Improving Account Manager Productivity at Cisco Systems

<body> <p>Cisco Systems is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. One hundred sixty million Internet users worldwide rely on Cisco equipment. Since shipping its first product in 1986, the company has grown into a global market leader that holds No. 1 or No. 2 market share in virtually every market segment in which it participates, with $13.4 billion in revenue and more than 23,000 employees.</p> <p>In North America, Cisco Systems maintains its growth and leadership through a distributed field sales organization. They need mobility and timely, accurate information to keep pace in today’s competitive internet economy. To that end, Cisco deploys best-of-breed eSales applications to reduce administrative burden and increase productivity for the Field Sales organization.</p> <p>An increasingly mobile work force has ever-growing demands: they need ready access to information, rapid data transfer, and fast action to meet client requirements. Cisco sales representatives were turning to handheld computers, or Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), to respond to those demands.</p> <p>"Our initial field evaluation suggested that over 50% of our sales force were using some type of PDA to store contact information, a trend we believed would only continue to increase," noted Nora Sandoval, Cisco’s Manager of Americas Sales Productivity. “To help eliminate duplicate data entry into disparate eSales tools and further increase sales productivity, support for PDA devices will become a necessity."</p> <p>Synchronizing data between the PDA device and the eSales database was neither automated nor bi-directional. It required a series of imports in order to update contacts and accounts, an effort not only time consuming but non-productive.</p> </body>