ANZ Field Operations Leader

Job Description

Commerce Operations (CO) manages operations for Cisco’s partners, sellers, renewal managers, and customers across all Cisco hardware, software, and services. We adopt a digital-first, agile-centric approach to provide transactional support and manage strategic customer operations across diverse business models. Our problem backlog initiative, driven by root cause analysis of cases and customer feedback, enables us to optimize business processes by reducing friction through simplification and automation. By streamlining operations, eliminating past errors, and promoting partner adoption, we integrate and accelerate transformation within the operations engine.

The ANZ Field Operations Leader provides operational leadership for ANZ sellers, coordinating numerous teams across Cisco's value chain. This role involves close collaboration with sales executives to manage, operationalize, and transform their operations, while embracing new capabilities and offerings to accelerate business transformations, even amidst complex challenges.

Key Responsibilities:

Stakeholder Intimacy:

• Build strong partnerships and provide daily operational support to the theatre Sales VP and Senior Leadership Team.

Problem Identification and Solution Adoption:

• Identify and log operational problems (process, policy, and capability) to drive simplification, automation, productivity, and overall experience.
• Promote awareness and adoption of solutions and enhancements.

Commit Management:

• Participate in theatre forecast calls to understand key priorities for the week, month, and quarter.
• Ensure weekly operationalization of commitments through multi-functional engagements (sales, channel, finance, IT) and update customers on progress and required actions.
• Prepare sneak peeks for respective theatre and segments during critical period-ends.

Business Partnership:

• Offer advisory, enablement, and organisational change support for field/customer operations regarding tools, policies, and processes.
• Consult on supply chain issues and constraint management.
• Provide operational design for complex hardware deals and assure deal quality.
• Analyze and resolve issues related to bookings and backlog management.
• Conduct customer operational business reviews.
• Advise sales teams on Cisco’s crediting and compensation policies, including system-driven credit rules, bookings policies, and changes to compensation programs.
• Handle customer issues and ownership accountability, including at the executive level.
• Identify and address seller problems proactively, collecting feedback to follow through.
• Lead process and system automation initiatives by submitting change requests and collaborating with cross-functional teams (e.g., IT, process management) until implementations are completed.

Talent Development:

• Provide ongoing coaching and mentorship to team members to enhance their skills and career development.
• Implement performance assessment frameworks to regularly evaluate employee performance and provide constructive feedback.
• Identify training needs and develop training plan that address team skill gaps and promote continuous learning.

Education/Language:

• Requires a BA/BS degree or equivalent plus 7+ years of related experience.
• Project Management certification is a plus.
• Proficiency in written and spoken English is essential.

Experience:

• Knowledge and experience of end-to-end operational processes.
• Experience in leading and managing teams is a plus.
• Demonstrable ability to drive multi-functional and/or global initiatives.
• Background in environments undergoing significant business transformation and leading organisational change.
• Additional advantages include Cisco ordering or technology knowledge/certification (Product, Services, or Software), sales operations experience, understanding of Cisco’s Partner Programs, and familiarity with software operations and enterprise agreement deal structures.

General Expectations:

• Ability to work multi-functionally within and outside Commerce Operations.
• Deep operational knowledge of processes, policies, capabilities, Cisco organization, and multi-functional team alignment.
• Ability to listen to customers and translate their priorities into actionable steps.
• Capacity to articulate client sentiments and feedback into actionable insights and problem descriptions.
• Proficient in analyzing trends and using analytics for problem identification.
• Good communication and relationship-building skills.
• Accountability for client/stakeholder experience and operational performance.
• Competence in handling customer issues, including at the executive level.
• Specific understanding of customer structure, systems, requirements, and challenges.

Why You'll Love Cisco At Cisco, we embrace individual uniqueness while collaborating as a team to make a difference. We help our customers navigate digital transformations by embracing change. Often perceived as solely a hardware company due to our 30-year legacy, we are also at the forefront of software, security, blockchain, and AI/Machine Learning innovations. Our intuitive network adapts, predicts, learns, and protects in ways no other company can.

"Digital Transformation" means fostering a culture of innovation, creativity, and learning from failures. We focus daily on giving our best, setting aside egos, and investing in our community—because giving back is important to us. We hold ourselves accountable and embrace bold actions and diversity of thought to drive equality and progress for all.

Why Cisco

#WeAreCisco

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint. Simply put – we power the future.

Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.

We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.