CHAPTER 11. Cisco’s Approach to Sales 2.0

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Cisco Sales is using the company’s own Web 2.0 technologies such as Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx, and Unified Communications as a key part of company’s Web 2.0 evolution. This approach enables Sales to be early adopters of Cisco technology, to pilot and use the technology from day to day in their workflow so they become thoroughly familiar with the products they sell to Cisco customers. It also enables Sales to collaborate more effectively with Sales team members, partners, and customers, improving communication and establishing deeper relationships.

Sales teams are also leading Cisco adoption and use of other Web 2.0 technologies, such as blogs and wikis, and new business models, such as social networking and folksonomies, even the Mobile Web. In doing so, Sales is increasing peer-to-peer collaboration and innovation and transforming key selling processes. Cisco Sales is developing and sharing case studies showcasing these selling process transformations with partners and customers, increasing Cisco’s leadership consultancy.

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This chapter provides a case study of the Cisco approach to Sales 2.0, explaining how Web 2.0 is transforming the way Cisco sells to its customers. This chapter

• Explains how Web 2.0 changes the selling process, describes Sales 2.0, and identifies key differences between Sales 1.0 and Sales 2.0.

• Outlines how Cisco Sales’ explorations of Web 2.0 technologies, Connected Communities, Finding Expertise, and Web 2.0 Explorers, helped shape the vision and lay the foundation for this fundamental change in Cisco’s selling processes.

• Describes initiatives in the U.S.-Canada Theater driving collaboration technology adoption across Sales.

• Provides examples of Cisco’s Sales 2.0 best practices and the business impact and results identified so far.

The Cisco approach to Sales 2.0 is characterized by highly collaborative interactions between employees, partners, and customers. These interactions are enabled by Cisco’s own Web 2.0 collaboration technologies, Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx, and Unified Communications, as well as other Web 2.0 technologies and tools. The ongoing selling process transformations that Web 2.0 technology has enabled in Cisco Sales serves as a model for the rest of the company and other enterprises to follow.

Web 2.0 Changes Sales Processes

Web 2.0 is changing both the sales process and the buying processes. Customers use web-based search engines such as Google to find information about products and services and are, therefore, becoming much more educated consumers. Customers who have used e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com expect one-stop shopping and faster delivery. Customers using these sites can choose to reveal information about themselves or remain anonymous, whereas sellers must reveal more product information than ever before in order to remain competitive.

Company marketing and selling processes are also changing in Sales 2.0 in ways intended to match new customer buying behaviors and expectations. Annual technology trade shows, for example, are giving way to collaborative spaces where virtual trade shows are “always on.” Partners can promote their products in virtual booths and collaborate with other partners. This section focuses on how Web 2.0 is changing key aspects of the selling process.

Sales 2.0

As enterprise Sales teams adapt their processes to embrace Web 2.0 and web-based communication, traditional Sales is changing, particularly in high-tech companies such as Cisco. This new selling approach, called Sales 2.0, fosters collaboration and information-sharing with customers to increase customer intimacy and loyalty. It supports collaboration and co-creation with selling partners, thereby improving Sales strategy.

Sales 2.0 uses Web 2.0 tools, such as instant messaging, web conferencing, and social networking, to increase Sales productivity and close significantly more deals. This approach leverages the skills of the next generation of sales professionals and enables seasoned professionals to engage as well. All this benefits both the customer and the bottom line.

Sellers are adopting Web 2.0 technologies to increase their social networks, build stronger relationships, and work more efficiently to sell more products. Networking and relationship-building play key roles in successful selling. Social networking enables sellers, customers, and partners to connect and extend their reach exponentially, for mutual benefit. Web 2.0 technologies make it possible to quickly find the right person through this extended, global network to connect, engage, share information, and collaborate immediately on a deal.

Where Sales 1.0 focused on selling products in volume, for example, Sales 2.0 focuses on customers, and how to enable them to more effectively manage their businesses. In Sales 2.0, teams are engaging in web-based collaborations with more customers and partners per day, instead of accumulating frequent flyer miles or spending hours on the road. These and other differences between Sales 1.0 and 2.0 enabled by Web 2.0 technologies and tools are highlighted in Table 11-1.

Table 11-1 How Web 2.0 Changes Key Aspects of the Selling Process [1]

Sales 2.0 technologies accelerate the selling process by facilitating the buyer’s decision-making process and improving the quality of the interaction. Company websites provide interactive, user-friendly interfaces, focused on customer needs and preferences. Effective sites are designed to attract and engage the customer 24×7, whenever they want or need information. Companies are beginning to enable customers and partners to join and participate in communities to share knowledge and experiences, improving the quality of the customer experience, as many consumer-based social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, have done.[1]

Collaborative technologies enable Sales to become more efficient, often reducing travel time and expense. Web conferencing, for example, enables Sales to meet directly with customers and partners and engage the right subject matter experts all at the same time. These interactions, through technologies such as Cisco TelePresence, are as effective as meeting face-to-face. The real advantage of these technologies is that they enable more interactions per day, and more engagements per subject matter expert, because no travel time is required, adding huge savings to the bottom line. The next section shifts to discuss how Web 2.0 is changing Sales at Cisco.

Cisco Sales Explores Web 2.0

Many groups within the Cisco Sales organization are working to explore the possibility, recognize the opportunity, and realize the potential of Web 2.0 to deliver business value to Sales. The largest Theater Sales team, United States and Canada (U.S.-Canada), and the Sales IT support team, Worldwide Sales Processes and Systems (WWSPS), have collaborated on many of these efforts. Both teams play key roles, leading or sponsoring Web 2.0 initiatives that deliver business value to Sales and, more important, the broader population at Cisco as well.

U.S.-Canada Sales and WWSPS drove much of the early exploration of Web 2.0 technology in Sales, recognizing that collaborative technology could drive Sales productivity. In March 2006, as early Web 2.0 explorations began at Cisco, Rob Lloyd, senior vice president of U.S.-Canada sales operations, commissioned WWSPS to explore Web 2.0 technology in support of the Theater. WWSPS began by partnering with Cisco’s Intranet Strategy team, described in Chapter 10, “Web 2.0 @ Cisco: The Evolution.”

During the discovery process, several compelling Sales requirements surfaced, including the need to

• Organize into communities of practice based on an account, campaign, vertical, theater, technology, and so on, creating an initiative titled Connected Communities.

• Find the right person or content required to prepare a presentation, answer a question, or provide support to a customer, launching an effort called Finding Expertise.

• Identify the importance of the Mobile Web to Sales, developing new capabilities such as the new Mobile On the Spot (Bookings) Report.

• Share information, presentations, news, and events on rapidly evolving collaborative technologies, fostering a community known as the Web 2.0 Explorers.

• Investigate technologies such as mashups as a way to accelerate capability delivery, through a mashup proof of concept (PoC), demonstrating the feasibility and business value of the technology.

• Develop a taxonomy of Sales-related abbreviations, acronyms, and terms called Salespedia.

• Align WebEx Connect–related efforts across Sales and provide a vision of a Sales desktop based on Connect, establishing a WebEx Connect initiative for Sales.

• Contribute ideas on new products, services, and process changes, gathered from Sales practices and suggested by customers, starting a program called iFeedback.

The next sections provide a brief look at each of these early explorations.

