you generate revenue if you don't have project managers guiding the development of a product to sale and no sales people to sell your product? Within another quarter, everyone was gone except for one executive admin and four exec's who moved into a small suite of offices in the Galleria Mall in Dallas paying themselves a salary for 7-9 months while they shutdown and shuttered the company, i.e. played golf and had business lunches while they looked for their next job.
before Kodak "went away", they cut sales folks biggly.
Writing was on the wall when they closed all those field sales offices last year. Reality is you don't need a huge sales army of AM's and SE's and layers of middle management anymore. All our customers have or are fully embracing cloud for the future, WFH is the future, Cisco just is more and more irrelevant. Culling the sales ranks is an indicator of managed decline, seen in all sorts of over the hill big companies. cheers.
Move on site/field sales to virtual to retain talent as well as relationships with larger accounts, and cull GVS (lower specialization, essentially an over-managed, overpriced call center).
Maybe CSS can replace the sales in the future. It’s all about renewal now.
It will be the death of Cisco if that gets implemented. It will be a step too far. Already Cisco largely irrelevant in cloud compute conversations. SASE has possibilities for Cisco but the complexity and licensing will ki-l it as they try to protect existing deployments of the individual constituent technologies. It will price itself out of the market. Only reason Cisco sell so much as they do is because of relationships cultivated over many years of physical meetings and lunches/beers etc pre-Covid. SE's bailing customers out of problems etc. Cut that away and the relationships will wither away and so will the revenue.
Maybe if you're selling small routers and switches to SMB but it won't cut the mustard to the larger enterprises and service provider customers
I think there’s an element of truth to this. One thing is very clear—the CFO doesn’t like travel, and has made it very clear that we are not going back to the old ways of travel. I think this is a mistake because with more people working remotely from home, a lot of people will drift away without face time.
shopping cart finally to replace sales folks. RIP sales
Virtual sales will become a norm in the bottom of commercial accounts. Accounts that spend $250-500k per year do not need the overhead of a field sales team. All resources can be provided virtual for pre-sales. The partner community will become the new in-person sales team.
Sales are mostly relationship based . Why do you think people still buy Cisco product despite it being so sh---y . There will be exemption to travel to these so called vip customer. If not we will risk of losing them to our competitor . If virtual sale are done from now on expect Cisco to die quicker than expected