Akbar Hasan: Digitize to Legitimize Co-Selling

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Okay, it has been a fantastic day here today at Cisco Live and so much energy on the show floor. We are actually standing right in front of the the Cisco co sell partners and industry solution booth, and I'm here with my friend Akbar Hassan. Akbar, welcome.

Akbar Hasan  0:20  
Oh, thank you very much, kit.

Chip Rodgers  0:23  
So, so Akbar Hassan is Senior Director of cosell Cisco, co sell acceleration and leading the CO sell programs for Cisco. Akbar, let's start there and like for Cisco, what is cosell, and what's the strategy around cosell? Why is? Why is Cisco making such an investment in CO selling?

Akbar Hasan  0:47  
Right? Thanks so much so. Cosell for us is a collaborative sales engagement between Cisco and its ecosystem partners that actually delivers a joint differentiated business outcome for our customers, right? That's kind of our formal definition, but it's really about assembling the perfect village of partners for our customers to drive those business outcomes, right? Because it does take a village, right? We got more and more complex things that we've got to go deliver on a regular basis, and our partners have got that expertise. So if we could just bring the right ones together on behalf of the customer, we get a very, very smooth opportunity.

Chip Rodgers  1:36  
That's terrific. And, you know, I think that's it's like, no one company can build everything right? So you've got, you've got partners that are very smart. It could be in specific technology or specific software or a specific industry or specific use cases. What are some of the maybe an example of a, you know, that kind of, you know, pulling together of partners to to create a solution, a co sell solution with Cisco,

Akbar Hasan  2:07  
yeah. So the kind of partners that we bring together are like ISVs, which are independent software vendors. They're dsis, which we call digital solution integrators, but they're really regional advisory consultants, right and channel partners and a host of other partners that we can bring together, and we can bring them together in all industries, health care, finance and some of the things that we've delivered is contactless pick up in retail, we've delivered more efficient load balancing of capacity for hospitals, right in terms of faster in and out, and that's been a very big pain point over the last couple of years, with everything that everyone's experienced. But you just, you just don't do that alone, right? Right? Again, it takes that village of the ecosystem coming together from all wakes to drive that and that's what we're doing. Now, the interesting part is, we've been doing this for more than 10 years, right? Didn't call it co selling. Call that ecosystem engagement, ecosystem acceleration, and we've been doing it across resale, cloud, all sorts of routes to market. That's what makes Cisco's approach unique. We have a wide breadth of partners, right? Everything from industry partners to integrators, but mainly what I'm driving is engagement with non transacting technology partners, right? That really help build upon our portfolio to deliver a business outcome, a business outcome, very, very overused word, right? Hey, I sold 5000 units of something that's not a business business outcome. As you saved the customer money, you gave them an opportunity to enhance their revenue stream, or you made them compliant, that's things that they care about. Is a business outcome. So that's kind of where we are now. We are going to digitize a lot of this, right? Because a lot of this gets wrapped up in an influence revenue, which, okay, you can call it that, but it's really collaborative, or CO sell revenue, right? Because you've got these different partners that may not sell for us, but they're absolutely playing a vital role in either consulting or writing code right around our systems and around our portfolio. So it's very, very, very important that we keep this village alive and well and very, very proactive, right? We've got to be proactive in how we bring partners together, and that's what my team does. We'll bring them together. To engage the sales teams, right and drive more revenue for everyone, right? The customer gets their business outcome. Our sales teams gets larger deals, more software and the partners, the most important part is they drive higher profitability.

Chip Rodgers  5:21  
That's terrific. You know, I was, I was gonna ask you, if, like, what's the value for Cisco, and what's the value for partners, and what's the value for you? Did it

Akbar Hasan  5:33  
too? Excited about this. It

Chip Rodgers  5:35  
is exciting. And what's interesting, I think, is I was talking to hinda, hinda earlier, and she was talking about some of the sort of operationalizing, some of these things in the field. And it is complicated. She taught. She gave an example of, like, four or five partners working together. And it's like you it's, you need to be able to pull them all together, make sure that things are moving forward, that the balls don't get dropped between all the players. So it's, it's not an easy it is. It's not an easy job,

Akbar Hasan  6:01  
absolutely not easy. And I was speaking to our senior vice president of enterprise sales, Cliff Thomas, and he gave a great example, right? He said it's like an orchestra. Everyone's playing their own instrument, right? But cosell, right? Not Cisco co sell is, you know, the conductor and how you co sell. Everyone's got a different kind of formula for that. Is super important. We have our own formula. And how partners come together, how they plan, how they do account planning, how they approach the customer. It's very, very important. And a lot of people think, Oh, my God, this is so complicated, because you're going to bring all these partners together. But if you look at it from a customer perspective, what I like to call not Cisco out, but customer in, they're having one meeting, right? It's not like different meetings that they have to go figure out and piece together. So they love it. You know, we love it, obviously, for the growth and for the delivery of customer excellence. So that's kind of our perspective around this.

Chip Rodgers  7:10  
That's terrific. Akbar, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your your thoughts and insights around cosell, Cisco, cosell, which is fantastic. I, you know, the booth has been busy all day and and thank you for taking some time. You,

Akbar Hasan  7:29  
you bet. And I really, really appreciate everything that works man has done to really, really digitize this. Because we've got to digitize to legitimize this emotion, right? Because then you just make the whole thing believable, and you guys are an integral partner of that. So thank you. Thank

Chip Rodgers  7:47  
you, Akbar. I love that actually the digitized to legitimize, I think that was you shared that on one of our events earlier, and that's that really resonates. Yep, you bet. Fantastic. Okay, so thank you, Akbar, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you again later today. You.

‍