Jarrod Weise, Partner Content Manager at Cisco, joins Jen Spencer on The Allbound Podcast to discuss partner enablement with content marketing and support from both sales and marketing.
Tell me a little be about your current role as Partner Content Manager at Cisco
I’ve been at Cisco for a little over two years. Until a few weeks ago I was focused primarily on the data center and cloud part of our portfolio and really go-to-market with our partners. Partners are over 90% of Cisco’s business, so, when it comes to very successful digital marketing we will not be successful without partners. I’ve always been a data center geek, I love the big expensive heavy iron that sits behind the glass, I’ve spent most of my career doing that, mostly because it was the really hard stuff that nobody in marketing wanted to touch and I’m a geek at heart so I love doing that kind of stuff. And then it occurred to us through this transformation we’ve gone through was there’s really a bit of a need for a roll that can look across a lot different personas and a lot of different topics and solutions to kind of understand what the partner lense would be. So a few weeks ago I moved into this role as the Partner Content Manager for the Americas; a healthy amount of my focus right now is the US but I do take a lot of conversations with my Canadian counterparts, I have not completely learned all the Spanish I need to for LabTam but I have some great relationships there and we’re off and running. So a big part of what I’m doing now is looking across the portfolio but really through a content marketing view with and through partners to understand; what are their needs, how do they tell those stories, but how do they tell those stories with Cisco and are we delivering what we need to, to them for them to be successful. They tell their own stories, they create their own content but so much of what they do is with Cisco at the core that we’re trying to inject more relevance there to broader audiences than we have in the past.