Partner Plus Program Delivers Greater Preference, Investment and Support

SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwire – Apr 17, 2012) – Cisco Partner Summit 2012 – Today at its annual partner conference, Cisco 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.

More at http://www.cisco.com