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The Future is Powered by Partnerships – The Cisco Partner Summit

03.04.16

By Diane Krakora, CEO

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Chuck Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, opened this week's partner summit with a fantastic statement. He began with, “the winners in the next two decades will be powered by partnerships.” Considering this a partner conference, and Chuck has spent 17 years at Cisco, which was driven to partner centricity by his predecessor, John Chambers, and having spent many of those years in channel roles, I expected nothing less.

He backed up this vision statement by explaining that end-customers’ expectations of technology offerings are changing. Cisco, or any technology company, cannot sell on technology 'feeds and speeds' anymore. Customers are demanding full solutions that meet their business needs and partners need to ensure the technologies work together on day one. I was really energized by this statement as the data from our State of Partnering report also points to this focus and need.

The winners in the next two decades will be powered by partnerships.

To make his point, Chuck used the statistics from the 400 customers that visit a Cisco Executive Briefing Center per quarter. Customers are bringing more people to the meetings. They are up from 4 or 5 to an average of 13 people per customer. And the big aha is that 70% of the attendees that participate are from outside of IT. And just to clarify, these are Cisco Executive Briefing Centers – filled with blinking lights from big iron boxes – traditionally more for the IT crowd. Lines-of-business people care greatly about how to use technology to drive business outcomes which means we need to change how we engage with the customers and help them adopt technologies to drive business outcomes. From the main stage on day one, Chuck stressed, “it is a complex world and deep expertise in certain solution areas is going to be required.” I assume he meant to add, “from you … our partners,” on the end of that statement.

Surprisingly, Chuck didn’t mention how many partners also joined in those customer meetings. From my non-statistical survey of about 25 partners over three days, only about 10% reported being included in those Executive Briefing Center meetings. Maybe I just didn’t find the cool ones? What about you? Are your customers’ line-of-business people participating in executive briefings? Do you bring partners into those meetings as well? Post your comments and check back for more of my thoughts from the 2016 Cisco Partner Summit.

Diane Krakora headshotDiane Krakora is CEO of PartnerPath with two decades of experience defining the best practices and frameworks around how to develop and manage partnerships.

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