Cisco boasts of a vendor first with channel marketing revamp

Cisco launches refreshed Marketing Velocity programme for partners

Cisco has overhauled its Marketing Velocity programme to assist partners in reaching and engaging with more customers across multiple platforms.

It also claims to be the first vendor to offer co-marketing services as part of the Activate component of the programme.

"Marketing is one of the biggest areas partners need help with," said Boon Lai, VP of global partner marketing at Cisco, in a pre-launch press briefing call.

"[This expansion] is more than just about bringing all the marketing resources under one brand, it's ultimately about integrating and levelling up partners' marketing practice with an end-to-end solution."

Marketing Velocity Activate is billed as a co-marketing service that creates an "omnichannel" for customer engagement, Lai added.

"We believe that Cisco is the first vendor to do something like this with our partners," he stated.

"Activate combines business data and insights to create joint marketing that allows Cisco and our partner to enhance and create an omnichannel journey to engage customers and drive revenue.

"It doesn't replace the existing offerings that are available today through Marketing Velocity Central, but it builds on it and it focuses on how we execute digital marketing with our more digitally mature partners that have high digital reach.

"We're really excited about [having] 110 million visitors to cisco.com every year, but we also know that over 400 of our channel and ecosystem partners out there have more than 2,000 visitors to their websites in a given year, so there are lots of opportunities for us to leverage on each other's platforms."

Cisco's expanded programme consists of three other components alongside Activate: Marketing Velocity Learning (previously Marketing Velocity), Marketing Velocity Funding and its portal Marketing Velocity Central (formerly known as Partner Marketing Central).

Cisco plans to roll out Activate to a select number of partners in FY20. It has already piloted the programme with two so far, including World Wide Technologies.

Chad Bockert, VP of marketing at the VAR, said on the call that piloting Activate since the start of the year has led to a significant increase in potential business wins.

"Just in the pilot programme that we put in place, there is already about $10m in the pipeline that's been developed as a result of Activate," he said.

"One or two of those leads have converted into actual business and opportunities and that has all been through organic engagement with our customers.

"We haven't put any money behind that other than just the time and effort to connect the systems and to build out the content. We're excited that with just that approach, we've already seen business result from it."

Robin Ody, analyst at Canalys, added on the call that it is not just joint marketing services that can lead to positive partner engagement for vendors.

A well-designed and easy-to-access portal can be an effective way of ensuring partners get what they need.

"Based on our research, partners often find portals to be either complicated or not particularly engaging," he explained on the same call.

"From that perspective, it's about making sure you have someone dedicated to understanding how the portal works and understanding the user experience of your vendor portals.

"It's not one of the most interesting things out there, but a really good portal and a useful one is something that gets really good feedback from partners consistently because it's not just about delivering content, but also helping partners to understand more about how they fit into the marketing conversation with the end customer."