Accelerating Partner Growth with PXP and Cisco Black Belt Academy

After recently attending Cisco’s FY25 global sales meeting, GSX, it is clear that our teams embody the passion, innovation, and commitment to provide our customers with the outcomes they need to succeed in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. GSX also solidified that our incredible global ecosystem of partners is the catalyst for delivering the experience that allows our customers to quickly adapt and accelerate their business goals.

Partners recognize that Cisco is the only company that can deliver a portfolio of solutions that will meet any customer challenge while fueling growth for their business. Whether it is delivering organizational preparedness to adopt or integrate AI effectively, future-proof the workplace, and/or create digital resiliency, Cisco is unmatched in our ability to drive innovation, create value, and shape the future of our industry.

The Partner Performance and Experience (PP&E) organization focuses on enabling you to “Meet the Moment” with best-in-class partner experiences. This is built on a foundation of simplifying and digitizing experiences and is co-designed with our partners. At the center of these experiences, we drive to achieve growth and profitability goals using Cisco’s award-winning Partner Experience Platform (PXP) and Black Belt Academy.

Through constant innovation by our teams, PXP and Black Belt Academy are evolving to accelerate partner proficiency so you can deliver the best outcomes to your customers and for your business. Let’s examine how we accelerate your profitable growth.

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PXP is your gateway to building your practice, growth, and profitability

As we enter a new digital era of artificial intelligence and machine learning, PXP growth capabilities will continue to expand using intelligence and insights to help partners drive growth across architectures, develop new capabilities across technology solutions, and simplify the partner seller experience.

Requested and co-designed by our partners, PXP’s Practice Maturity delivers continuous performance insights on key Cisco practice areas. Practice Maturity is the starting point for our partners, providing overall Cisco practice performance, trends, peer comparisons, and actionable insights on where to improve and/or invest their time and energy across five essential Cisco business practices – services, software, lifecycle, automation, and profitability.

PXP Growth capabilities, which include Growth Finder and Whitespace & Wallet Share, continue to enable partners to find new growth opportunities. Early adopter partners have identified and booked over $400M in new bookings by leveraging Growth Finder.

Delivering process simplicity

From PXP’s inception, our goal has always been to reduce the number of touch points necessary to achieve a customer outcome. We have added enhancements to minimize cycle times further so partners can spend more time on high-value customer opportunities.

Another example of these efforts is with PXP Partner Mapping. This new capability allows partners to upload their company’s business, territory, and/or sales team hierarchies into select dashboards within PXP Sales Opportunities. This innovation enables partners to sort and filter opportunity data based on their business’s structure, accelerating the identification of new opportunities and decreasing time to market.

We are excited by the adoption and use of Cisco Partner Journeys (CPJ). Located on cisco.com and embedded in PXP, CPJ continues to streamline partner resource identification and expedite practice development. With the recent launch of the new PXP Journey on CPJ, partners now have a simple digital guide on delivering outcomes to their customers with PXP.

Increase marketplace advantage with Black Belt Academy

We have seen that partners with 60% or more of their employees certified in Black Belt Academy have an average growth rate of 10% higher bookings than their peer companies. By delivering a better and more engaging digital learning environment, we help partners increase their growth.

Black Belt Academy’s core focus is building skills and supporting partner growth through high-quality, engaging content. To keep learners engaged and satisfied, we have introduced a gamified enablement experience, resulting in higher learner registration and learning path completions. This year, we are enhancing the enablement experience and building new and exciting content on AI and cloud, networking, solutions, and more. In October, partners will be able to leverage a significant content refresh on Black Belt Academy.

What are the next steps to take

PXP and Black Belt Academy constantly evolve to meet our partner’s needs.

Leverage PXP to increase potential revenue opportunities and generate business outcomes to drive customer growth while maximizing productivity.
A fully trained and prepared team provides profits and creates productivity for the top and bottom lines. Commit to refreshing Black Belt Partner Academy training maps to ensure all teams are ready for any opportunity.
Leverage Cisco Partner Journeys to build new or differentiate existing practices to grow your customer’s business across multiple solutions and architectures.

Sign up and join me for the Partner Performance and Experience Open House at Cisco Partner Summit for the latest exciting news from our team!