Partnerships Unraveled
The weekly podcast where we unravel the mysteries of partnerships and channel to help you become more successful.
Partnerships Unraveled
Jason W. Gallo & Elisabeth de Dobbeleer - Inside Cisco’s 360 Partner Program
What does it take to overhaul a 20-year-old partner program at one of the most channel-centric companies in the world? In this episode, we dive into Cisco’s monumental redesign of its global partner ecosystem with Elisabeth De Dobbeleer, VP of Cisco’s Partner Program, and Jason W. Gallo, VP of Value Acceleration.
Together, they unpack why Cisco is reimagining everything - from partner capability metrics to co-innovation frameworks to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving customer landscape. With seismic shifts in AI, cloud, and cybersecurity, Cisco’s new 360 Partner Program is designed not to tweak, but to transform. Elisabeth and Jason share how they're redefining what it means to be a capable partner, why transparency and vulnerability were vital to the program’s design, and how they’re investing $80M in partner readiness to ensure success at scale.
From tracking sentiment across 39,000 partners to rewarding technical depth and lifecycle excellence, this is a masterclass in change leadership, co-creation, and future-proofing your channel.
Whether you're a channel strategist, program architect, or partner marketing lead, this episode offers critical insights into building and rebuilding at scale.
Connect with Elisabeth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisabeth-de-dobbeleer/
Connect with Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jagallo/
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Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships, and channel on a weekly basis. My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanix and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guests. Elizabeth Jason, how are you doing? Great how are you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm well. Usually I do this one toone and now we're doing this one-to-two, so I feel slightly outnumbered and intimidated. So please be gentle, maybe for the uninitiated Elisabeth, you kick us off. Can you give us a bit of an introduction about who you are and what you do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. My name is Elisabeth Adobler. As you may hear from my name, I am from belgium, um, so I'm sitting not so far from brussels and I lead the partner program at cisco, and I've been an employee with cisco for now close to 25 years, awesome and jason uh, jason gal.
Speaker 3:so I'm a vice president of value acceleration working in eliz Elizabeth's organization, and my role is three parts really representing the channel with some of our business unit, looking at broadening our ecosystem for some really cool and new types of partnerships around our mint and consult type partners, as well as a really exciting part of my role which is a new part of the Cisco 360 partner program and the value indices that we're building Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, I think that 360 program is where we want to start. Cisco's, I think, the most channel company. When I think of channel, I think of Cisco. Right, you guys have built an extraordinary program that touches all parts of the world with all different types of partners. Now you are rebuilding the program, which is a seismic shift. Why now, um, why, do you take on such a huge undertaking as reimagining the partner program elizabeth coming to you?
Speaker 1:okay, I'll get us started. So I think it all starts with the customer and the market right? So I think we've seen. You know, our partner program is more than 20 years old and obviously it's been building and adjusting and being tweaked over the years. But if we look at what's happening right now and what customers are expecting in terms of the value partners are providing, the outcomes they expect typically multi-partner, partner to partner, pretty complex and then if we think about the impact of artificial intelligence, which will only accelerate in an exponential way what customers need from their trusted technology advisor, we realize that our current program can no longer be tweaked and adjusted, that the only way to really accommodate what the market and the customers are expecting is to do an overhaul and to redefine and that's also, I would say throughout this whole podcast the way to think about it. It's a complete overhaul. So it's not a tweak, it's not an adjustment, it's completely overhauling the way we think about the value a partner brings and what a capable partner means to the customer and to the market. So it's really outside in. I think that's the biggest deal.
Speaker 1:But of course, corresponding to that, many other things at Cisco are changing and Jason may want to comment on this as well. We're seeing unprecedented innovation Our new chief product officer is talking about. We want to be the world's largest startup, so we have never innovated as fast and as much as in the last so many months. And more is there to come, so we need our partners to be able to invest in technical capability to be ready for that and, at the same time, our sales motions are also changing in terms of being able to think through what happens after landing the sale, how to drive customer value along the journey, and all those things. So, jason, I don't know if you want to add anything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I think it's exactly right, and the only thing I might add is just how? Not just how fast that innovation is coming, but how broad it is. One of the great things about Cisco as well, has been the breadth of our innovation. You know, one of the great things about Cisco as well has been the breadth of our innovation, and we always talk about, you know, an end-to-end approach with our innovation, and Jeetu Patel, who leads the product side and the chief product officer, has also started talking about the platform.