Connected Communities

In early 2006, U.S.-Canada Sales and WWSPS realized the need to enable teams to organize into forums or groups, and took the lead to support development and deployment of community sites for many Sales teams. By August 2006, the U.S.-Canada Theater and WWSPS had established several of these wiki-based forums and collaboration portals, called Connected Communities. As the business value of more effective knowledge-sharing became evident, many segments and verticals developed web-based communities of practice.

One early example, specifically targeted at Sales team members selling Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) solutions and services, was announced in August 2006. The initial wiki-based SONA Portal was developed to consolidate SONA sales material in one site, providing quick access to content designed to meet the customers’ needs and interest level. The SONA Connected Community was designed to help accelerate understanding and usability of these SONA messages.

The SONA Community enabled Sales teams to interact via discussion forums, owned and managed by the SONA team, and provided an encyclopedia archive of SONA-related topics. It also provided a calendar of SONA events, linked to Cisco’s calendar solution, to increase awareness of SONA community events. The SONA Portal has evolved into the Enterprise & Mid-Market Solutions Marketing Enterprise Architecture website, shown in Figure 11-1. Like its predecessor, this new SONA portal provides educational and architecture-selling resources, connecting the Sales team to information.[3]

Figure 11-1 Cisco’s Service Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) Portal.[3]

The business value of Connected Communities is that they foster increased collaboration and knowledge-sharing. They support the exchange of best practices, business and technology expertise, and lessons learned among Sales teams. Connected community sites enable account teams and entire Sales organizations to work more closely and interactively with one another. They also improve productivity because all relevant communication and content can be encapsulated within the persistent context of the community effort or work, and experts within the community can weigh in to help guide and often times accelerate the community effort.

Finding Expertise

By mid-2006, Cisco’s Directory provided contact details, such as photo, title, organization, phone, email, and address. Many employees expressed the need to search through Directory content to find the right person to answer a question or assist on a project. The Internet Strategy group, part of the Employee Commitment team in Cisco’s Human Resources organization, was responsible for managing the Directory application.

The group realized that searching for the right person within the global workforce of more than fifty thousand often either took too long or proved unsuccessful, so they decided to add an Expertise section to existing Directory entries. U.S.-Canada Sales and WWSPS, realizing the business value of sales employees being able to find the right expertise quickly, supported the effort. They partnered with the Cisco Directory team, providing requirements and resources to support and accelerate delivery of a Finding Expertise capability in Directory 3.0. This latest Directory release, described in more detail in Chapter 10, was announced at the end of January 2009.

The business value of the Directory Expertise section is that it enables everyone across the company—employees, contractors, and vendors—to input their roles, subject matter expertise, and interests in their profiles.[2] As soon as that task is complete, Sales users will be able to search Directory 3.0 and find expertise. This real-time access and capability to bring expertise and support in at appropriate times in the Sales cycle, without having to know the expert personally or by name, will result in higher productivity and shorter Sales cycle time, as you will see from other examples later in the chapter. This ability to reach experts is enhanced even further via mobility.

Mobile Sales 2.0

As Chapter 9, “Web 2.0 and Mobility,” identified, mobile access to information is an issue of particular importance to the Sales organization. Most sales account managers and systems engineers spend a good deal of their time in the field with customers, often away from their computers. More than half of Cisco’s mobile device users are in Sales. Many find mobile access to sales-specific services, known as Mobile Sales Information Services (MSIS), in true Sales 2.0 fashion, increases their productivity, enabling anytime, anywhere access to information and services needed to do their jobs.[4]

For the past two years, a small team within WWSPS supported MSIS, testing new devices, working through Sales billing and other issues, in partnership with members of the U.S.-Canada Sales team and others.[5] During that time, many opportunities to enable business capabilities as mobile services worth exploring were identified. These include mobile alerts, offering immediate click-to-resolve access to the underlying applications and systems, streamlining, and accelerating workflow.[6]

Many day-to-day services of particular interest to Sales could be accessible via the Mobile Web, including travel itinerary information, mileage and expense tracking, approvals for deals, travel, even Paid Time Off (PTO) for vacation. As the Directory service outage example mentioned in Chapter 9 indicates, mobile services can deliver business-critical capabilities. Finally, and perhaps most important, these Mobile Web services can become building blocks to develop and enable new services, combined and configured in ways we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of.

The On the Spot (Bookings) Reports service delivered at the end of 2007 to key executives, including CEO John Chambers, is described in Chapter 9. It is the sole new mobile service added to the MSIS portfolio in more than three years. Because MSIS provide clear business value, this is an area where more could be done to enable new Mobile Sales 2.0 capabilities offering additional value to Sales. Other opportunities to leverage Web 2.0 for business value were identified by a community known as the Explorers.

Web 2.0 Explorers

At the beginning of May 2007, WWSPS convened a meeting of Web 2.0 thought leaders from the U.S.-Canada team and other interested parties, calling this community forum the Web 2.0 Explorers. The group was formed to keep early technology exploration alive, until funding became available for additional sponsored initiatives. The Web 2.0 Explorers team met at least monthly for more than a year. The team grew from its inception, from a handful to well over sixty regular members from Sales, Customer Advocacy, Cisco Development Organization (CDO), and the Communications Center of Excellence (CCoE) initiatives.

Guest speakers at Explorers meetings shared information updates on collaborative technologies, such as WebEx Connect, and emerging Web 2.0 concepts, such as mashups. Explorers meetings provided a venue to collaborate with like-minded individuals on ways to foster Web 2.0 applications to drive innovation and business value in Sales and other organizations. Members took an active role in sharing information, presentations, news, and events on the Explorers community site, proudly displaying a compass as the site logo, as shown in Figure 11-2.[7]

Figure 11-2 Web 2.0 Explorers community site.[7]

The Explorers community provided business value previously mentioned for Connected Communities, Knowledge-Sharing. The Explorers community also offered additional value as it provided a forum to gather a set of collaboration capability requirements from members across the global Sales organization. These requirements also validated the many opportunities to enable business capabilities as mobile services worth exploring, mentioned in Chapter 9. These include mobile alerts, offering immediate click-to-resolve access to the underlying applications and systems, streamlining, and accelerating workflow.[8]

In addition, the Sales capability requirements gathered by members of the Explorers community helped shape the vision and establish the foundation for many Sales 2.0 initiatives, including the first Web 2.0 strategy and framework for the Worldwide Sales organization. The capabilities also served as the basis for an early conceptual vision of a Sales desktop, designed to fulfill the Sales requirements, built on Cisco’s WebEx Connect collaborative platform. The community identified mashups as a potential enabler of many of these capabilities.

Mashups

In October 2007, the Web 2.0 Explorers team organized a Monster Mashup event, where team members viewed a demonstration of mashup capabilities. Mashup technology has been used within Sales for several years to aggregate links to selling content from product and marketing business unit sites into a Cisco tool called Sales Rack managed by WWSPS. As a result of the demo, the Explorers team sponsored a mashup technology proof of concept (PoC), gathering use cases from Explorers members.

