Cisco Helps Partners Accelerate Growth With Mid-Sized Customers

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Today at its annual partner conference, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced Partner Plus, a new global channel program targeting mid-sized customers. Partners who participate in the program will receive increased preference, investment and support in the form of business accelerators such as incremental incentives, engineering support, marketing and demand generation, sales enablement, and customer intelligence.

Partner Plus is a key pillar of Cisco's Partner Led strategy, which is designed to empower and reward channel partners to lead the sale with small and mid-sized customers. This approach combines the power of the partner sales force and Cisco's sales force in an innovative way to go after these market segments. This is part of the $75 million investment that Cisco announced in 2011 for enablement, systems, and support capabilities.

Key Highlights
Partner Plus is targeted to a set of channel partners who invest in selling Cisco to mid-sized customers. It provides incremental incentives, virtual engineering support, marketing, sales enablement, and customer intelligence to partners who commit to a highly collaborative selling approach with Cisco to accelerate their business more quickly than the market.

Partner Plus offers qualified partners five partner benefits including:

• Incentives/Rebates: The program rewards partners for growing their Cisco business with mid-sized customers. These incentives help fund business building activities such as marketing, sales training, and cash to hit stretch growth targets.
• Virtual Access to Cisco Engineers: Partners can count on Cisco's full technical resources and capabilities, via Partner Help Plus, to increase channel partners pre-sales capacity, increase their ability to up sell and cross sell, and increase their overall deal size.
• Customer Intelligence: Cisco will provide enhanced customer information so partners can reduce their total cost of sale and better target their selling efforts to help them increase their win rate.
• Premium Sales Enablement: Partners will have access to Partner Sales Excellence Training to accelerate their advanced sales and management skills.
• Premium Marketing: Cisco will offer co-marketing support, including partner business planning, marketing curriculum, and partner marketing funding.

Supporting Quotes
John C. Harris, President of Aspire Technology Partners
"Cisco Partner Plus uniquely combines the power of Cisco and Aspire sales teams to pursue the significant mid-sized business market growth opportunities."

Ronald Kraanen, managing director and owner for Avit Systems:
"Our strength is differentiation with innovative Cisco borderless and collaboration architectures for dedicated verticals like healthcare, hospitality, education, marine and offshore. Within this approach the mid-sized business market is our strongest opportunity to grow our Cisco business. With Partner Plus, Cisco is helping us expand our business and drive growth with mid-sized customers."

Andi Janto Singgih, Commercial & Enterprise Director for Compnet
"With Partner Plus, Cisco is offering the training and motivation we need to help us accelerate deals and provide better service to our customers."

Andrew Sage, vice president, World Wide Partner Led for Cisco:
"For Partners that are committed to collaborating with mid-sized customers, Partner Plus will offer greater preference, investment and support. This will help both Cisco and its partners grow their business quicker in this growing market segment."