Data centre education for resellers

Cluster, the global Cisco Learning Partner and service provider, has launched a course that will help reseller sales personnel improve their effectiveness when presenting at board level and raise their chances of winning significant new data centre and infrastructure business with Cisco Architectures and solutions.

The Effective Executive Conversation (EEC) for the Data Centre course teaches resellers about the specific sales skills and approach that are most effective in the boardroom and how best to ensure they make the right impression on Chief Executives and Financial Officers. The course provides whole-class and individual coaching on the techniques, language and specific information that will resonate most effectively with senior board members.

It is designed to work in harness with the Executive Relevance Selling (ERS) for the Data Centre course, which it delivered to hundreds of Cisco partners around the world as part of the company’s global partner enablement roadshow earlier this year.

Matthew Hathorn, CEO of Cluster, states: “Most resellers are used to selling technology solutions using technical language and terminology. Through the ERS and now the Effective Executive Conversation courses, we can enable them how to articulate a clearly defined financially based business case for investment in Cisco Data Centre solutions. This will ensure not only that they reach the boardroom in the first place, but also that they do not get turned away before they can make real progress. The last thing any sales person wants is to as get that far, only to be marched down the corridor to the person they most sound like, such as an IT Manager, having failed to make an executive impact. Our courses ensure that partners understand exactly how to convince board-level executives that their proposition is one that can and will deliver valuable and measurable benefits in terms of hard cash flows.”

The two-day course is available in multiple languages and can be delivered by Cluster in multiple locations around the globe, including both the east and west coasts of the US, Latin America, the Asia-Pacific region, and in major European countries.

Earlier this year, Cluster delivered ERS for the Data Centre training and coaching on behalf of Cisco and Comstor as part of a high-level global partner enablement roadshow. This unique sales enablement programme that drives proposals at the executive level, based upon a financial business case. The course has been available to Cisco Partners in the US for the past two years through Comstor on an exclusive basis, where it has succeeded in driving over $50m of incremental Cisco business for partners.