The mashup PoC team developed an application for the Cisco Development Organization (CDO) team members to aggregate product quality data from multiple sources and present it in a comprehensive dashboard, as a set of dense charts with histories and drill-downs. The mashup provided a more holistic view of the product quality data and significantly reduced the time required for data gathering and aggregation.[9] The mashup PoC team also developed an application in partnership with WWSPS to screen scrape content from a web-based Sales Bookings application and reformat the content to fit on a mobile device in about three hours, offering significant value from a rapid prototyping, time-to-market delivery and cost savings perspective. Previous estimates to produce the capability via traditional development methods were at least three months.[10]

Results of the Explorers mashup PoC are compelling, from a business value standpoint. Mashups may prove extremely useful in developing business applications quickly and in creating new Mobile Sales 2.0 services to address the opportunities discussed in Chapter 9. The results of these technology explorations have been shared with Explorers team members, including Cisco’s Mobility Solutions and members focused on Cisco’s Communications Center of Excellence (CCoE) initiative. The lessons learned serve as a foundation for mashup technology exploration for CCoE and for Cisco, in general. The next initiative, Salespedia, serves as the foundation for another Cisco initiative, Ciscopedia.

Salespedia

Salespedia, [Seylz-pee-dee-uh] -noun 1. a centralized list of Sales-related terms and abbreviations, 2. an index of knowledge/information of those engaged in Sales and Sales support.

Salespedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia developed by WWSPS to provide information in the Sales domain. It includes abbreviations, acronyms, and terms with definitions or descriptions. It also provides links to relevant websites and other content in one centralized, searchable location.

Salespedia establishes a collaborative platform for Sales knowledge, presented in one centralized location, and sets the stage for Sales knowledge-sharing. Combined with the Finding Expertise and Connected Communities efforts, Salespedia enables more powerful connections between people, communities, and information. It represents a significant step toward delivery of an Integrated Workforce Experience (IWE) for Sales.

Built on the Web 2.0 concept of user-generated content, Salespedia solicited information-sharing from Sales’ subject matter experts. WWSPS team members and others have been encouraged to share and collaborate by adding relevant terms and definitions, contributing to the Sales knowledge base. Sales interns and new hires, in particular, have reported finding the acronyms and links to related information sources extremely useful as they join Cisco.

While developing Salespedia, WWSPS has been working closely with Ciscopedia, Cisco’s version of Wikipedia, and Directory 3.0 Expertise initiatives described in Chapter 10. Salespedia provides the start of a consistent set of abbreviations, acronyms, and terms that can be leveraged in Sales’ Directory Expertise sections. Salespedia also contains categories of Sales terms, such as roles, theaters, projects, and skills, to help drive consistency across Sales Directory Expertise entries and serve as a foundation for a Cisco Glossary.[11][12]

When the beta version of Ciscopedia launched at the end of January 2009, it contained over 540 Sales and marketing–related terms merged into Ciscopedia from Salespedia. “Salespedia” is currently the most popular tag in Ciscopedia, followed by “acronym” and “internetworking terms.”[13] After Salespedia’s additional 500+ acronyms and abbreviations are merged into Ciscopedia the enterprise will have access to the entire Salespedia glossary. Another example of a Sales initiative providing leading practices for the entire company is the one focused on WebEx Connect.

WebEx Connect Initiative for Sales

WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007, offers WebEx Meeting Center meeting capabilities, outlined in Chapter 2, “User-Generated Content: Wikis, Blogs, Communities, Collaboration, and Collaborative Technologies.” WebEx Connect, currently in beta release, offers a number of out-of-box capabilities: Instant Messenger, Chat, Contacts, Spaces, and Calendar. In early 2008, WWSPS established an initiative to assess the capabilities of WebEx Connect.

WWSPS worked to identify how WebEx Connect could be leveraged as a Sales collaboration platform to

• Increase customer intimacy and loyalty

• Drive deeper customer relationships

• Improve strategy through co-creation

• Develop more effective awareness of customer, industry, and technology trends through communities of practice

• Accelerate the buyer’s decision process

The initiative helped align WebEx Connect–related efforts across Sales, providing an early conceptual vision of a Sales desktop, designed to fulfill the additional Sales requirements gathered from the Web 2.0 Explorers members, including

• Stock ticker

• Metrics dashboard

• Meetings, alerts, and news feeds

• A view of bookings from Sales’ My Bookings Report (MBR)

• Return-on-investment (ROI) calculator

• Sales account information

These capabilities or features appear in the early vision of a Sales desktop, based on WebEx Connect, shown in Figure 11-3.[14]

Figure 11-3 Early conceptual vision of Sales desktop.[14]

The effort led to the creation of a list of out of the box WebEx Connect capabilities and widgets in development of primary importance to Sales.[15] Widgets are essentially portable chunks of application code that enable a capability, performing a service such as retrieving data. More important, it led to the development of a widget documentation pattern used to capture essential information about current and planned widgets in one location.[16]

The business value of this initiative is that many of these capabilities were developed as widgets, thereby enabling a working conceptual model of the Sales desktop to be presented at the Global Sales Meeting in September 2008. The code underlying existing Mobile Sales Information Services, described in Chapter 9, was used to build several desktop widgets. Others were created by mashing up, or combining, back-end data services or developing new ones.

In addition, the WWSPS WebEx Connect team partnered with the U.S.-Canada team in 2008 to establish a WebEx Connect Early Adopters Program (EAP). The EAP was designed to help field sales teams learn to leverage WebEx Connect to collaborate more effectively with employees, partners, and customers. Guidelines, training material, best practices, and lessons learned through the EAP are being leveraged to support WebEx Connect adoption across the company through the company current EAP website, shown in Figure 11-4.

Figure 11-4 WebEx Connect Early Adopter Program site.[17]

The site provides getting started information, service alerts, and links to enable users to contribute their ideas and learn more.[17] Now turn your attention to an initiative designed to broaden ideation across the Sales organization.

Sales Innovation via iFeedback

WWSPS partnered with the U.S.-Canada Theater team members, members of the I-Zone team, and others to collaborate on an initiative, called iFeedback, designed to gather and maximize the business value of innovative ideas of Cisco Sales employees. Like Cisco’s current I-Zone initiative and Customer Advocacy’s planned CA I-Zone initiative, described in Chapter 10, iFeedback is intended to act as an idea pipeline that moves ideas into action. Figure 11-5 provides a snapshot of an initial iFeedback Collaboration community site, where the innovation-focused Sales community can shares ideas when the initiative is launched.[18]

Figure 11-5 Sales Innovation iFeedback Collaboration community site.[18]

Key objectives of the proposed iFeedback initiative are

• Enable Sales to learn to leverage innovation to increase productivity, as many other companies are doing today.

• Accelerate the movement of ideas from the innovative source to subject matter experts (SMEs), who can review or test the ideas and turn them into action.

• Facilitate employees’ use of collaborative software to brainstorm ideas to solve core problems, one at a time.

• Develop case studies and success stories that enable us to capture and reuse creative and innovative processes to solve problems for ourselves and our customers.

• Drive innovation to become so ingrained in Cisco culture (long term) that everyone is expected to submit ideas for innovations and improvements as part of any job.

As this list indicates, the iFeedback initiative is meant to transform Sales.

