Cisco Pushes Virtual Boundaries

Cisco held its 2009 annual sales meeting virtually, testing the limits of what technology can—and can't—do.

For 20 years, technology giant Cisco Systems, Inc has held its annual global sales meeting in Las Vegas, bringing 14,000 salespeople together with company executives for several days of high-level strategy speeches, drill-down educational sessions, motivation, and recognition.

But in November 2008, with the economy in tatters, Cisco's leaders made the decision that in 2009, all events, including the flagship September Global Sales Experience (GSX) would move to a virtual platform.

This left Angie Smith, manager of the global sales experience for Cisco's global sales operations, with a tough assignment. She had to build, from scratch, a virtual meeting platform that would support all those attendees, provide Cisco executives a way to communicate broad-picture fiscal information, offer rich educational sessions, motivate the sales force, and recognize the year's stand-out sellers. And instead of 14,000 managers and salespeople, the company expanded the audience to include some sales support staff—meaning 22,000 employees were invited from 104 countries.

"This is the largest program, internally or externally, that Cisco does," Smith says. "We had a pretty cynical audience. We've been doing it live for 20 years. They are used to walking into a live event, hearing their name called out, and having opportunities to network with executives. To make it a success, we had to keep them wanting to be there, rather than multitasking at their desks."

With the help of three vendors, experience marketing agency George P. Johnson, its interactive services arm jUXT Interactive, and virtual events provider InXpo, Smith and her team not only pulled off a very successful virtual meeting, they pushed the boundaries of what the technology can do, testing both its potential and its limitations.

"We definitely set a new bar in terms of how we deploy virtual technology," says Chris Meyer, senior vice president of client services and general manager of George P. Johnson. " 'Edutainment' at the level we deployed has never been done before."

That is because the Cisco GSX wasn't just a virtual meeting. To create the excitement, the buy-in, and the willingness to pay attention needed for the virtual event to succeed, the GSX became a platform for an alternate reality game so complex it drew the participants into a virtual mystery that spanned the globe, sending them on an online manhunt for "stolen" Cisco technology and the thief who had absconded with it. All this to earn prestige and points on the Leaderboard at the center of the GSX homepage, which could be traded for incentive prizes.

To solve the mystery, participants had to work in teams that spanned countries and languages, collaborating across corporate verticals and national borders to chase down and solve clues, many of which were sprinkled throughout the education and speaking sessions of the GSX itself.

What a Virtual Meeting Can Be

From the beginning, Smith and Meyer knew Cisco couldn't replace a meeting as big and multi-faceted as the GSX with a standard virtual event metaphor—typically a city or a convention center.

There were, of course, features common to any virtual meeting: speeches by senior executives, learning sessions, chat rooms, and the like. But the whole GSX experience was wrapped around gaming.

"The client was willing to take risks, try new things," says Meyer. "Cisco wanted to let the sales force understand how virtual technology can help their clients. Cisco already has several sales opportunities around virtual events, and their sales force is now better equipped to discuss them. The GSX was definitely a training experience for the sales force."

The actual design of the virtual environment was handed to jUXT Interactive, which treated it like a big consumer campaign, says Todd Purgason, jUXT's executive creative director. The audience was 90 percent male, competitive, social, and smart. "We said, 'Let's focus on competition.'"

The core was one big buzz-worthy game, The Threshold, and three mini-games to attract participants who may not want to get involved in something as complex as the main game. But there was also a Solutions Showcase, a Chat Zone, and the Sessions, as well as a prominent Sales Recognition Zone that continually scrolled pictures of top performers on the GSX website's homepage.

The three smaller, simpler, more traditional games—Closer Wars, Cisco Insider, and Resource Wrangler—were aimed at employees who wanted to participate, but not at the level of The Threshold.

Two facts informed the overall design, according to Purgason. First, people don't read instructions. So the central part of the homepage's user interface was a virtual hostess—named Eva—who could be called up from anywhere on the GSX site to explain things to the participants.

The second was that while participants were from 104 countries, spanning 24 time zones, Cisco is a U.S. company and its business, including the GSX, was in English. "A lot of non-U.S. markets feel English is favored," Purgason says. "So we set it in areas around the world."

Using the same matte painting backgrounds found in top consumer video games, the Solutions Showcase—which would traditionally use the metaphor of a virtual trade show floor—was set in a Tokyo skyscraper with changing city views. The Chat Zone was in Dubai, and an exclusive chat area for top sellers was in Rome. The Prize Center, where points accumulated while playing the various games could be redeemed, was set in Las Vegas. And the speaker sessions were held in the iconic Beijing National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest, built for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

The Game

One of the more unusual aspects of Cisco's virtual meeting—aside from the fact that it involved a big alternate reality game—was that the game launched three weeks before the GSX took place. One obvious reason for this, Purgason says, was to give participants the chance to familiarize themselves with the game and the technology being used.

Another was to use the hype building around the game to market the meeting. So jUXT launched a "marketing campaign like a movie," Purgason says. "We had emails, posters, online trailers. Prior to this, people's context was 'This is going to suck, they are taking away Las Vegas and giving us podcasts.' This is where we got them."

The Threshold's storyline was that Cisco had acquired a company with a new technology that allows people to connect to the Internet via their eyeglasses. But a key engineer had been kidnapped and the participants had to help find the victim and retrieve the technology. The story featured strong characters, complete with company websites and LinkedIn pages, that participants could interact with virtually.

