As a dedicated Cisco distributor, one of our primary goals at Comstor has always been to enable solution providers in building their Cisco practice profitably. Our EDGE program is at the core of this goal, enabling us to partner and co-invest in solution providers’ successes. But what we’ve noticed in our decades of experience is that marketing often lands on the back-burner of solution providers striving to grow a profitable Cisco practice.
Today at the Cisco Partner Summit 2016 #ciscops16, Wendy Bahr, Senior Vice President of Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, focused on digitization, announcing “Engage” – a new suite of digital marketing services designed to help partners engage their customers and drive revenue.
Citing both the prediction that by 2020, 75 percent of companies will be digital and the reality that customer expectations are changing, Cisco acknowledges that the customer experience is top-of-mind for marketers in the channel.
Engage is the collection of marketing services being added to Partner Marketing Central — in partnership with Zift Solutions and leveraging their Channel Marketing Automation platform (accessible with Cisco partner credentials) — and will feature the Marketing Velocity Hub, which provides “always on” marketing best practices from industry experts to help partners at all levels learn new digital marketing techniques.
Ensuring that vendors and solution providers stay relevant with their customers, Engage is designed to provide a personalized experience for those customers, whenever and wherever they choose to consume marketing content. Cisco promises a personalized experience making it easy to find and customize marketing content aligned with partners’ priorities.
Just last year at our EDGE Conference, Comstor announced the development of a Managed Marketing solution that allows partners to take their investment in EDGE and their Cisco practice to the next level. We understand the value of marketing and the need to offer partners access to a practice-building methodology that is proven and prescriptive.
Engage – from Cisco – provides valuable new resources to complement this strategy that include:
- Monthly On-the-Air Webcast series with marketing experts that will share new innovative ideas, best practices, and trends
- eLearning marketing courses where partners can enhance their marketing skills through courses around Cisco technology marketing, social media, revenue marketing, and digital demand generation
- Roadshows providing workshops for select partners to build their skills with working sessions on current digital marketing topics
The marketing team at Comstor is excited to leverage our own proven marketing assets to help solution provider partners grow their Cisco practice profitably. We welcome the additional investment of tools and resources by Cisco that Partner Marketing Central, Marketing Velocity Hub and Engage promise to deliver.