The business value of the iFeedback initiative is that it will provide an opportunity to tap into the tribal knowledge that Sales teams possess regarding Cisco customers, partners, products, and markets. Ideas contributed through iFeedback could be honed by the power of this collective intelligence. Very much a Sales 2.0 initiative, it could also help shape, in real-time, the overall Sales strategy. Imaginative Sales employees, partners, and customers could work together to solve core problems via collaborative brainstorming sessions, turning innovation into realization.[19]

Now turn your attention to several key collaboration initiatives currently underway in the U.S.-Canada Theater.

U.S.-Canada Sales Theater Initiatives

Cisco’s U.S.-Canada Theater was launched in 2006 as part of a broader reorganization of the Worldwide Field Organization. The Theater was designed to maximize the synergies between the United States and Canada, both in terms of geographic proximity and market maturity, to best serve Cisco customers and accelerate growth. The Theater represents 53% of Cisco’s total business, has over 5,000 employees, and 13,900 U.S. and Canada partners.[20]

The U.S.-Canada Theater, under Rob Lloyd’s leadership, has sponsored many of Sales’ Web 2.0 initiatives previously mentioned. These efforts have helped drive collaboration technology adoption across the Theater, enabling U.S.-Canada to become one of the leading organizations from a Sales 2.0 perspective. More important, however, U.S.-Canada Sales 2.0 initiatives provide best practices and lessons learned to the larger Cisco Sales community, the broader population at Cisco, and to customers and partners as well.

As the Theater home page shown in Figure 11-6 indicates, Collaboration is a key initiative as is Five to Thrive, an initiative described later in the chapter. The Theater is made up of a number of organizations, such as Sales Planning & Operations and Field Marketing. U.S.-Canada Field Marketing is led by Jere King, vice president of marketing, whose blog was mentioned in Chapter 10.

Figure 11-6 U.S.-Canada Sales Theater home page.[21]

The Theater is also organized by market segments, such as Advanced Technologies, Canada, Public Sector, U.S. Commercial, U.S. Enterprise, and U.S. Service Provider, listed on the page under Segments. The site provides Theater employees a place to find Lloyd’s key messages, including his blog, as well as a number of Hot Topics, Theater News, and Discussions. It is shown here to help frame how U.S.-Canada Theater organizations and initiatives described later in the chapter relate to one another.[21]

Sales Planning & Operations

Donna Rhode, vice president of Sales Planning & Operations (SPO), leverages the SPO homepage, shown in Figure 11-7, to provide access to her “On the SPOT” blog, news, and related items. Rhode, a member of Cisco’s Communication and Collaboration (C&C) Board mentioned in Chapter 10, puts U.S.-Canada and SPO team efforts in perspective, saying, “By offering sales team members the tools to collaborate in today’s business world, an organization enables both better workplace practice and improved service to customers and partners. A high degree of collaboration leads to an environment where salespeople can respond more quickly to their customers’ needs due to the ability to connect with specialists and executives with short notice, spend more time off airplanes, and be able to interact and share ideas with a wide spectrum of individuals and cross-functional teams. Through collaboration, a sales team expands its strength to be greater than the sum of its parts. More insight, expertise, and best practices make the team stronger, thereby providing an important competitive edge.”[22]

Figure 11-7 U.S.-Canada Sales Planning & Operations home page.[23]

Under Rhode’s leadership, the U.S.-Canada SPO organization develops tools to help Sales to understand how to use Web 2.0 technologies and leverage them in a Sales 2.0 way to increase collaboration, improve productivity, transform selling processes, and provide business value. Key SPO initiatives include

• Scale the Power, a program focused on effective use of resources, such as video technology and telephony.

• Administrator Training, training content on topics such as virtual team meeting scheduling.

• Collaboration Portal, collaboration-related content aggregated in one location.

• Collaboration Guide, a comprehensive technology reference guide.

• Collaboration Hot Topics, key information and news headlines.

• Collaboration Library, a collection of papers and use cases showcasing business value of collaboration.

• Collaboration Cockpit, technology installation and adoption metrics.

• Web 2.0 Committee, a bi-weekly forum of Segment leaders working on key collaboration priorities for the Field.

• Worldwide Sales Collaboration Board, a monthly forum of global collaboration initiative leaders.

• Five to Thrive, a fast-tracked, cross-functional program designed to enable sales teams to help customers leverage Cisco solutions to succeed during the economic downturn.

The following sections provide more details about each of these initiatives.

Scale the Power

The Scale the Power (STP) initiative facilitates and positively impacts virtual interactions between Cisco customers, partners, and employees enabling them to leverage cutting-edge video, voice, and collaboration technologies and telephony tools. STP’s goal was to

• Make the latest Unified Communications products available to the field.

• Install wireless area network (WAN) upgrades in all Field Sales Offices (FSOs).

• Video-enable all FSOs, via Cisco Unified Video Advantage—(CUVA) and MeetingPlace, to support virtual face-to-face meetings.

• Build out of large high-quality video conference rooms in FSOs.

• Roll out TelePresence for U.S.-Canada.

Figure 11-8 shows SPO’s STP site, which provides collaboration technology–related news, success stories, tools, resources, related items, a learning center, and upcoming events.

Figure 11-8 Sales Planning & Operations’ Scale the Power site.[24]

Thanks to the Scale the Power initiative, enhanced audio/video (EAV) rooms have been installed across the Theater. These conference, training, and demonstration rooms are equipped with advanced audio video systems and special room lighting and acoustics appropriately sized to support video teleconferencing activities. The goal of this Sales 2.0 initiative is to enable customers and partners to experience the same high-quality interaction they would experience visiting Cisco headquarters, in or near their everyday work locations.

As the list of STP’s goal at the beginning of the section indicates, the initiative focused on deploying technologies to Field Sales Offices, putting collaborative tools in the hands of front-line, customer- and partner-facing teams. As a result, Sales teams can now conduct business virtually with partners, customers, and associates without traveling, which enables executives and subject matter experts (SMEs) to scale more effectively.[24]

Administrator Training

A key aspect of the Scale the Power initiative is focused on training key staff members: executive administrative assistants and field sales administrators (FSAs). Sales executives often rely on their administrative assistants, and Sales teams rely on their FSAs to schedule and support virtual meetings for their organizations. The U.S.-Canada Theater realized that providing a comprehensive training program to this group would enable them to be more effective, and would also help to increase adoption of collaborative and virtual meeting technologies across Sales.

The Collaboration Training for Cisco Administrators site offers a training program broken down into three modules:

• Key elements of a successful virtual meeting, offering an online video tutorial and overview presentation

• WebEx Meeting Center–focused training

• TelePresence overview

Assistants who have taken the training have a better understanding of the technology features and capabilities. They are also more likely to help others use the technology and make them aware of Sales 2.0 practices that can add value to virtual meetings and collaborative activities.[25]

Collaboration Portal

The U.S.-Canada Sales Collaboration Portal, shown in Figure 11-9, provides a “one stop shop” for all things Sales 2.0, making them more relevant and easily accessible to the field. The Collaboration Portal team works closely with groups focused on the CCoE initiative mentioned in Chapter 10 to share best practices and lessons learned. This is not a duplication of CCoE, the enterprise collaboration technology site, but provides a front door to CCoE for Sales.

