SMB business development
“Cisco’s partner channel is made up of a huge number of different types of organizations with different skills, focuses and development strategies. To some, Cisco is a major vendor, but to others it is not. In my role as BDM, I wanted to find out which of our SMB partners would be the best for Cisco to focus on developing for our mutual success in SMB- Sales. By asking the right questions, we can identify business opportunities for partners to do things differently and to be more successful. This would also identify the right partners for Cisco to invest in for our own growth”.
Cisco’s Business Development Manager Mark Boumans
The Situation
Cisco successfully scale their regional SMB business development capability with LeadSeed.
The Challenge
Cisco was faced with two clear challenges in achieving its goals: skills and scale
“The team at Cisco that specializes in this type of structured dialogue and analysis has finite resources, and the task of evaluating the channel across EMEAR was too large. So, to be successful, I needed to try to automate part of the process of partner review to enable it to scale. I needed to be able to give the task to Cisco channel sales reps who weren’t familiar with the content of this type of conversation”
The Solution
“LeadSeed were recommended to me by a colleague. Although I never met any of the team face to face, I quickly felt confident that the team behind LeadSeed would be able to help me and that the platform would give me the scalability I needed across territories. In this respect, my project was much like any other LeadSeed client – we know what we want to achieve, but need the expertise of LeadSeed to help translate it into something executable. There are DIY tools out there that might be able to deliver part of what is needed, but having specialists to develop the platform into something bespoke for the specific purpose delivers the ultimate value.”
“In the first phase of the project, the team at LeadSeed scoped out the questions, responses and report based on an existing Cisco partner survey. After doing some testing with this structure, I realized that we could and should do much more, and set about adding layers of detail and structure to the brief to more accurately fit the business need.”
The results
Working together for even better outcomes
“The Leadseed team was extremely responsive to the new demands of the project, integrating complex Cisco business intelligence data and content into the reports and training videos into the questioning tool itself. I set high standards for the end goal of this project and LeadSeed worked hard to deliver it.”
“The platform has been rolled out to Account Managers and is starting to bring in the insight we wanted. We even have some of our partners using it independently as a tool to assess themselves, which is testament to the intuitive user interface and the value of the output they receive.” “The platform has been rolled out to Account Managers and is starting to bring in the insight we wanted. We even have some of our partners using it independently as a tool to assess themselves, which is testament to the intuitive user interface and the value of the output they receive.”
LeadSeed is a B2B Conversation As a Platform generating qualified lead using “give to get” principle and building trust, gaining relationship. It combines the latest digital marketing technic with proven sales methodology.