Cisco IT Case Study
Virtual Sales Expertise
How Cisco Supports Virtual Access to Technical Experts
Cisco solutions for collaboration and unified communications increase the
productivity and reach of product experts.
Cisco IT Case Study/Business Management/Technical Expert Optimization: This case study describes
how Cisco is increasing the effectiveness and productivity of Cisco® sales support technology experts by
using Cisco Unified Communications and collaboration solutions and other tools for working virtually and
immediately, bringing expertise to customers at the right time. This program has increased the quantity and
quality of customer interactions that help to accelerate the sales cycle and increase revenue while also
providing a better work/life balance and productivity for the specialists. Additionally, this program has reduced
growth in the number of expert staff and travel expenses. Cisco customers can draw on Cisco’s real-world
experience in this area to help support similar enterprise needs.
CHALLENGE
Like many companies that sell complex products, Cisco relies on a relatively small number of technical sales
specialists to support a much larger number of salespeople, such as account managers and channel partners.
Historically, Cisco’s sales specialists focused on specific market
“Our salespeople are no longer
dependent on their own knowledge.
Instead, they can respond to a
customer’s questions with the
expertise of the entire company.”
– Patrick Romzek, Senior Director, Advanced
Technology for US and Canada, Cisco Sales
segments and technology areas, and were assigned to work with all
of that segment’s sales teams in a local area.
This way of working had several drawbacks, both for the specialists
and for Cisco as a company.
Huge demands for assistance. Account managers routinely
contacted their sales specialist for any question or resource need
that arose in the process of making a sale. This meant each
specialist was constantly trying to respond to many queries, ranging
from technical questions, to research for customer references, to
traveling to a customer’s site for a sales discussion or product demonstration. As a result, the specialists would
devote much of their time to tactical tasks such as locating information or resources. They spent only 30 percent of
their time on strategic activities such as interacting with customers.
Limited tools to support the specialists’ work. Frequently used information such as documents and customer
references were not available in a central location, and specialists would need to ask other people for help. The
specialist’s time was often consumed by the inefficiences of searching for the right people or the right information,
then preparing a response to the salesperson’s inquiry, which also meant a delay in responding to the customer.
“Instead of using highly-paid specialists to do information research and basic product demos, we knew there would
be huge benefit from providing tools to improve information access and transferring routine tasks to more appropriate
resources,” says Patrick Romzek, senior director, advanced technology for United States and Canada, Cisco Sales.
Product demonstrations were scheduled as an on-site presentation for individual customers or partners, which often
meant a wait of several weeks for an available time in the specialist’s schedule. However, “As the systems engineers
who support the sales process, most of the time we don’t need to be present at a customer meeting,” says Ife
Stewart, a systems engineer for Cisco SOAR (Specialist Optimization Access and Results). “Now we can present a
product demo and participate in the meeting via an audio or video call or a web conference.”
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Cisco IT Case Study
Virtual Sales Expertise
Difficulty finding the right expert. Cisco did not have formal
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CHALLENGE
● Improve the productivity of highly in-
demand sales specialists.
● Increase collaboration and knowledge
sharing among technical experts.
● Reduce the need to hire additional
experts to keep pace with sales growth.
● Support access to deeper levels of
technical expertise for sales personnel.
SOLUTION
● Virtual roles and work tools through the
Cisco SOAR program.
● SOAR sales engineer teams to perform
research and other sales support tasks.
● Expertise Locator for access to the best
available technical sales specialist.
● Self-help tools to help salespeople
answer customer questions quickly.
RESULTS
● Higher sales productivity and increased
interactions with customers.
● Revenue growth from top customers.
● More sales opportunities.
● High customer satisfaction with sales
responsiveness.
● Improved work/life balance for sales
specialists.
processes or tools for finding the right technical expert for each issue.
“If a specialist was unable to answer a customer’s question, he or she
would usually rely on established relationships with certain experts or
resort to broad calls or email blasts to locate someone with the
necessary knowledge,” says Romzek.
Infrequent knowledge sharing and collaboration. There was no
easy way for the specialists to collaborate or share knowledge and
resources with each other. Over time, each specialist collected
documents, contacts, and knowledge as necessary. Lack of a central
knowledge repository meant that it was particularly difficult for newly
hired specialists to access the information and resources that they
needed to begin work successfully. In addition, because the technical
sales specialists were expected to be the single knowledge source for
their sales teams, there was little reason to collaborate with other
experts.