Figure 11-9 U.S.-Canada Sales Collaboration portal.[26]

Access to the Collaboration Portal and its content is open to all Cisco users, to encourage the broadest possible participation and content leverage. The Collaboration Portal provides links to Sales 2.0 Hot Topics, Sales Tools, Related Items, Collaboration Discussion, and more. It also provides access to the U.S.-Canada Collaboration Guide, Collaboration White Papers, Metrics, and an overview of the U.S.-Canada Web 2.0 Committee described later in the chapter.[26]

Collaboration Guide

The U.S.-Canada Theater established a Collaboration Guide to provide a brief overview of Cisco’s collaboration technologies and tools, including the following:

• Collaboration Continuum: Mapping audience interaction types to technology solutions

• Collaboration Tools: Blogs, Ciscopedia, Directory 3.0, and discussion forums, connecting people and information

• Community Platforms: Technologies enabling connected teams

• Document Management: Platforms helping users to share, store, and archive content more effectively

• Video Creation and Publishing Tools: Podcast, VoDcasts, CUVA, C-Vision, and vSearch, enhancing communication and increasing connectedness

• Web 2.0 Quick Reference Guide: Mapping Web 2.0 technology to intended audience and use case, describing the technology from the user point of view

• Virtual Meetings: Mapping meeting size and purpose to technology solutions

• Virtual Meeting Platforms and Tools: Enabling virtual face-to-face interactions

• Virtual Meeting Quick Reference Guide: Mapping technology/application to audience, experience, and type of virtual meeting

• Glossary and Resources: Buzzwords and related links

• Technology Comparison Chart: Technology features from a user perspective

The Collaboration Continuum shown in Figure 11-10 identifies technologies used for interpersonal, team, and community collaboration. It also provides technology recommendations based on the audience interaction types listed in Table 11-2.

Figure 11-10 U.S.-Canada Collaboration Guide Collaboration Continuum.[27]

Table 11-2 Collaboration Guide Collaboration Continuum Audience Interaction Types [27]

The Collaboration Guide offers significant business value because it is designed to increase Sales productivity and save time. It offers pros, cons, best use, and getting started links for each technology. The Guide provides explanations of key concepts such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), social tagging, and social networking tools. It also answers questions on the differences between these technologies.

The Collaboration Guide is designed to enable Sales 2.0 teams to leverage these tools to reduce travel expenses and be more connected. The Guide helps Sales teams to leverage collaboration and virtual meeting tools. It provides guidelines on when to use MeetingPlace, WebEx, and TelePresence to hold virtual meetings, and a (CUVA) camera to create a video on demand (VoD).

The Guide offers brief descriptions of types of virtual meetings: sales calls, briefings, seminars, and broadcasts, and recommends Cisco technology options for each. It also answers questions on the differences between meeting technologies and offers simple graphic examples of types of video interactions and provides technology solutions for each situation. The Guide provides ratings for the video quality, interactivity, and ease of setup for each virtual meeting technology and collaboration application.

Finally, the Collaboration Guide saves time by providing a robust set of definitions of collaboration buzzwords. It also provides a centralized source of links to related information. In a Sales 2.0 way, it provides access to key information to help Sales use collaboration tools and technologies to best support the customer. The CCoE site has incorporated the Collaboration Guide content for use across the broader enterprise.[27]

Collaboration Hot Topics

Sales teams often use newsletters to get the word out on Sales initiatives and new technologies. The U.S.-Canada team also recognized the value of communicating key collaboration hot topics to the field on a regular basis. As collaboration became such a buzzword at Cisco, the U.S.-Canada Theater jumped at the opportunity to put together a comprehensive monthly newsletter, called Collaboration Hot Topics, providing key information on collaboration tools, technologies, and best practices. Table 11-3 shows sample newsletter topics.

Table 11-3 Sample Topics in Collaboration Hot Topics Newsletters [23]

Each Collaboration Hot Topics newsletter provides insightful Sales 2.0–inspired content. Newsletters are thoughtfully crafted by the U.S.-Canada team to provide the field with the information they need to understand to leverage collaborative technology more effectively and become more productive. Newsletters usually include Web 2.0 concept definitions, introduce and provide status updates on collaborative technologies, announce collaboration initiatives, and share collaborative best practices drawn from the Sales community.

The February 2009 edition just listed in Table 11-3, for example, contains a number of news headlines linking to initiatives worth itemizing here, to help connect the dots:

• WebEx Connect Sales Training Modules Now Available refers to a set of Flash training modules developed, as a part of the WebEx Connect Initiative for Sales mentioned earlier in the chapter, to help the Field understand how to best leverage Connect.

• New Channels Collaboration Use Case Now Available creates awareness of the latest Channels-focused addition to the Collaboration Library described later in the chapter.

• Partner-to-Partner Collaboration Fuels Profitable Growth showcases a recent Cisco study that revealed collaboration among Cisco partners generates 31% of Channel revenue, a topic discussed later in this chapter, in the “Worldwide Channels” section.

• New Directory Now Available, Salespedia Now Merged With Ciscopedia highlights the connections between Cisco Directory 3.0 and Ciscopedia, both described in Chapter 10 and in Salespedia, mentioned earlier in the chapter.

• Live Daily Demo! Cisco WebEx Meeting Center on the iPhone showcases live demos of the award-winning mobile WebEx Meeting Center application available on the iPhone, described in Chapter 9.

• Announcing the Cisco WebEx Connect Community Wiki creates awareness of this community wiki effort highlighting WebEx Connect best practices, metrics, and capability development, described in Chapter 10.

The Collaboration Hot Topics newsletter provides a great example of how to effectively evangelize benefits of Web 2.0 and to drive its adoption. The newsletter was first delivered to the U.S.-Canada team via email, but has become so popular and widely acclaimed that it is now posted on Cisco’s intranet, on both the Sales Planning & Operations home page and the Collaboration portal.[23]

Collaboration Library

The U.S.-Canada Theater has developed a collection of white papers and use cases focused on collaboration. For example:

• “The Next Revolution in Productivity and Innovation” demonstrates the power of collaboration at work, sharing the company’s perspective on the collaboration revolution underway.

• “The Next Frontier in Collaboration: Improving Customer Intimacy and Enhancing Operational Efficiencies” describes the steps Cisco has taken to think beyond the norm about collaboration technologies and management practices and shares the business results.

• “The Next Frontier in Collaboration: Transforming How Cisco and Channel Partners Work Together” provides an overview of how Cisco and its channel partners work more effectively together and with end customers.

Collaboration white papers and use cases are developed quarterly, each with a different focus, creating a reference library of success stories for Sales teams to share with customers and partners.