Speaker 3:And you know, to Elizabeth's point, when you now have innovation that's not just in a single area, innovation that's not just in a single area, but that's truly compounded together, where you have to know networking in a way that ties into security. You have to know security in a way that then ties in AI and the cloud elements. You have to know the AI and the cloud elements. That brings in data and splunk. All of these things start to compound. We felt like the elements of the new partner program have to emphasize that depth of capability. So that's also why it's just because you know the technology and the richness of the innovation and how those pieces are going to work together is driving a need for partners to have a much deeper set and a richer set of understanding as they take that out to the customers, and a richer set of understanding as they take that out to the customers.
Speaker 2:I'm smiling and chuckling slightly because I thought rebuilding Cisco's partner program was going to be complicated and now you've added that also at the end choose that the technology is integrating within itself in a far more complicated way. So we've got complicated on complicated, so I think redesigning it becomes extremely ambitious. Jason, I think you called it a Harvard business case in the making. Maybe what surprised you most about the sort of design phase and collating that partner feedback to sort of drive that new partner program.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And it wasn't so much that the complexity is what is driving the thinking around it being a Harvard business case, it's really the fact that no other vendor has ever co-designed at this scale. And from the very beginning, you know Elizabeth and the broader leadership wanted to set us on a path to make sure that the design was not finalized when we launched. And you know I got to tell you as the teams thought about that, there was this level of discomfort that said it's like wait, we're going out broadly to 39,000 partners at our flagship event, partner summit, and the message is going to be we haven't figured this out yet. And you know what does that look like? To come to the table with a design or you know, a blank page that is, you know, framed out enough that it leaves space for all of the ideas to be incorporated, and then create enough of a sequence, set of discussions, co-design workshops, advisory boards.
Speaker 3:It's quite a bit of work. To like change management, the change management Right. So it's kind of fascinating how we've been successful at incorporating and distilling so many different thoughts and opinions. Incorporating and distilling so many different thoughts and opinions I kind of liken it to if you were to put up an Excel spreadsheet or a PowerPoint in a meeting and you're trying to edit it real time, while everyone's looking at you. That's kind of how it's felt at times, but we're making our way through it.
Speaker 2:Well, 39,000 partners are looking at you.
Speaker 3:That's the level of pressure.
Speaker 1:That's out there, right.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that I found sort of fascinating is almost like a cultural principles perspective. Getting people to ask for feedback isn't easy, because often that feedback is negative and that can be really tough to sort of digest and pull the emotions away from it. Maybe, elizabeth, coming to you, how do you create a culture within Cisco where teams are empowered and willing to lean into some of that pressure and pain that come from those conversations and then drive towards a positive outcome?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's a great point and it goes to the human factor of change, right, and it's not just inside Cisco. I think the same is very true for our partners, because our partners know us very well and so um, a lot of them sometimes, you know, we have jokingly say they know us better than we know ourselves. So I think it, whatever I what I'm going to say now is applicable to both inside cisco as um, with our partners as well. I think when we started um, first of all it's about the community and the people that you invite to do this design. So when we started out in March last year, we put together initially it was a smaller group, so it was about 30, 40 people, so we had both people who had been working on the program for the last 10 years, 15 years, who often had themselves designed the existing program, right, specific incentives within the program, etc. So who very much had a vested interest in the existing program, right, specific incentives within the program, et cetera. So who are very much had a vested interest in the existing state. But we also deliberately invited some bold thinkers or people who just had a passion for the channel, but maybe leading systems engineering in Europe, middle East and Africa, or they may be part of the security business entity, or they may be owning of the security business entity, or they may be owning the commerce platform in Cisco. So we just invited a good mix of both longstanding SMEs but also people who were caring a lot about the channel, but it wasn't necessarily their daytime job or they may have worked on this in previous lives in other companies. So we had a very good mix of people and we worked in sprints.
