Cisco Customer Story

Cisco, the largest networking company in the world, is widely recognized as a leader in driving digital transformation. Cisco is also known for its world-class sales teams, and the company continuously seeks ways to improve sales and service effectiveness. With the technology industry undergoing rapid change, Cisco recognizes that they must enable their sales and partner teams to educate, excite, and support customers faster and better than ever before.

Cisco commissioned a study and found their sales and partner teams spend, on average, 15 to 20% of their time—or millions of hours annually—searching for the right information to support valuable customer conversations. For example, Cisco’s 6000 Sales Engineers (SEs) struggled to find accurate, up-to-date information on product roadmaps, feature comparisons and competitive data. Content was spread across more than 20 different locations, resulting in content chaos. Cisco estimates this community alone cost the company over $375 million a year in lost productivity from navigating the content chaos.

To solve these challenges, Cisco turned to Alfresco. According to Jeff McKittrick, Director of Sales Enablement at Cisco, “Cisco IT brought us together with Alfresco to show us how we can move with speed, be flexible, and bring in all our different types of content to deliver an awesome experience for our sales teams.” 

SalesConnect: 87,000+ Users | 26 Languages | 151 Countries

SalesConnect is Cisco’s new centralized sales content and training platform, and since its launch, SalesConnect has grown to be Cisco’s fastest adopted platform in sales.

Chuck Robbins, Cisco CEO says, “SalesConnect helps us mobilize our sales team and our partners to focus on selling new products very quickly. They can find what they need, spend more time with our customers, and help build comprehensive solutions our customers are looking for from us.”

Melinda Cox, Vice President of Operations for Cisco, adds, “We are so excited about the momentum with SalesConnect. We have over 87,000 users, half being within Cisco, half externally to our partners. There are so many benefits to this platform; it’s scalable, it’s flexible. We can now bring all this collateral and training into one place, in over 26 languages and 151 countries.” 

Alfresco at Heart of SalesConnect

Cisco needed to design, develop, and deploy SalesConnect in only six weeks.

According to Bailey Szeto, Senior Director Collaboration Architecture at Cisco, “We were able to hit the aggressive timeline mainly because of Alfresco’s open source platform. Because we had the ability to look at the source code and see what’s going on, we could deliver the platform we were looking for in just six weeks.” 

The Alfresco platform also met Cisco’s needs in the areas of performance, ease of use, security and compliance, and feature scalability. Chuck Robbins adds, “SalesConnect would not be possible without our partnership with Alfresco. In the digital world, no one company can go it alone. We need to move fast with strong partnerships and Alfresco enabled us to build this transformative, scalable, open, easy to use platform and we did it very quickly.” 

Rapid Access to Relevant Information to Better Serve Customers

With over 100,000 Cisco products and one million SKUs, Cisco’s Marketing team manages the platform and provides the best and most relevant content for sales to use. They determine what content a sales person needs, tags this information with appropriate search words, and assigns an expiration date to ensure the documents in the Alfresco platform are
organized and up to date.

The feedback from Cisco SalesConnect users has been phenomenal. According to a user, “I love not having to search and get a gazillion results.” 

From Cisco Sales to Marketing Library to Valuable IP

Cisco has evolved SalesConnect based on learning and feedback. Now it is “the place” to launch new campaigns and get sales focused around new promotions and ways to excite their customers.

The Alfresco-Cisco success is spreading to other Cisco departments. Marketing teams around the globe are now managing all marketing content with the Alfresco platform in a Marketing Library. This solution only took less than three months to implement.

Cisco also plans to leverage Alfresco’s content and process platform to manage all valuable business documents, including contracts, engineering documents and other sensitive information – across the entire organization. In addition, Cisco is looking at Alfresco to help streamline and integrate business processes such as customer service requests.