The last entry in the list focuses on Channels, and is the latest addition to the collection. It provides more details on the business value of collaboration with channel partners and customers, as cited in the Nexus example showcased in Chapter 10. It is also cited in the Netera example described in the “Worldwide Channels” section later in this chapter, and mentioned briefly in Chapter 2. This new Channels collaboration use case is shown in Table 11-3, a sample topic from the February 2009 Collaboration Hot Topics Newsletter. The Newsletter provides a means of bringing Collaboration Library content to the Theater’s attention.[28]

Collaboration Cockpit

The U.S.-Canada Collaboration Cockpit provides metrics on a number of key SPO initiatives and U.S.-Canada Theater technology adoption:

• Enhanced Audio Visual (EAV) rooms/sites enablement, through Scale the Power (STP) and non-STP installations

• Video site enablement schedule by location

• Number and location of TelePresence rooms enabled

• U.S.-Canada Theater website hits

• Donna Rhode’s On the SPOT blog hits and comments

• Theater WebEx Connect usage, documents, and spaces

• Theater WebEx Connect training sessions

• C-Vision and Cisco TV views

Because metrics are an important part measuring the success of U.S.-Canada initiatives, they are reported weekly. Some of these metrics are gathered from website tracking tools. Others, such as the WebEx Connect user metrics shown in Table 11-4, are based on CCoE metrics, discussed in Chapter 10.[29]

Table 11-4 U.S.-Canada Versus Cisco WebEx Connect User Metrics January 2009 [29][30]

The SPO team continues to refine its metrics-gathering process to measure technology adoption for each segment. More important, however, the team is working to identify metrics to measure the business value of collaboration technology adoption. Based on some work being done by Cisco’s Customer Value Chain Management (CVCM) initiative, focused on measuring the business value of collaboration, these metrics have begun to take shape as shown in Table 11-5.[31]

Table 11-5 Collaboration Technology Business Value Metrics[31][32]

Metrics in this space might include such measures as time to access C-Vision Videos, percentage of employees using Directory 3.0 to find experts, percentage of time Ciscopedia yields needed information via search results, number of employee locator mashups, productive virtual meeting time, time-to-decision using WebEx polling function, number of TelePresence sessions with customers, number of presentations at external technology conferences or working groups, and so on.[32]

Web 2.0 Committee

The U.S.-Canada Web 2.0 Committee consists of account managers (AMs) and systems engineers (SEs) from across the Theater and a number of WWSPS team members. The Committee represents U.S.-Canada and feeds into the Worldwide Sates Collaboration Board (WWSCB) described in the next section. Members of the Web 2.0 Committee play key roles in U.S.-Canada collaborative programs. They are generally responsible for managing communication and often day-to-day support of most U.S.-Canada Web 2.0 initiatives and also serve as Sales 2.0 evangelists. Web 2.0 Committee members are expected to drive their team’s engagement in and support of Sales 2.0 collaborative initiatives, such as Scale the Power and the WebEx Connect Early Adopters Program described earlier in this chapter.[33]

Worldwide Sales Collaboration Board

U.S.-Canada and WWSPS have partnered to establish a Worldwide Sales Collaboration Board (WWSCB) with senior, global representatives from Sales theaters and groups: Inside Sales, Channels, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Sales partners, such as Customer Advocacy and Global Accounts, for example. The Board represents Worldwide Sales and feeds into the Communication and Collaboration Board, a group chartered to drive adoption of Web 2.0 collaborative technologies company-wide. Members of the Sales Collaboration Board, shown in Figure 11-11, are theater business representatives and governance owners.

Figure 11-11 Worldwide Sales Collaboration Board.[34]

Members of the WWSCB are aware of theater Web 2.0 activities and serve as Sales 2.0 evangelists. WWSCB members are expected to sponsor their theater or group’s engagement in and support of Sales 2.0 collaboration initiatives.[35] The Board is currently sponsoring a sub-committee focused on defining work scenarios, where collaboration might accelerate decisions or enable business process transformation.

Now let’s review how collaborative Web 2.0 technologies are enabling business process transformation in the U.S.-Canada Theater Advanced Technology Segment.

Advanced Technology

U.S.-Canada’s Advanced Technologies (AT) organization was established in 2002 to focus on selling emerging technologies to customers in the region. The team has grown under the leadership of Carl Wiese, vice president of U.S.-Canada advanced technology sales, from a few to over 800 sales professionals. The $5 billion organization represents a third of U.S.-Canada Theater sales.

AT is a key part of Cisco’s business, growing 137% in the past three years, accounting for 63% of the U.S.-Canada Theater’s growth. The Advanced Technologies portfolio includes

• Unified Communications: Collaboration, voice, video, and mobile applications on both fixed and mobile networks

• Data Center: Data center switching, storage area networking, and application networking services

• Contact Center: Call routing and reporting as well as agent desktop capabilities

• Wireless: Wireless access points, local area network (LAN) controllers, and secure mobility services

• Security: Intrusion protection, firewalls, virtual private networks (VPN) security management, desktop security, email, and web security

The AT team, whose deep technical knowledge and strategic selling skills are among the best in the industry, is in the midst of a Sales 2.0 initiative, described in the next section.[35]

Specialist, Optimization, Access, and Results

In 2008, the U.S.-Canada Theater recognized that existing sales support headcount and sales processes would be unable to support Cisco’s aggressive Advanced Technology (AT) sales efforts. As a result, the Specialist, Optimization, Access, and Results (SOAR) initiative was launched to

• Improve customer support and accelerate AT growth

• Drive adoption of Web 2.0 technologies and tools and virtualization to transform the selling process

• Increase depth and quality of specialist interactions

• Identify and leverage expertise of deeper sub-specialists through virtual interactions and tools

• Increase sales and specialist productivity, accessing virtual resources to provide rapid response

• Implement self-help tools to drive self-sufficiency and increase access to information[36]

The U.S.-Canada’s SOAR team began working together with the same precision, dedication, discipline, and professionalism as Canada’s Air Force Demonstration team, the Snow-birds, whose synchronized aerobatics is showcased on the SOAR Canada site.

SOAR’s home page, shown in Figure 11-12, provides links to the SOAR Canada and SOAR Inside Sales sites as well as individual segment-specific sites, including SOAR U.S. Commercial, Enterprise, Public Sector, and Service Provider.

Figure 11-12 Specialist, Optimization, Access, and Results home page.[37]

The site highlights SOAR news, features VoDs, and provides links to SOAR resources, including the Technology Solutions Network (TSN). SOAR leverages the global TSN as a collection of on-demand virtual specialists that make up SOAR’s rapid response team.[37]

In addition to providing a single point of contact for quick access to technical resources to the SOAR team, TSN specialists support a wide range of technical pre-sales activities to support sales account teams:

• Bill of Materials (BOM) support

• Locating product or competitive product information

• Finding, creating or validating presentations

• List pricing

• Request for Proposal (RFP)/Request for Information (RFI) assistance

TSN serves as an example of a Sales 2.0 program designed to transform and increase the number and quality of SE-to-customer interactions via real-time collaboration solutions, while reducing the time specialists spend traveling. The SOAR team also benefits from the TSN knowledge wiki, a self-service tool providing access to AT-related content, collaboratively developed and maintained by TSN specialists.[38][39]

The SOAR team also leverages content on the SE Connection Portal, which provides the SE community with a wealth of information on

• Customer support

• Product demonstration and testing

• Network design and modeling

• SE development, training, and leadership programs[40]

Many members of the SOAR team collaborate via SE Community wikis, among the first Connected Communities mentioned previously in the chapter.[41] Community wikis enable SEs to exchange information with product development teams on delivery schedules and features, significantly improving communication, reducing email traffic, and increasing productivity.

Many SEs on the SOAR team also share informational videos they have created themselves on an SE community-based video-sharing portal called vSearch. Figure 11-13 showcases the U.S.-Canada vSearch Spotlight page, accessible via the U.S.-Canada Collaboration Portal mentioned previously in this chapter. The Spotlight page showcases best practices used to build communities and helps users to learn how to find vSearch content.[42]

Figure 11-13 U.S.-Canada vSearch Spotlight page.[42]

Like C-Vision, mentioned in Chapter 10, vSearch provides a virtual water cooler for the SE community to share knowledge and information.

