Know Your Customer: The Story of Cisco SalesConnect

Too often we think about effective search in terms of finding the right content on a website. But for enterprises across the world, effective search is equally important internally, to groups like Sales and Support. And it’s even harder to achieve when "Know Your Customer" is the driving force.

Let’s take the example of supporting sales teams. Sales reps are on the frontlines, trying to sell an enterprise’s products and services to new and existing customers. They need a lot of content to win a customer, such as marketing information, product datasheets, and technical whitepapers, and so on. To continue selling to existing customers, Sales reps need to understand what the customer has currently in its product portfolio to understand where potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities exist, and then they need to get the content that works in that specific context. When a Sales rep has all this information at their fingertips, it’s so much easier to produce the sale.

Imagine trying to find all this information when it’s spread across business systems? Traditional search can’t help.

Cisco’s Know Your Customer SalesConnect Story

To make this clearer let’s look at Cisco. Cisco is a provider of networking hardware, telecommunications equipment and other high-tech products and services. With over 80,000 Sales reps selling across a deep portfolio of product lines, they need an efficient way to find the most relevant information that will win new business. But with content spread across so many different systems, reps were spending 15-25% of their time just searching for the right information. That’s a lot of lost sales productivity.

Enter SalesConnect. SalesConnect is a smartphone and tablet solution Sales reps leverage to search for the most relevant information needed for a customer or prospect. SalesConnect provides some key features to reduce search time and effort:

• It integrates CRM feeds that can help surface relevant content by incorporating information about customers, product portfolios, territories, and behaviors.
• It enables Cisco to highlight content related to products or key messages to increase sales of specific products, or demonstrate need using behavioral information.
• It allows reps to bundle content to create global sales kits.

With SalesConnect in place, Cisco now has a single source of truth for sales enablement and has increased the volume and velocity of cross-selling and upselling. It also delivered $350 million in field operation efficiencies.

What’s Your Know Your Customer Story?

Your story may be similar - marketing and sales content stored across multiple systems, customer information stored in CRMs, ERPs and support systems, and no efficient way to pull this information together to get a clear view of the customer’s needs.

What if you had a single “window” to find this information? What if it was smart enough to surface highly contextual, and relevant information during each stage of the buying cycle? What if it was smart enough to recommend relevant content by learning from your past searches? Or by automatically analyzing customer information and surfacing content that is relevant to their particular situation? What if your solution worked for you even when you weren’t actively looking?

Real-time, highly contextual and relevant information is critical to improving productivity and efficient sales efforts.

Want to learn more about Cisco’s story? Check out the SalesConnect case study.