Network Ninja

I am at the local Cisco offices today for Partner training. It’s basically Cisco letting Partners know where to find what on Cisco.com. For those of you that haven’t tried to find/navigate the Cisco Website it can be a little daunting at first (I remember how it was for me). The nuts and bolts of this training is Cisco letting Partners know what tools are available and giving us a bit of a demo (selling us on them).

I am writing this post so that I can keep these links in a central place; If you find them useful that’s cool. There are more tools available from Cisco like Quote Builder, Competitive Edge Portal, Sales Accelerator and others that I am not covering.

Most if not all of the tools I will be babbling on about will require a valid CCO login and that your CCO be linked to a valid Cisco Partner.

A good place to start if you are a new Cisco partner or just getting started on a new job at a Cisco Partner would be the Partner Enablement Page; from there you can find most of the tools that Cisco provide listen under logical headings that I will describe shortly below.

The first heading you will find is Develop whether this be business development or personal development it’s listed under here. First off the bat we have The Partner Enablement Page that gives you one click access to most of the Cisco tools that you will need under this section. Including tools like the Partner Enablement Navigator that is an online wizard for Partner enablement tools and resources to give you quick access to what you need when you need it. There is also a link to Partner Practice Builder that helps Partners create a strategic development plan for various decision making functions (i.e. whether to do Unified Communications or not?). Finally there is Partner Education Connection that provides online course content for most of their courses; the courses range from free to providing links to where training is available at Cisco Learning Partners.

Next up we have Market and this is a kind of obvious one this is links to tools that either help you market Cisco products (Campaign Builder) or give you specific and relevant information assist you to be more effective in marketing Cisco products (Cisco Customized Partner Intelligence).

Then we have Sell for those in the sales teams or supporting sales teams. Starting off with Cisco Demo Solutions which is a boxed demo solution available for purchase from Cisco. Then we have the Cisco Partner Helpline that gives partners access to technical product information, including assistance with network design and product selection.

Finally Deliver where you can find Steps to Success that has resources for selling, delivering and supporting business solutions throughout the network lifecycle.