How has Cisco historically gone about planning its involvement in trade shows?
Each [marketing] group, which has its own budget, basically signs up for all these events. There was no centralized list or game plan for how all of these events should be leveraged by each of the marketing campaigns, nor was there any sort of expectation or understanding around how resources are allocated based on how important the show is to the company. What was your solution? If you look at the way Cisco is organized, we have a central marketing organization, which I’m a part of, and then we have the teams for each of the company’s various marketing campaigns. And then you have marketing people trying to deliver various types of programs to the field so the sales team can drive business. So you have three organizations that need to be [working] off the same song sheet. We finally have a song sheet. We got all the business units to agree to a centralized list of events, broken into three categories: Tier 1—the top 30 prioritized events for the company at the corporate level—Tier 2,
