Scaling Content Creation for Cisco Partner Marketing

Tendo built an on-demand content engine for Cisco’s partner marketing team, helping realize an ambitious GTM strategy that repositioned the tech giant and drove sales in a strategic growth market.

CHALLENGES

Reinforce and reposition Cisco as a leading technology vendor for small and medium businesses (SMBs)
Help Cisco partners increase sales to SMBs
Scale content creation to accelerate time to market despite limited internal resources

RESULTS

#1 most frequently activated partner campaign
31% increase in SBM campaign activations
25 high-value content assets created per quarter

TENDO SERVICES PROVIDED

Brand positioning and messaging
Campaign creation
Editorial services (via Tendo Content Studio)

About Cisco’s SMB Focus

Cisco is the worldwide technology leader, with a portfolio of solutions for networking, security, collaboration, cloud management, and more.

Over the past 20-plus years, Cisco has cultivated a large and vibrant partner ecosystem that contributes more than 80% of the networking and security giant’s revenue. Partners support hundreds of thousands of customers with Cisco solutions and services, including small and medium businesses (SMBs). These SMBs represent a significant opportunity for both Cisco and its partners, so Cisco wanted to reinforce its commitment to the SMB market.

Cisco

San Jose, CA

Networking and security

84,900 employees

The Challenge

Cisco needed to reinforce its position as a preferred technology vendor for SMBs—not just enterprises and commercial businesses.

And it wanted to increase sales to SMB customers, primarily through its partners. This objective would first require Cisco to educate and energize partners and distributors about the market opportunity. Next, Cisco would need to equip partners with SMB campaigns and content to drive awareness and consideration of its solutions among SMB customers.

Cisco needed help bringing this vision to life. They sought an agency partner with deep technology roots and content and editorial expertise. They required a firm that understood their business and could create high-quality, differentiated content in the shortest amount of time.

The Solution

Through our Tendo Content Studio model, a dedicated team of strategists, writers, designers, and project managers acted as Cisco’s content engine.

By leveraging our deep knowledge of Cisco’s technology, GTM strategy, and partner marketing intricacies, we helped Cisco reestablish its brand presence and impact sales in the SMB market.

Over a two-year span, Tendo concepted and created a series of high-priority customer, partner, and distributor campaigns. From brand awareness to sales enablement, thought leadership to product messaging guides, Cisco relied on Tendo to fuel some of its most business-critical initiatives.

The Results

Most frequently activated partner campaign

31%

Increase in SMB campaign activations

High-value assets created per quarter, on average

This integrated effort has become one of the most high-performing initiatives for the SMB business unit and helped Cisco reestablish itself as a prominent player in the market.

“I always choose Tendo if I have the option because their team is amazing. They are attentive, detail-oriented, and produce superb deliverables, on time, on all of our project asks.” –Cisco Global Partner Marketing Manager