The SOAR initiative leverages TSN and SE Connection resources to enrich the customer experience, ensuring the right resources are available at the right time to support a sales opportunity anywhere in the world. The SOAR team has also contributed significantly to Sales’ self-help tools mentioned earlier and others, including weekly virtual product demos and a customer reference database.

SOAR launched a series of high-level technology webinars called Virtual Demos, highlighted in the December 2008 Collaboration Hot Topics listed previously in Table 11-3. The demos, targeted at customers, provide live, high-quality, interactive technology demonstrations using Cisco’s WebEx product. Sales teams can connect customers in any TelePresence location to Unified Communications, Security, and Data Center demonstrations provided by expert systems engineers located in Cisco’s San Jose Executive Briefing Center from 6:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m. Pacific Time. These demos enable a Sates team to assess a prospect’s interest in a more scalable way.

Table 11-6 presents some of the outstanding results in terms of business value metrics.

Table 11-6 Specialist, Optimization, Access, and Results Business Value Metrics[43]

These SOAR metrics are based on a survey of support specialists conducted in March 2008 and year-over-year expense analysis in July 2008. SOAR is enabling Cisco to increase the number of external customer interactions specialists can have every week, in some cases by more than 50%. But equally important, SOAR is improving Cisco’s ability to shorten the sales cycle, bringing in the right specialist at the right time—all while improving the quality of life and work-life balance for Cisco’s sales professionals.[43]

In November 2008 Wiese announced Cisco’s new Collaboration Connection interactive talk radio, which is another program designed to help Sales team members talk about collaboration with their customers, with maximum impact. Like Cisco TV, mentioned in Chapter 10, Collaboration Connection talk radio features a variety of conversations every month, including collaboration-focused interviews with key stakeholders from both inside and outside the company. Sales teams can contribute to the program by submitting comments and questions on specific content or suggestions on future topics.[44]

Now turn your attention to how Sales 2.0 is helping to enable a cross-functional collaborative initiative driving change both inside and outside the company.

Five to Thrive

In October 2008, the U.S.-Canada Theater launched a fast-tracked, cross-functional program, Called Five to Thrive, whose interally-focused website is shown in Figure 11-14.

Figure 11-14 U.S.-Canada Theater Five to Thrive site.[45]

The program had aggregated a wide array of content, such as presentations, VoDs, and other tools into a set of playbooks. Each playbook is designed to enable Sales teams to help customers keep pace with the rapidly changing business environment and succeed during the economic downturn, often by leveraging Cisco collaboration technology solutions.

The Five to Thrive program focuses on five proven success strategies, or business imperatives, if you will:

• Save to Invest, by reducing costs to provide funding for investments in improvements that yield competitive advantage

• Unlock Employee Potential, by improving innovation and productivity to build an “anytime, anywhere” workforce

• Drive True Customer Intimacy, by including customers in business processes so processes truly meet customer needs

• Outpace Your Competition, using Web 2.0 collaboration technologies to yield new business models

• Transition to a Borderless Enterprise, increasing potential for success via collaboration with global ecosystem partners

The Five to Thrive program enables Sales to share Cisco’s value proposition with global employees, customers, and business partners in meaningful ways, particularly during challenging economic times.[46]

Cisco believes that collaboration, virtualization, and video technologies can help customers succeed and is working to show them how by making this information available through the externally-focused Cisco.com site shown in Figure 11-15.

Figure 11-15 Cisco.com Thrive in Dynamic Times site.[47]

Table 11-7 consolidates content from the Cisco.com Thrive in Dynamic Times site, which consists of a collection of individual pages, each presenting one of the Five to Thrive strategies.

Table 11-7 Cisco’s Five to Thrive Business Strategies[47]

The Cisco.com Thrive in Dynamic Times strategy pages feature VoDs, articles, and stories from employees, customers, and partners sharing best practices and experiences, showcasing the practicality, business value, and return on investment (ROI) of the strategy at hand.[47] Readers are encouraged to visit the site often to learn more.

The cross-functionally driven Five to Thrive Program has been well received. It is helping drive conversations around business process transformation based on network-centric collaboration and virtualization technologies. Content from the building blocks for business-relevant conversations on how to Thrive in Dynamic Times are being rolled into Cisco’s next marketing campaign, along with content from Cisco’s worldwide Channels organization.[53] The global Channels organization is the next area of focus.

Worldwide Channels

Cisco’s Worldwide Channels organization, led by Keith Goodwin, senior vice president of Worldwide Channels, is working with customers and partners to collaborate and grow the market together to achieve the Channels 3.0 vision. Because over 80% of Cisco’s revenue flows through Channels, the indirect sales route-to-market plays a key role in Cisco’s strategy, particularly in dynamic times such as these. Worldwide Channels’ vision focuses on working with what Cisco considers the world’s best partners to transform the customer experience. Its mission is to accelerate partner and customer success, creating capacity for growth.[54]

Like U.S.-Canada’s Five to Thrive program, Channels has a program, called Navigate to Accelerate, designed to help partners navigate the economic storm and accelerate as the market turns. The program focuses on Cisco providing partners with a compass to help them focus on their customer base, changing needs, managing finances, and the future. The program is intended to help partners make strategic investments in technology and partnerships that will enable them to prepare for the eventual upturn in the economy.[55]

Cisco, its channel partners, and its customers are learning to work together in new ways, using collaborative technologies such as Cisco TelePresence, WebEx, and Unified Communications, described in Chapter 2. The SOAR example described earlier in the chapter shows how these tools have enabled Cisco to more effectively meet customer needs for specialized expertise, nearly doubling customer interactions while reducing specialist travel. This virtual expert model is also being applied within Channels.

As Cisco’s portfolio of products has grown, so has the complexity of selling to support those products. This has caused an increasing need for more effective and more innovative collaboration between Cisco and its partners, often yielding deeper partnerships between the two. Customers are often more global and increasingly demand deeper sub-specialist technical knowledge from Cisco and its Channel partners.

Cisco to Partner

As in the SOAR example, the Channels Virtual Expert Program is leveraging Cisco technologies such as TelePresence and WebEx to enable SEs to work more productively and effectively. SEs cover more partners virtually, resolving partner issues faster, reducing travel, and improving their own quality of life and work-life balance. Results of the program, showcasing the business value, are summarized in Table 11-8.

Table 11-8 Channels Virtual Experts Program Business Results[56]

One other advantage, particularly important as Cisco and its partners and customers focus on Green initiatives such as the one mentioned in Chapter 10, is that a reduction in travel of this magnitude also enables the company to decrease its carbon footprint. Partner issues that might have taken nearly a week to resolve, with back-and-forth communication and travel to a partner or customer site, can now be resolved in 10–15 minutes as virtual on-demand experts can be brought to bear quickly.

SEs are a key part of Cisco’s efforts to educate partners and customers through virtual demos and webcasts focused on delivering information on Cisco products and technology services to audiences ranging from 150 to 400 remote participants. These demos can be replayed for review or shared with new employees. SEs are also becoming adept at using WebEx to remotely control a partner’s computer, walking them through steps to resolve an issue. SEs often leverage partner resources as their hands and eyes to TeleWork, solving technical issues while providing partners with hands-on training sessions. Nexus, a Cisco channel partner mentioned in Chapter 2, is a great example of Partner to Customer Collaboration and its business value.