Speaker 1:So we calculated that we have five sprints between March, when we started, and partner summit, and every sprint we laid out what we wanted to achieve in that sprint, and the first one was the most critical one. The first one was the one where we defined the North star. So we spent quality time designing the end. Let's say right, so what are we trying to achieve, or what are we even trying to solve for? So we started with that and that somehow set the tone in terms of we are in this together.
Speaker 1:Everybody's perspective is worth the same, and we're going to fiercely debate because, right, jason, we've had, and we continue to have, passionate debates on many things, but it allows us to get to the right outcome and I would argue that, as and when we came out right with Partner Summit, we've held that principle with our partners as well, and I always, or often, say it's not my ambition to be right, it's not my ambition to know it all right, it's not even my, I'm not even pretending that I know it all or I know better. I think our ambition is to land the most successful program as and when launch day comes, which is 5-26. We are absolutely committed to landing a successful transformation and that doesn't mean that we want to be right that the people who started thinking about this in March last year or who announced this at Partner Summit, that whatever we thought then is still true next year. So we're trying, with all the feedback, to get to the best possible version of this program within, of course, the strategic framework of al. Get to the best possible version of this program within, of course, the strategic framework of aligning to the market, aligning to what customers are expecting, aligning to our product innovation and aligning to what's happening with our sales transformation.
Speaker 1:But I think that's a little bit. It's this constant balancing act between being very committed to the North Star and, of course, we are all still very committed at Cisco to be partner first and partner centric, but at the same time, be completely open and vulnerable as well, because I don't know if you want to talk about that, but we have felt vulnerable because, to your point, the feedback you're getting is not always the feedback you were hoping for or the feedback you expected, or the things you thought were an issue or not an issue, and the things you thought were easy and straightforward were not. So that means that we feel quite exposed and we are showing vulnerability, but it's all with the best intentions, because we want to land a successful product. We want this to be successful.
Speaker 2:What I find really interesting about this approach is actually quite a product design approach. Right, product people spend a lot of time talking to their customers around. What does our product do well? Is it not doing well? How do we break? Fix it? How do we build towards our North Star? And in this instance, your product is your program and your customers are the partners. Right, and so you've built this circular loop and that vulnerability.
Speaker 2:I mentor various product people and I've worked with great product people at the channel and it is frustrating. You spend six months working on a piece of product and someone goes this is terrible and you're pulling your hair out. Right, it can be painful. I think the context of flowing towards understanding that the your customer is your partners um, jason, at the core of what you're trying to build is the, the sort of partner value, towards understanding that your customer is your partners. Jason, at the core of what you're trying to build is the sort of partner value index. Talk to me about what that change means for some of the non-traditional or non-transacting partners like developers or influencers.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so.
Speaker 3:One of the key elements, as you mentioned earlier with the portfolio, was how do we take this massive portfolio and represent those capabilities in a much simpler way? If you think about Cisco today, there's about 15 different product families across different business units. We've got multiple depths of specializations in certain areas and we distilled all that down to six portfolio areas certain areas and we distilled all that down to six portfolio areas, and so we'll have six focused portfolios as part of the value index networking, security, cloud, ai, splunk, collaboration and services and it will really help us understand how to index, as the name implies, partners' capabilities within those portfolio areas as they sell and or drive some managed services. But the key is not so much the what, it's the why. And if you think about what a value index outside of the programmatic piece of it represents, it's kind of the natural business conversation that Cisco and our partners are having anyway, and the reason I say that is a few years back I remember there was a key partner who came to Cisco and they wanted to be one of the best and the biggest partners and they kind of asked me four questions at Partner Summit when we first met them. It was what are the basic elements of being a Cisco business or partner? What talent should I hire and how do I get them trained and up to speed? How do I know that I can connect with your sales teams and align and start winning some deals, because it's all about driving again those deals out to their customers at the end of it. But then is the customer getting what they expected, achieving some outcome? And that's exactly how we've constructed the value index into those four kind of conversations.
