With huge partner ecosystem, time to outsource commodity hardware sales to partner community. Focus on software, integration and recurring revenue. Reduce the cost of Sales. No brainer !!!
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Let the BE take over sales and manage it all from Bangalore. They seem to know how to do everything.
Outsourcing in theory yes
In practice totally different
Why should a partner champion Cisco hardware like realistically is it that much more of a difference to a reseller than Forti, Aruba, extreme?
Partners in my experience have minimal loyalty
It is hard enough to qualify a customer and manage the discourse as the OEM with our internal issues nvm letting someone with zero skin in the game do this for us on our behalf
cisco has to clean up enough after the bulk of the large partner deals so thinking that ecosystem can do much other than sell a widget still hasn't made it through to the elt. I swear, chucky and mm were the xiden/cackles of the professional world. Destroy or set the path for destruction of a company and have zero clue of reality. If I see chucky boy eating pudding or sniffing hair I will toss in the towel.
Is that you, MM? Sounds like you.
Once you let a partner own a bigger customer, you’ve lost that customer most likely because the partner will sell what is cheaper or what makes him the most profit. No brand loyalty. Not talking about small customers which have always been a partner play.
If you don't focus on the hardware, what are you building the software for? Cisco is/was a hardware company, regardless of how many times they try to become a software company.
I'm assuming many people commenting here haven't actually been involved in a customer deal, fighting for budget, fighting against the competition, fighting to help the customer overcome their staff shortage, fighting to convince them that our next solutions is the one they need.
This is very different than run-rate business where the customer is just buying more of a standard solution.
AM's spend there time on the stuff in the first paragraph - if they don't then the stuff in the second paragraph never happens.
From reading a lot of the comments I don't think its well understood how long the initial sales cycle is, what the current competitive landscape looks like, and the challenges our customers have in their internal organizations.
Not going to happen but AMs get paid way too much to refresh 2 yrs prior to LDoS.
In fact many of them dont even understand what i just said!
Sales peoples bloated, so we must cut. Inside sales can takes over for 1/2 cost and also the overlays team in Patrick org can do any face selling. Engineering, we are ones who for makes sales anyway! We should gets commissions becuse we are always covering for sales lying and fix mess to customers. Many sales peoples like serpent and give Cisco bad name.
It would be a transfer of gross profit. More expensive to CSCO for similar or poorer sales.
Would have happened long ago by now, if software licensing was not such a pathetic conundrum, permanently and unnecessary forever woven into the sales cycle.
With such a deep understanding of how we sell our products like you clearly have, you sound fit to be on the ELT.
Our key focus should be on cutting costs by laying off full-time employees and hiring contract workers without benefits.
Software, Hardware, AI... these are problems Tech companies need to worry about. Cisco sells & markets legacy network equipment. We are the Best Buy for switches & routers.
Partially make sense for low-end commodity hardware stuff. Our key focus should be on software.
So let partners, who can sell anything, be accountable for selling Cisco HW? We already loose enough deals vs the competition. This would be the actual end.