The reason for putting more sellers, SEs and leaders on the front lines is due to the fact that the existing portfolio leaders, sellers and SEs have failed significantly.
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@ec+1kt256qvy seeing as the seller is held accountable for the execution on the commit call yes this is correct and technical proficiency of these 'SE' is quite terrible as of late
@af Agreed. Look at the confusing clusterfu-ks that are SDA, ACI, ISE, FSO, FP and others. Cr-ppy quality and support , multiple concurrent licensing mechanisms running, fixing problems that don’t exist, standards based alternatives already exist. All post sales issues land with SE. No wonder SE overwhelmed with it all and cannot lead the room like the old days. These fu-k ups start at the ELT and senior BU management.
Portfolio is complex, unwieldy and incoherent. It is very expensive, insanely complex to license and of poor quality. Cisco tries to do too many things and does them poorly. It should focus at excelling at fewer things.
OP is spot on, they are doing this cause the portfolio AEs can’t sell and have been losing market share and majority of portfolio SEs are nothing more than glorified admins for the portfolio AEs. Portfolio leadership are too focused on their next career move than actually holding their teams accountable. The portfolio leadership is the only place I have seen where you cannot get fired for losing market share.
My generalist SE can be replaced by a Claude prompt and regularly is
Two years from now they go back to specializing in technology and get rid of portfolio SE
So moving specialists to portfolio SEs seems to be the d-mbest idea I have heard. Long ramp because there are several new portfolios to learn. Now all SEs will be too spread out technically to be able to have deep technical meetings and just do more paper pushing activities.
Specialists SEs are technical. Some are very hands-on and know their stuff. Unfortunately, leadership doesn't understand you can't fix buggy half-baked products that don't work better together by redistributing specialists to generalist teams. A poor product remains a poor product no matter how many good SEs you throw at it.
This issue is simple. The SEs and Specialist are not technical experts anymore. The Cisco SE was the smartest person in the room 15-20 years ago, they all had CCIEs. Now most of the SEs and Specialist have never touched the products they are selling, have never deployed the products and have no clue how to troubleshoot them. The only way you right this ship is to do a major technical training investment in your SEs and Specialist.
Correction: Portfolio leadership has failed, not the front line SEs. This is an RM, OD, AVP problem that permeates multiple verticals. Sure they all get stung by poor product/code quality here and there, and the price premiums have grown more outrageous, but for years the portfolio leadership has become complacent and relied too much on run rate business. The latest re-org is going to bring a higher density of portfolio sellers closer to the customer, sure, but under the same failed leadership, there are portfolio regions, operations, and entire areas who have not made their number for multiple fiscal halves, yet the leadership remains firmly in place.
OP is wrong. This is not a seller or SE problem. This is a leadership, product, quality, and lack of innovation problem. Cisco BU's are stuck in 1990 and cannot innovate. Any good ideas or concepts are ki-led by politics and pi----g contests between BU's or over budgets. Halfway decent concepts are GA'd with MVP's that anyone else would consider an internal alpha product then ELT expects it to generate billion dollar revenue while customers want nothing to do with it until its a real mature product.
Actually it’s because the specialists su-k - most SEs don’t know it well enough, most AEs double dip for no work. They tried to make them better and couldn’t. So now they’re trying another stupid idea.
@OP so.. sh-t products, huge gaps to the competition combined with outrageous margins leaving the seller the only possible way to compete is via EA? that's what you mean, yeah cool.
OP - I couldn’t disagree more. The sellers aren’t the problem, it’s the products. Quality and product design has become horrific over the past decade.
Have you ever been to a Cisco customer meeting? It’s an assembled army from Cisco that almost always outnumbers the headcount present from the customer. One separate SME for every single thing because the Cisco mission statement is now quantity over quality. It’s insane. That approach was not made by your frontline sellers. Those are leadership decisions by people at the top all fighting over why they’re important and needed and why they simply must have more headcount. Your front line sellers are not the problem. As always, what you’re seeing is a course correction of stupid leadership decisions and a deterioration of the quality of our products that necessitates more direct customer support. ‘I’m here because Cisco cares, not because our issues are so profound that all customers need a degree of handholding our current staff cannot support!’
Instead of solidarity with your peers, you’re choosing to attack them. Grow up.
There is no accountability by the portfolio leadership. When was the last time you heard of a AVP or OD getting fired. They are completely responsible for losing market share. They lived on renewals.