Speaker 3:Foundational, what's the basics of being a partner. Capability, who do I hire and how do I train them. Performance I want to align with your sales teams and make sure that we're driving sales performance. And then, ultimately, engagement section of the metrics, and that's all about the customer seeing that value. Realization of what the portfolio said it was going to achieve as an outcome. And so, yes, it's a program. But I think in many ways, you know, those sections of foundation capability, performance and engagement are a reflection of the business conversation that we're having, regardless of the programmatics, with our partners, and every great company runs on a scorecard. So it's kind of natural that we should have metrics that we look at on a regular basis with our partners Because, you know, as the old saying goes right, what gets measured gets done.
Speaker 2:So love it. We have understood that the macroeconomic and technological change require us to rebuild the partner program. We have then gone out garnered feedback, of which some of that can be painful. We now have a measurement infrastructure in place that we are happy with broadly. I understand version one is designed to help and drive us forward and build value. And Elizabeth talk me through what it really takes to sort of win the hearts and minds of partners through a radical and sort of fundamental shift to how they go to market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, thank you, yeah. So, as I said, there is the human factor, where there is a natural aversion to change, right in human nature, and especially because our partners's built on very strong relationships, literally between people at the partner and people at Cisco, and so it's very important for us and that's why I think, when we announced the partner summit, we had three key messages that we kept repeating over and over again, and the first message was always we will give you time, we will give time, right, we're going to do this with time. So we set out 15 months um, that was really important, and 15 months of course you can have a philosophical debate is a lot of time, not enough time. So they're still. Now, people are, even though 15 months is probably the longest any vendor has ever given time in terms of changing a partner program. We now sometimes hear well, it's not really 15 months, it's less because and it's it's not enough, we need more time. But we have made a very deliberate choice of 15 months, um, I think, uh.
Speaker 1:The second point is that we said we're going to protect you in this transition. So it's not like all the things, it's everything you've done until now, all the investments you've made are still very valid in the future as well, because of course, you know we are trying to keep up and be ahead of the market. But of course, all the things we've been saying in the past, like invest in managed services, invest in lifecycle selling, continue to invest in technical capability, is very relevant going forward as well. So we've made some deliberate decisions also. So we said, for example, all the gold partners or all the customer success specializations, we're going to automatically renew them, so don't worry about any of that. So we will automatically extend it until we launch, or by the time we launch, feb 26, so that partners wouldn't have to worry about both investing in the existing and getting ready for the new.
Speaker 1:And the third big message was we're going to do this together. So we're going to do this with you and for you, which goes back to the feedback. So those were the three things right Time protection and then doing it together, and so I think that went a long way. But even then, we've been tracking partner sentiment super closely in multiple ways. So we all, of course, have lots of one-on-ones and executive relationships and executive meetings, but we also do advisory boards, we do webinars and seminars and all that and we have a consistent way of tracking sentiment. So we stay, or we try to stay, super close to how partners are feeling about this at every single point in time, and it goes slightly up and slightly down, which is very understandable along the way, and we just want to make sure that we are doing this together.
Speaker 1:So now we've been in this co-design phase, we will slowly get out of it now in the next few weeks.
Speaker 1:So we're starting to loop back with partners on the feedback we've gotten to tell them okay, we've changed this, we've adjusted that, we didn't adjust this, but we're going to do this instead.
Speaker 1:So we're going to enter into more of a stabilization period, but we're also going to give more and more details on how they can make money with us, and so we expect partner sentiment, on the one hand, to be happier because there's more details and more clarity as we go forward. At the same time, the whole how and where to make money. For some partners that will be very welcome because they're already quite ahead in that journey in terms of, for example, adopting and renewing or investing in modern services or having invested in a lot of technical capability. Those partners will probably win. The partners that are a little bit more behind that, for example, are still mostly in a lot of technical capability. Those partners will probably win. The partners that are a little bit more behind that, for example, are still mostly in a landing business, let's say, and haven't invested in lifecycle practices. They may feel like they're losing out and they will have to accelerate investing in those practices.