Lack of scalability. If Cisco continued to scale the number of sales
specialists to the number of account managers as it had done in the
past, it would mean hiring three times as many specialists in order to
meet the company’s sales targets by 2011. Given that hiring this many
technical specialists would be costly and perhaps not even possible,
Cisco needed ways to improve the availability and scalability of the
specialists and other technical experts.
● Lower growth rates of expert staff levels
Support deeper levels of expertise. As Cisco products and
● Better resources for sales teams.
technologies become more sophisticated and complex, the company
● Reduced travel expense and impact.
needs specialists who can focus on sub-areas, such as contact center
LESSONS LEARNED
● New tools that enable different levels of
virtualization improve collaboration
efforts.
● Process changes require support from
all levels in the sales culture.
NEXT STEPS
● Expand the SOAR program to more
regions and market segments.
● Add new tools to support virtual work.
and video solutions within the Cisco Unified Communications product
line.
Support better work/life balance for sales specialists. Cisco
technical sales specialists found themselves constantly in demand for
immediate answers to technical questions and product demonstrations
to customers. They each covered a large regional territory and spent a
lot of time traveling, which reduced their ability to do other work.
It became clear to Cisco executives that the sales specialists needed
ways to work more efficiently, collaborate easily with other experts, and
develop more focused product expertise to keep pace with an
increasingly competitive marketplace.
SOLUTION
The Specialist Optimization Access and Results (SOAR) program at Cisco aims to increase sales productivity by
enabling the company’s sales specialists to do more work virtually. Steps toward this goal include finding innovative
ways to leverage employee expertise by using Cisco solutions for virtual access, Cisco Unified Communications and
WebEx® collaboration tools, as well as web 2.0 tools.
The SOAR program encompasses new roles, new ways of working, and new tools for Cisco’s technical sales
specialists and the sales personnel they support. (Table 1)
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Virtual Sales Expertise
Table 1.
Key Elements of the Cisco SOAR Program
NEW ROLES
NEW WAYS OF WORKING
● Virtual Specialists
NEW TOOLS
● Account managers can use self-help tools to
find many answers themselves
● Technology Sub-Specialists
● Central SOAR sales engineer teams provide a
● SOAR Sales Engineer Teams
first-line resource for more help
● Virtual tools allow specialists to work from
home, office, or other location
● Knowledge wiki
● Customer reference database
● Expertise Locator
● Virtual demos
● Virtual community space for
specialists
New Roles and New Ways of Working
The biggest changes produced by the SOAR program are in the roles of the sales specialists and how they conduct
their work. Instead of serving as the single, first person to call for any and all sales questions, the specialists now
handle fewer routine inquiries and tasks, and can focus on more complex and strategic activities. This change is
enabled by key elements of the SOAR programs, including self-help resources, the SOAR sales engineer teams, and
virtual access to the right specialist for each sales situation. (Figure 1)
Figure 1.
SOAR Program Resources for Cisco Salespeople
Coverage:
Region
Operations
Area, Segment, or Theater Resources
Aligned
Specialist Resources
Advanced
Technology
Systems
Engineer
Account
Manager
Product
Specialist
Customer
Specialist
Channel
Specialist
Partner
Virtual Sub-Specialist Resources
Application
Specialist
Financial
Model
Specialist
Application
Specialist
Sub
Application
Specialist
Application
Specialist
Sub
Application
Specialist
Emerging
Technology
Business
Unit
Health
Finance
Retail
Specialist
Sales
Sales
Engagement
Engagement
Portal
Portal
On-Demand Services
Self-Help
Resources
End to End Focus
SOAR Sales
Engineer
Teams
Solution Focus
Specialist
Community
Application Focus
Technology Focus
ET
Self-Help Resources. Through the internal SOAR website, a Cisco account manager can access self-help tools and
information that address the questions and issues that frequently arise in a sales situation. These self-help resources
are kept in a virtual workspace within WebEx Connect, and include issue discussion forums, a technical knowledgebase wiki, useful file libraries, competitive information, and links to Cisco training and other internal websites that
support online product demos. (Figure 2)
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Using these resources, sales personnel can often find the answers that they need without contacting a specialist.