Clues ranged from the relatively simple—typed symbols found only on a German keyboard—to incredibly complex: binary codes that could be turned into latitude and longitude and pasted into Google maps, which in turn pointed to buildings shaped like letters. Groups of those formed words for a single clue, Purgason recalls. Multiple languages were used to ensure cross-border collaboration.

In all, 350 clues were distributed throughout the game, the speaker sessions, and other learning content. Creators ensured that one person—or even one team—couldn't solve it on their own. "They had to collaborate," Purgason says. Participants built an incredibly detailed Wiki with the clues, and created 1,600 threads in the GSX chat forums. "Some teams had their own WebEx meetings and tried to invite game characters," he says. "Leading players used Cisco tools to organize outside the system—a pager system sent alerts to some players when new clues were posted. One person posted in the forums, 'If we collaborated like this in real life, there's nothing we couldn't do.'"

The game ran for a total of four weeks. "We expected about 7,000 of the 19,000 GSX attendees to play," Purgason says. "In the end, we got 13,000." The point of introducing an alternate reality game into a virtual conference is "to give it the party aspect of a live event," he adds. "The general feedback was that 60 percent of the GSX attendees thought it was an amazing addition to the experience."

Lessons Learned

By many measures, Cisco's virtual GSX was a huge success: the technology worked, the salesforce education sessions were rated as well or better than at live events, and participants could view segments they missed via a video-on-demand feature.

And the there's the cost savings. By holding a virtual GSX, even one as complex as this, Cisco saved a staggering 90 percent of the cost of holding a live event, a number that includes 211 million airline miles not flown.

After the event, Carlos Dominguez, Cisco's senior vice president of U.S. service provider sales, wrote on his company blog: "If you go back to one of our key goals of educating the team, I think this format yields better results than an in-person event. As a matter of fact, the event has opened my eyes and I believe that gaming and [alternate reality games] will play a significant role in the way we learn in the future ... I don't think we'll ever be able to replace the human need for live interaction but at 10 percent of the cost, I have a feeling a lot more people will take this kind of technology for a spin."

Still, Smith provides a word of warning for other planners who are considering replacing a live meeting with a virtual one: Don't start with the big annual sales meeting.

"I would not recommend biting off so much the first time," she says. "If I were talking to a customer, I would say that it is a very complex process doing what we did, and we underestimated what was involved. It took way more resources than an in-person meeting. There were huge cost savings, but don't think it is going to be less work. You don't have to feed people or set up conference rooms, but you do have to build an infrastructure."

To do a program on the scale of Cisco's GSX, "It doesn't matter how many people you have, it will take a minimum of six months to a year," Smith says. "But once you've done it for a large-scale program you can do another in six months, easily."

One reason they were able to pull it off in this timeframe is that the user interface of Cisco's GSX plugged on top of an existing and well-tried back-end engine supplied by InXpo.

"Our user interface was designed from day one to be independent of the back end," says Drew VanVooren, president of InXpo. Which is to say, it was designed to handle an event like Cisco's GSX, says VanVooren, who believes, "This was the first event not governed by planners asking, 'What can the technology support?', but by 'What is needed to make the event a success?'"

"What Cisco, George P. Johnson, and jUXT Interactive did," he says, "was push the envelope of what we are able to do outside of our core product, that is integrated into our platform."

From now on there will be three tiers of virtual events, VanVooren says. Tier one will be events like Cisco's, a fully customized, permanent environment that gathers an audience around a short event. Tier two will be semi-custom event platforms built for regular, repeated events like a big monthly meeting. And Tier three will be plug-and-play events which are scalable and robust, yet can be set up quickly and cost- effectively—think of the typical convention center metaphor virtual event.

"I am not sure what the 'new normal' will be," he says. "But I believe in physical meetings and in virtual events, and I believe it will integrate both."

What's Next

Certainly that's the way Cisco is going. For all of its success with the 2009 event, Cisco's 2010 GSX meeting will be a hybrid of virtual and live events, Smith says, incorporating the virtual platform built for the 2009 GSX as well as participants at regional mini-conferences.

In 2009 "we swung the pendulum all the way virtual," Smith said. "[This year] we'll swing it back a little." While the program has not yet been finalized, she expects it to save 50 to 60 percent over the cost of a fully live event, while avoiding the big pitfall of the 2009 GSX experiment: Recognition.

Simply put, while Smith and her team incorporated many features to offer top sales people the kudos they had earned, it just wasn't enough.

"We made a strong attempt at recognition," Smith says. "There were exclusive areas for participants who achieved quota or were in the top 10 percent. There were exclusive areas for them to network with each other, and exclusive chats with senior executives." Their names and photos also scrolled on the GSX homepage, and they were given American Express gift cards and social badges displayed in chat rooms and other interactive venues.

"In the live GSX, our Sales Champions get single rooms at upgraded hotels, while the rest share rooms," Smith recounts. They also get a reception with the CEO, preferred seating at events, a fancy lanyard and badge, and perks like access to a VIP area to meet entertainers (such as Aerosmith at a past GSX).

"The social badges were one of the most popular forms for recognition, which we did not expect," she adds. "But did they like it compared to the past? Not really. To be brought up on stage to meet the CEO is more desirable than a $500 gift card."

George P. Johnson's Meyer agrees. "The feedback was we need the face-to-face recognition and motivation," he says. "I think going forward, all events will be hybrids of live and virtual. Virtual extends your reach and your contact—you get more out of your budget and expand your audience."

Originally published Jan. 1, 2010

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