NOW is the time to align your marketing and sales efforts.

More than ever you as partners, regardless of your function, have to remain vigilant of customers' needs in today's digital world. Everything moves faster. Everyone is connected. Your customers have transformed. Digital natives will dominate. As a result, your competition will disrupt you.

By aligning your marketing and sales you will be more in tune with your customers, and you will improve outcomes that you may not have even realized existed.

Face it. Digital is the new universal language. That means everyone in your practice holds responsibilities for both marketing and sales in supporting customers.

Engage in the Evolution

How are we helping you with alignment and your skills in the new digital first world? Enter the Engage Marketing Suite. It helps you step up, stand out, and get through to your customers. It's a suite of digital marketing services. One side educates, connecting you to training, experts and best practices. The other side enables you to put those skills to action. Closing the divide between marketing and sales to increase impact.

Is it working? In the short time since we've introduced it we have seen the positive impact it's had -partners that have fully immersed in Engage have reaped nearly20% growth! By maximizing the benefits of Engage, our partners are experiencing success in what was a challenging environment. Let me be clear this isn't a tool, platform, program or gimmick, this the value exchange we give to you, our partners. We want you to be successful. In doing so it helps you enhance your marketing efforts and impact your sales and brings those functions closer together. If you're already blending your marketing and sales capabilities, you're already a step ahead. Now you need to transform to a digital first model.

Get digitally savvy through Engage. Get access to always on marketing best practices, training and knowledge transfer from experts through Marketing Velocity to learn the digital language. Ready to get started with the 'action'? Partner Marketing Central brings it all together through campaigns, funding dashboards and dedicated marketing expertise. The beauty of Engage is that you just need to start, where you begin is up to you. The outcome takes your marketing and sales to a new level, and the result will expand your outcomes, revenues and success.

Walk the Walk AND Talk the Talk

We at Cisco have experienced the benefits of closer marketing and sales alignment. To demonstrate this, Karen Walker, CMO will share the success of when these two worlds merge during Partner Summit in San Francisco (Nov. 1-4). She will offer proof points, partner insights and how our collective approach will change the way you do business in today's digital world -through marketing AND sales.

Don't fret if you can't attend the event live. We will also make this discussion available through Virtual Partner Summit, and I invite you to register so you don't miss it. You will also get fantastic insights for upcoming programs and marketing tutelage from guest speakers like branding expert, Martin Lindstrom.

Now is your time to change the way you do business. Your customers have made the transition to digital. Now is your time to get ahead of them - by aligning your efforts and transitioning to digital, you will succeed.