When they do need more help than is available in the WebEx Connect space, they click on the Expertise Locater, a
mash-up of Google maps with a listing of all Cisco experts that shows their location and current availability, how they
prefer to be contacted, and links for connecting immediately by phone, email, or instant message.
Figure 2.
SOAR Program Workspace on Cisco WebEx Connect
SOAR sales engineers. A group of Cisco sales and systems engineers operates as a global, virtual contact center to
provide a next step for getting answers if the self-help tools do not meet a salesperson’s needs. “The SOAR
engineers help the specialists respond to a customer’s question immediately or in just a few hours, where before it
might have taken a few days while we tried to find the right person or information,” says Jon Grady, a Cisco systems
engineering manager.
Cisco sales personnel can access the SOAR sales engineering team by clicking on a “Live Help” link on the SOAR
website, or through instant messaging, an email message, or telephone call. All requests submitted to the team are
queued by a Cisco WebEx ACD (automatic call distributor) application, then routed to the next-available sales
engineer. The requests are also tracked through a case-management tool and against committed service-level
agreements (SLAs).
Services provided by the SOAR sales engineers include answers to frequently asked questions, product research
and presentations, information about competitive products, and help in responding to customer requests for
proposals (RFPs). If greater technical expertise is required, the engineer or the account manager can access a virtual
specialist as needed. “We conduct all of our work using virtual tools, but we want to deliver the same quality of
interaction with customers as if we were there in the room with them,” says Fatima Razvi, a Cisco systems engineer.
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Virtual Sales Expertise
Virtual Sales Specialist. With so many routine requests handled by the self-help tools and the SOAR sales
engineers, Cisco sales executives were able to consider transforming the roles and assignments of the sales
specialists. By disconnecting the specialists from a relationship with a specific local area or set of account managers,
virtual specialists can be pooled together for better utilization, to serve multiple regions and account teams. This
meant that virtual specialists were more available to sales executives the moment that they were needed, speeding
the sales process. For example, a salesperson can add a virtual specialist to a Cisco WebEx Connect session with a
customer when needed to answer questions and share presentations and documents over the web. Team spirit in the
sales organization has risen as the account managers and sales specialists understand that they are now working
with colleagues who can be better enabled and more responsive in the sales process.
New Tools
PRODUCT LIST
Cisco solutions and web 2.0 technologies provide tools that enable more virtual and
collaborative work by the sales specialists.
Collaboration
● Cisco WebEx Connect
Cisco Unified Communications and collaboration solutions. The sales specialists
● Cisco WebEx ACD
can use a variety of Cisco solutions to conduct all or part of their work virtually. By
● Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
using these solutions and other SOAR tools, each specialist can cover larger
Unified Communications
● Cisco Unified Personal Communicator
● Cisco Unified Presence platform
● Cisco Unified Application Environment
● Cisco Unified Video Advantage
geographic areas and support more sales personnel while working from home, a
Cisco office, or other location. The Cisco solutions include the following:
•
The Cisco Virtual Office Solution provides a secure VPN connection to the
corporate network from an employee’s home. Many virtual sales specialists
prefer the flexibility of working from home, and the virtual office solution
Security and VPN
● Cisco Virtual Office
allows them to conduct video calls and product demos as easily from home
TelePresence
as from the office. People spend less time driving, and their perceived quality
● Cisco TelePresence
•
of work is improved.
The Cisco Unified Personal Communicator application simplifies access to various communications tools
such as voice and video calls, instant messaging, web conferencing, and voicemail. It also provides realtime presence information for the user, which is visible to other Cisco sales personnel through an Expertise
Locator tool.
•
Cisco TelePresence™, Cisco Unified Video Advantage, and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center allow the sales
engineers and sales specialists to participate virtually in meetings with colleagues and customers.
Knowledge wiki. A key self-help tool for all Cisco sales personnel is the online, centralized knowledge wiki. This
knowledge base contains a wide variety of commonly requested information, such as answers to product questions
and technical documents. Any sales engineer or sales specialist can update the wiki with new information, which
helps ensure that this resource will grow in both content and value over time.
Customer reference database. A common activity for sales people is finding Cisco customers who are willing to act
as references and discuss the value that they have gained from Cisco products. In the past, an account manager or
sales specialist had to phone or email others to find an appropriate reference. Now customer references are listed in
a central database that is accessible to sales personnel through integration with sales applications. Users can
search for customer references based on criteria such as product, industry, reference rating, and business size. An
automated mapping feature helps users identify customer references within a geographic area.