Speaker 2:Awesome. What I like about this program is maybe Jason coming to you. I hear a lot of businesses talk about them being. You know, we're really pro-partner and we're really pro-channel, but talk is cheap. But for Cisco, you're putting your money where your mouth is. I think you've invested $80 million in partner training. How are you ensuring that you drive the right outcomes from that investment and it's not just a checkbox exercise when it comes to certifications?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, first off, we're curating the content to make sure it's very relevant and we're tracking really well towards that $80 million investment that we announced at Partner Summit.
Speaker 3:In fact, the partner community has responded in a way that we're super excited about their ability to be ready for some of exactly what Elizabeth talked about investing in the areas of depth.
Speaker 3:You know we've got 12,900 partner individuals who have taken several hundred hours worth of training just since November when we announced it. So we're tracking towards that $80 million investment. That has been on our security portfolio initially, where partners are getting really deep in training their teams on security, and then we updated and more recently came out with the latest continuing education credits and free training through our Cisco University on AI, and so now partners are sending some of their teams to AI. So we think that the investment is, you know, to your point. It's not just checkbox and putting it out there, it's getting consumed, it's very relevant and curated content through our Cisco University and it's giving them continuing education credits that they can then use towards their certifications like the CCIEs, the CCNAs, and all of that counts towards the new Cisco 360 partner program. So very connected strategy across all of those areas benefiting the partner, ultimately being rewarded within the program but ultimately getting the level of capabilities needed to deliver that great customer outcome.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Now, if we maybe look ahead slightly, we fast forward to 2026. Other than you two both getting what I imagine the first night's sleep is in 15 months, talk me through what a thriving Cisco partner looks like. What are some of the sort of behaviors, investments, mindsets that you think?
Speaker 1:are really going to separate a good partner from a great one, elizabeth, to you.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we always talk about partner value and then we talk about the most capable partner, right? So I think that part of it is probably and again, jason, you may want to chime in, but that's also most resonating with our partner community it's this whole piece around we will reward investing in technical capability and the concept of technical readiness, right. It's not an after-the-fact thought, but as and when we launch innovation, and given the pace of innovation is only going faster, we want to make sure that our partners are ready as and when we launch. So I think being a very capable partner, as in investing in technical capability in this fast-moving environment, is probably the most explicit one. And then the other pieces are, I think I don't mean it disrespectfully, but the more obvious ones that have been in the making for the last few years, which is the ability to stay close to your customer and retain that value, which is a lifecycle selling bit. Also the ability to invest in managed services and all these things. But I think the technical capability thing is the most important.
Speaker 3:Jason. I mean, I guess I'll add two, maybe three things. One, I actually don't think we'll be getting much sleep in February of 2026, because that's actually when it really starts. So there will be quite a bit more conversations and questions, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:But the second thing is, I do think that one of the things that was a part of the original design is reaching out to the broader ecosystem, and so it's not just about the sales and the service side. We're comprehensively working with our distributors. We're comprehensively looking at what does it mean to be a great partner who has more of advisory services? If you want to develop on top of the platform, what does that look like and how do you get recognized with the value you bring? And so all of those elements of the program will also be a part of what we continue to build and to evolve as we go through.
Speaker 3:You know some of the, you know the out years invest in our partners. You know this truly is an evolution, with not just the rebates and incentives, but how we provide equipment and NFR, what we call not for resale, and how all of the partners get a welcome package and get invited in. Really top to bottom. We've re-imagined everything, and once that kicks in in 2026, you know, we have to make sure that, not just the pieces we've talked about here, but, you know, truly, end to end, we continue to tighten and refine for the partner experience to be world class.
Speaker 2:Amazing Well at Partnerships Unraveled. We like to build a world-class customer experience, partner experience, channel experience for our listeners, which means we like to cheat by asking our current guests to recommend our next guest. Elizabeth, who did you have in mind?
Speaker 1:Well, we will recommend a Cisco colleague, actually Alexandra Zaguri. Um, she's been at cisco quite a few years. She's probably the most disruptive and thought leader in the channel that I know of and not just in the channel, I would say. So I think she will definitely give you a very interesting and unique perspective, um, on all things channel and ecosystem she has the world's best name and she's a channel disruptor.
Speaker 2:that's what we like to hear, Elizabeth Jason, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge today. It's been awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you so much, alex.