This time of year around my house is all about back to school. A time filled with excitement, nervousness and anticipation. I know for my two daughters they are thrilled to get to meet new people, embark on new experiences and maybe deep down they want to learn some new stuff too. As parents, we are excited to meet our daughters' teachers because we know that the teachers that partner with us as parents have a direct impact on our daughter's success regardless of the subject taught.

Same can be said for our partners, here at Cisco, as they progress with us on our transformation journey around Customer Experience. Over the last year you have heard about Cisco's transformation around Customer Experience and our future portfolio. It is certainly an exciting time around here, filled with new ideas, solutions, services, roles and advancements in our programs and strategy while at the same time spending time on the basics and keeping a keen eye on our partners and their profitability along the way. Like the start of school, while it is an exciting time, we also understand that it is like meeting new teachers. We all want to understand how we are going to be successful in this new classroom.

While that transformation takes place, we must at the same time keep a foundational approach to the existing portfolio that has served Cisco and our partners well up to now to do this, we are investing in resources to help our partners continue working through these existing offers just like the supportive teachers we strive for our daughters to get. Let me show you how in three quick areas:

• Partner Sales: We have established a dedicated global partner team focused on CX Partner GTM that will primarily focus helping scale our partners that are positioning our existing portfolio with offers like SmartNet Total Care, PSS, BCS and SWSS. You can engage with this teamNOWby emailing [email protected]. This team is working hand-in-hand with the CX organization to organize priorities by architecture and offer to best support our strategy in the coming year.
• Tools: We are putting a renewed focused on new content for our existing portfolio to help partners sell including CX Playbooks, CX Sales Webinars, CX Quick Selling Guides and Quarterly CX Partner Blogs (like this one). All this content can be found at our CX Partner Guide inside of Sales Connect. You can access the initial set of content here: http://cs.co/customerin
• Programs: We are also updating and maintaining our highly successful partner programs for Customer Experience. Check out the latest within our CSPP program here: Cisco Service Partner Program

So just like when our kids get back to school and the teacher reacquaints everyone with the programs, ABC's and where to go during recess (I always loved recess!)....this is our time to do the same for CX for our partners. And while we have a bunch of cool stuff we are working on, there is still plenty of time to pull out the pen and paper and get back to the basics of CX.

Happy selling everyone!

Bryan

For more information on our CX Partner Portfolio, here are a few helpful links:

Sales Connect Site: https://salesconnect.cisco.com/#/program/PAGE-14534

Accelerate: www.cisco.com/go/accelerate

Success hub: www.cisco.com/go/successhub