Expertise Locator. The Expertise Locator tool allows a Cisco salesperson or sales engineer to find the right sales
specialist to address a customer need or question. When viewing the expert’s profile, the user can click to connect
with that specialist in real time through an online chat session, a telephone or video call, or email. The availability of
the specialist is detected through real-time presence information provided by the Cisco Unified Personal
Communicator, the Cisco Unified Presence platform, and the Cisco Unified Application Environment, as well as
location data provided by Google maps. (Figure 3)
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Virtual Sales Expertise
Figure 3.
Location Display in the Expertise Locator Application
The sales specialists list their areas of expertise in their employee profiles, which are stored in Cisco’s online
employee directory. The Expertise Locator application integrates with the directory to display each specialist’s profile
as the user searches for people whose expertise matches keywords, e.g., security for wireless. Employees also use
this application to include other important areas of expertise such as vertical industries, competitors, system
integration and language support. Because this information is searchable, these entries produce an additional benefit
for the application by allowing searches for multiple areas of expertise. For example, a sales team can access
someone who is an expert for a particular product and who speaks the customer’s language, knows the vertical
industry, and has experience with a similar integration.
Virtual demos. Previously, delivering product demos to customers was a responsibility of the sales specialists. This
activity was very inefficient because the demos were delivered individually for each customer, and were often
delayed until the specialist was available. Additionally, the tasks of arranging and delivering demos took a lot of time
for the specialists.
Today, many product demos are delivered virtually by the SOAR sales engineers. The demos are scheduled as
weekly, predictable events that can serve multiple customers. Demo information is integrated with Cisco’s sales and
product marketing applications. This program is now expanding globally so that demos are available at the right local
time and in the right language for Cisco customers and partners worldwide.
Online community for specialists. The SOAR portal gives the sales specialists their own online community for
sharing information and resources. The Cisco WebEx Connect platform is central to this portal, which enables the
specialists to post technical information, access the Expertise Locator, participate in discussion forums, and add
information, documents, and links to the knowledge wiki. (Figure 4)
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Virtual Sales Expertise
Figure 4.
Online Community in the SOAR Portal for Cisco Sales Specialists
RESULTS
Cisco initially implemented SOAR as a pilot project within two sales segments, then made the first full program launch
in Canada. The program has since been launched in all of Cisco’s U.S. and Canadian sales segments and, as of
early 2009, deployments are planned around the world.
Accelerated Sales. Participating specialists report an increase of 40 to 50 percent in their interactions with
customers and other external parties (depending on the region and sales group measured). Cisco has found that
more customer interactions, even virtually, help to increase revenues and accelerate the sales process.
“The combination of virtual tools and the SOAR sales engineers help
“The combination of virtual tools and
the SOAR sales engineers help our
account managers answer customer
questions faster and move forward
with closing the deal.”
our account managers answer customer questions faster and move
– Vanessa Scott, Sales Engineering Team Manager
account managers who used the services of the SOAR sales
forward with closing the deal,” says Vanessa Scott, a Cisco sales
engineering team manager. “We discovered that the salespeople who
used the SOAR team the most had the highest levels of meeting their
sales goals.”
High satisfaction with the SOAR sales engineers. A survey of
engineers indicated satisfaction ratings of 4.9 on a five-point scale for
service quality. Describing one typical sales call, Jim Chase, a Cisco account manager, says, “The sales engineer
knew which experts to bring into the customer conversation, who I wouldn’t have been able to find on my own.” Adds
Brian Denton, a Cisco systems engineer, “Customers feel special because they are now connecting with experts they
might never have met in the past simply because that person wasn’t located in the customer’s local area.”
Says Scott, “The virtual tools also make it easier for other Cisco technical experts to support our sales activity,
because it is easier for them to communicate and share information with us.”
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Higher productivity and improved work/life balance for technical experts. Participating specialists report time
savings of 6 to 15 hours per week while working in the SOAR program. “By working virtually, I am not losing time in
traveling from one customer meeting to another,” says Derrick Kea, a Cisco systems engineer. “I can go from one
customer conference call or WebEx session to another with just a few minutes of transition time.”
