Improving Partner Performance with Black Belt

When you work with Cisco, there’s a lot to learn. About complex customer challenges, how our products solve them, and how you can set yourself apart from the competition. That’s why we at Cisco are always looking for ways to make it easy for you to learn about and sell Cisco solutions.

So we’ve put together a new Partner Performance team to help you do just that. Our goal? Simplify and improve your experience as a Cisco partner. For example, we’ll be rethinking the way we work, looking for places to cut down on the back-and-forth. All to help you stay focused on what matters most—driving new business and getting predictable results.

One key initiative is our Black Belt Partner Academy. This is a comprehensive digital learning framework that has been a huge hit in our Asia Pacific region and is now available to all partners around the world. When utilized effectively, Black Belt will help you build the skills foundation to differentiate and put a game plan in place to battle the competition. Here are a few highlights of what this framework can do for you.

Become an expert in Cisco solutions

In a nutshell, our Black Belt Partner Academy is a digital, self-paced training framework, customized for your role. You can take it to learn all about how to sell, deploy, adopt, and support Cisco solutions. The idea is to become more competent, confident, and connected with Cisco—and our customers.

Specifically, you’ll learn how to:

◉ Help customers transform their business with complete, connected solutions

◉ Be confident and compelling in how you engage with customers

◉ Have richer, deeper conversations with customers

◉ Stand out from your competitors

◉ Execute on your key sales priorities

Take training tailored to your role

We’ve customized each learning map for all major roles that are involved in selling and delivering Cisco solutions. This includes engineering, sales, business architects, and services. So, if you’re in sales, you can take the Sales Track, which lets you:

◉ Get the same sales training as our own Cisco account managers

◉ Stay up to date on the latest market trends, competitive advantages

◉ Explore learning maps for each architecture

◉ Get credit for continuous learning

◉ Earn incentives

You’ll learn things like how to:

◉ Sell the exact solutions your customers need

◉ Set yourself apart from the competition

◉ Craft compelling sales presentations

◉ Use social selling to reach out to the right people

◉ Get help from Cisco when you need it

To give you an idea, here’s a sample learning map for the Sales Track.

Get ready-made resources

Along with training, you also get a trove of ready-made resources for each track. For sales, this includes things like case studies, demos, architectural overviews, market trends, industry reports, competitive battle cards, and presentations.

Take it at your own pace

Another great thing about this framework—it’s all digital, available 24×7. You can take the training in your own time. And we’ve broken it out into three stages, so you can space it out and give yourself time to apply and digest. We estimate that each stage will take you, on average, 6 hours.

◉ Stage 1: Blue Belt – demonstrate learning

◉ Stage 2: Green Belt – demonstrate application

◉ Stage 3: Black Belt – demonstrate success

Earn your badge

In martial arts, black belts are often a coveted symbol that you’ve put in the time to become an expert in something. And it’s the same here. After you take all your training and exams, you get a badge for finishing the Stage 1 learning maps. If you want, you can then move on to the deeper Stage 2 and Stage 3 learning maps, which come with their own badges, but also require you to apply the knowledge you learned to your company’s business.  Only when you proved that you applied the knowledge and successfully close a deal will you be able to call yourself a Cisco Partner Academy Black Belt.

Then you can spread the word to your boss, your colleagues, and your customers that you’ve just earned the coveted black belt—in Cisco.