Cisco
World networking leader runs faster and more efficiently with Hyland's Alfresco platform.
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 6,000 sales engineers 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 Hyland's Alfresco platform. According to Jeff McKittrick, Cisco's director of sales enablement, “Cisco IT brought us together with Alfresco platform 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.
“SalesConnect helps us mobilize our sales team and our partners to focus on selling new products very quickly," Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said. "They can find what they need, spend more time with our customers and help build comprehensive solutions our customers are looking for from us.”
Added Melinda Cox, Cisco's vice president of operations, “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 platform at heart of SalesConnect
Cisco needed to design, develop and deploy SalesConnect in only six weeks.
According to Bailey Szeto, senior director of 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.
“SalesConnect would not be possible without our partnership with Alfresco," Robbins said. "In the digital world, no one company can go it alone. We need to move fast with strong partnerships. And Alfresco platform enabled us to build this transformative, scalable, open, easy-to-use platform, and we did it very quickly.”
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SalesConnect would not be possible without our partnership with Alfresco platform. In the digital world, no one company can go it alone. We need to move fast with strong partnerships. And it enabled us to build this transformative, scalable, open, easy-to-use platform, and we did it very quickly.
— Chuck Robbins, CEO, Cisco
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, tag the information with appropriate search words, and assign 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 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 took less than three months to implement.
Cisco also plans to leverage Alfresco platform’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 platform to help streamline and integrate business processes such as customer service requests.
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