Partner to Partner

Cisco recently deployed Cisco Partner Space, shown in Figure 11-16, which is a virtual environment designed to facilitate three key collaboration models: Cisco to Partner, Partner to Customer, and Partner to Partner.

Figure 11-16 Cisco Partner Space virtual tradeshow environment.[57]

Partner Space provides partners the opportunity to share their products in virtual booths, taking part in a tradeshow that is always on. So far, with over 3,500 visitors each month and 400 partner booths, Partner Space enables partners to increase their visibility online, collaborate with others, and win more business.

Cisco’s annual Partner Summit, formerly limited to 2,500 in-person attendees, expanded its reach, holding the first Virtual Partner Summit in Partner Space in 2008. 2,000 additional attendees were able to view live feeds from keynote speeches, theater sessions, and the show floor. The Unified Communications team increased its September 2008 summit attendance from 300 to more than 1,000 by enabling virtual participation.

Cisco’s Wireless Partners Collaboration Workspace provides another example of a Channels-focused collaborative initiative that has successfully increased reach and streamlined communication between Cisco and its partners. Nearly 1,600 members, from 355 partners in 22 countries supporting wireless customers, leverage WebEx collaborative technology to share documents and participate in discussions. The Workspace also enables members to send each other event reminders and post news and announcements. A poll of partner members yielded positive ratings of either “very good” or “excellent” from 74% of those polled.

Partner to partner collaboration helps drive partner revenue by extending the partner’s geographic reach. Collaborating with other partners also helps to expand a partner’s portfolio of solutions and add to its competencies. Collaborative communities enable partners to find other partners to work with, expanding their reach. This is particularly important in a competitive environment where partnerships based only on prior relationships or word of mouth limits visibility and opportunity.

Cisco’s research, summarized in Table 11-9, shows 31% of channel partner revenues, increasing rapidly by 15% per year, results from partner to partner collaboration. More than a thousand channel partners have created profiles in Partner Exchange, a profile search tool within Partner Space, enabling partners to search for partners by technology expertise, geographic location, or business focus.

Table 11-9 Channels Partner to Partner Collaboration Business Results[56]

Some Cisco channel partners attribute an even larger increase in revenue to partner to partner collaboration.

Netera Networks(http://www.netera.networks.com), for example, has seen solid benefits from partner to partner collaboration, including a 38% increase in revenues and between $3–4 million in new pipeline revenue. Netera also reports benefits from improving internal collaboration, using Cisco WebEx technologies, to see a 20% productivity increase in their engineering pool, a 22% decrease in time-to-resolution on customer issues, and overall cost savings to their customers. With a 5.0 out of 5.0 customer satisfaction rating and an increase in employee satisfaction, Netera has seen significant business value from using collaborative technologies.

Cisco Partner Locator is another tool enabling more than 40,000 visitors per month to more easily connect with partners and other customers. Partner Locator enables customers to search for keywords and phrases and receive a list of partners that match customer needs in terms of technical, geographic, and skill perspective. Partner Locator has become Cisco’s most utilized tool.

To more effectively transform its business processes and manage change, Cisco follows a methodical approach to

• Build initiatives leveraging regular partner feedback, engaging frequently to assess partner collaboration needs.

• Provide a strong role model, reinforcing new methods, leading by example, showcasing technology adoption and use.

• Encourage early adoption and support grassroots efforts, fostering employee innovation and showcasing partner technology champions.

• Match organizational structure to new collaboration workflow, enabling teams to organize in ways that support the program.

• Measure performance and offer incentives to get results, encouraging partner participation through discounts and program improvements that foster adoption and reward innovation.

Table 11-10 shows key benefits from improved collaboration.

Table 11-10 Key Benefits from Improved Collaboration[56]

As these examples show, Web 2.0 technologies increase collaboration; enhance productivity; decrease travel costs; improve employee, partner and customer satisfaction; and drive deeper relationships that generate more revenue. Web 2.0 collaborative technologies enable process transformation and yield significant business results.[56]

Marketing

I would be remiss not to mention that Marketing, led by Sue Bostrom, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, plays a key role in Sales 2.0 and in the success of Cisco sales team efforts. Cisco has marketing teams focused on consumer, corporate, enterprise, and mid-market solutions, globalization, service provider, small business, strategic, and worldwide field marketing. The organization is responsible for product marketing campaigns and annual events, such as Cisco Live 2008, mentioned in Chapter 10.[58]

Collaboration Consortium

One key Cisco initiative, the Collaboration Consortium, was launched by Cisco in July 2008. Cisco currently chairs the collaboration research initiative comprising 17 member organizations, spanning vertical markets in both public and private sectors, including 15 Cisco customers, Stanford University, Wharton Business School, and SBTadvisors (http://www.sbtadvisors.com/), a strategy and business transformation consulting firm acting in an advisory role. Cisco currently chairs the organization. Its primary objectives are

• Provide a forum enabling members to share best practices and lessons learned from collaboration efforts.

• Develop a Collaboration Framework to apply collaboration to business to transform business processes.

• Establish priorities focused on key areas such as vision and strategy, business models, culture, adoption and metrics.[59]

In Short

This chapter identified what Sales 2.0 is about and demonstrated its practical application in Cisco Sales. It described how Web 2.0 led to Sales 2.0, changing both the buying and the selling processes, as well as key aspects of Sales 2.0 selling. It went on to explain how early explorations of WWSPS and the U.S.-Canada Theater teams, such as Connected Communities, Finding Expertise and Web 2.0 Explorers, shaped the Sales 2.0 desktop vision.

The chapter touched on the importance of mobility to sales and showcased a number of U.S.-Canada Theater initiatives such as Scale the Power, the Collaboration Guide, and SOAR, which are helping to drive collaboration technology adoption across Sales. Finally the chapter described the Five to Thrive initiative, showcasing, internally and externally, the business imperatives enabling business to thrive in dynamic times and the ways collaborative Channels initiatives such as Cisco Partner Space are yielding significant business value and results, for Cisco, its partners, and its customers.

The book introduced the reader to Web 2.0 from an enterprise perspective, highlighting the importance of user-generated content and showcasing ways the enterprise can best leverage technologies such as wikis, blogs, communities, and collaborative technologies. It provided insight into the fundamental practices and frameworks that comprise the rich portfolio of Web 2.0 technologies and tools. But perhaps more important from an enterprise perspective, the book outlined the Web 2.0 evolution at Cisco—how it has changed the organization, transforming and accelerating processes to increase productivity and deliver measurable business value, particularly in Sales.

There are “rinse and repeat patterns” provided here that will resonate, establishing a guideline or recipe to follow. However, there are still

• Bridges to build to enable communities to connect

• Panoramic pictures to aggregate and communicate

• Business processes to transform through new ways to collaborate

• Best practices to share and innovative lessons to learn

Web 2.0 enables the enterprise to extend its reach to connect, communicate, collaborate, and learn through the human network. We hope reading this book will provide a compass to lead you to explore the possibility, recognize the opportunity, and realize the potential of Web 2.0 to deliver business value to your enterprise. Safe journey!