Higher productivity also creates a better work/life balance for the specialists, with more than 70 percent of specialists
surveyed reporting improvements in their quality of life. One account manager, responding anonymously to an
internal survey, said, “With young children and a working spouse, working virtually has helped me tremendously in
sharing the morning and evening childcare routines.”
Lower growth rates of expert staff levels. Higher productivity for existing sales specialists means Cisco will be able
to reduce the number of additional experts it will need to hire as the company’s sales continue to grow. “As an
example, we have set a target for overall productivity gains of 12 to 15 percent in FY 2009 for the United States and
Canada sales organizations,” says Romzek.
Better resources for sales teams. Account managers can find answers and obtain help more easily through the
SOAR tools. They can also request assistance from a SOAR sales engineer or find and connect with the sales
specialists who have specific expertise. “It’s easier now for an account manager to find the best expert to answer a
customer’s question, not just a ‘good enough’ resource,” says Grady.
More experts in the sub-areas of Cisco’s advanced technologies means that individual specialists will not need to
maintain in-depth knowledge about every product, and can focus their training in one area. “Our salespeople are no
longer dependent on their own knowledge,” says Romzek. “Instead, they can respond to a customer’s questions with
the expertise of the entire company.”
Reduced travel expense and impact. Virtual availability through audio and video conferences, Cisco TelePresence
meetings, and Cisco WebEx Connect sessions means specialists are physically present at fewer customer meetings.
This reduced travel yielded cost savings of 50 percent for Cisco in the pilot program as well as the lower CO2
emissions and environmental impact from 37 percent less time that specialists spent commuting to a Cisco office or
customer site.
LESSONS LEARNED
As Cisco expands the SOAR program to additional regions and market segments, the company will apply the lessons
learned from the pilot project and early implementation.
Different levels of virtualization. The particular ways in which the SOAR model is implemented will vary according
to geographic region and sales organization. The impact of the SOAR program is greater in the sales organizations
that can adopt a higher level of virtualization, such as the small and midsize business segment. Many of these
customers can be served entirely through virtual tools such as email and voice calls, with no need for a specialist to
visit the customer site. In contrast, the complex requirements and product orders of large enterprise customers
means that more in-person meetings with sales specialists are appropriate. Still, for either environment, it appears
that with the right collaboration tools, sales specialists can be less geographically organized, and pooled into larger
groups. This organization improves the utilization of the sales specialists, and brings them together with each other
and with the salespeople they support into a much closer and better-working team.
Support the necessary changes in the sales culture. Because many account managers have developed
relationships with certain experts over time, they may be reluctant to change how they work with those specialists or
bring in new specialists to resolve questions for their customers. Cisco sales executives addressed this hesitancy to
change by making the SOAR program a key initiative for the sales teams and helping them understand the link
between the new tools and the expected positive impact on Cisco’s business.
Other activities also helped to encourage acceptance of the virtualization. Sales specialists who were early adopters
of the SOAR tools promoted their value to other specialists. Operational changes in the Cisco Sales department
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Cisco IT Case Study
Virtual Sales Expertise
integrated the new SOAR tools into routine procedures. And new performance evaluation criteria include a measure
of how the sales specialists make use of the virtual tools.
Develop standards. Creating standard definitions and procedures is important for helping ensure that virtual tools
can be truly useful. For example, the Expertise Locator requires users to enter keywords consistently in order to
respond correctly to the user’s query.
NEXT STEPS
Cisco plans to eventually extend the SOAR program across all sales segments and regions, which will improve
access to specialists across the company. For example, a worldwide Expertise Locator will help Cisco account
managers find specialists who speak a certain language or are available in other countries for multinational
customers.
Cisco will also expand the SOAR program to include technical experts from Cisco’s product groups into the SOAR
collaboration spaces and Expertise Locator tool. The collaboration tools and virtual resources available through
SOAR will be enhanced and adapted for other Cisco business processes.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
For additional Cisco IT case studies on a variety of business solutions, visit Cisco on Cisco: Inside Cisco IT
www.cisco.com/go/ciscoit
NOTE
This publication describes how Cisco has benefited from the deployment of its own products. Many factors may have
contributed to the results and benefits described; Cisco does not guarantee comparable results elsewhere.
CISCO PROVIDES THIS PUBLICATION AS IS WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE.
Some jurisdictions do not allow disclaimer of express or implied warranties, therefore this disclaimer may not apply to
you.
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