Summary: Guided Deal Registration (GDR) was a pivotal initiative in Cisco Commerce Workspace (CCW), aimed at guiding 100, 000+ Partner’s, Distributors & Customers intuitively through a complex configuration, pricing, quoting & ordering process. The focus was on influencing and driving unique sales behaviors in our Partner and Customer eco-systems, by incentivizing them to qualify or earn multiple incentives/discounts with no touch vs around 80% of deals and quotes which have manual price or discount adjustments and complex, time consuming approvals.
- GDR transformed the foundation of Pricing and Discounting by introducing intuitive discounts structures which influenced and incentivized Partner Sales behaviors in multiple unique ways.
- Discount stackability and combinations of 800+ Partner discounts, for hundreds of thousands of Products & Services is a very complex challenge, which required completely out of box thinking. GDR Introduced flexible discounts structures, by breaking larger discounts into smaller more meaningful incremental & stackable discount blocks and mapping them to best sales patterns.
- Parallel Approvals: The capability to enable parallel approvals for multiple stacked Incentives allowed reduction in the deal approval cycle time. So if a Deal required a Sales agent, his Mgr and Director’s approval, they all could approve in parallel instead of sequentially.
- Sales crediting: New Platform integration led to significant improvement in the accuracy of AM deal assignments on partner led deals resulting in timely and accurate sales crediting. This capability resolved many data quality issues, improved overall Cisco sales experience and resolved complex group /Team assignments on Deals.
- Mismatch in Accounts/end customer sites/ had cascading effect on AM and Deal Approver assignments leading to hundreds of Partner cases. Enabled significantly improved search by using Hadoop and Big Data concepts and introducing weightage based on Historical bookings etc, to allow partner to select the correct end customer site from millions of potential customer sites.
- Architectural Bundles and Partial Bundles selling capability: This was a new business model created to incentivize partners to buy across different Architectures and Technologies, thus selling across various Cisco offerings. The Partners bill of material is scanned by the system and Product configurations compared, with any available eligible architectural bundles and discounts applied automatically.
- Improved Integrated Analytics: As the new operational capabilities were built around partner experience, both program owners and finance are able to leverage the new analytics capabilities to analyze the effectiveness of stacked discounts.
- Seamless Cut-Over during transition: With over millions of in-flight deals, we had to innovate the cut-over process, so that all new deals were created based on new discount stacks, whereas Old deals continued to be supported until fully consumed by partners