Cisco's New Simplified Deal Registration: What You Need to Know!

Co-Authored by Sarah Sorrell

Getting the best possible discount from Cisco for your customer deal is a game changer. And deal protection assures that you receive the most competitive price from Cisco over any other partner. These two things often mean the difference between winning or losing that business. But sometimes, going through the deal registration process can slow you down. And getting the quote to your customer quickly can be just as important as pricing it correctly.

Partners have told us that deal registration is the number one partner profitability incentive. It is by far the most visible with our sales teams. We know that deal protection is critical and important for you, but we also hear that the process is too complicated and cumbersome.

Within the deal registration process, there are too many programs and acronyms to figure out, and the amount of time it takes to register a deal and get approval is longer than some of our industry peers. In addition, sometimes, our account managers are sitting on approvals for too long, and it doesn’t allow you to respond quickly with pricing back to your customer.

We are introducing a new simplified, single guided deal registration experience that will streamline the entire process for you. This new experience skillfully guides you to the best possible pricing and speeds up the whole process. So, what does all this mean for you?

First and foremost – it’s simple and takes less time to complete the process. The optimized deal registration interface will reduce the required clicks to enter a deal by 50%.
Fewer fields to manually enter. By leveraging new smart AI technology, the deal registration system will obtain information from the uploaded BOM, auto-populate fields, and guide you through the process in a simple, intuitive way.
Increased deal velocity with expanded streamlined deal registration. Specific checkpoints in the process remain necessary, but you can expect improvements on the approval timelines.
Faster approvals by reducing the number of approvers for certain deal types, automating applicable compliance checks, and reducing the time an AM will need to spend on a deal. This improved process should decrease approval times from over 24 hours to under 8 with a target of 4 hours average on deals that qualify for this process.

These foundational changes to the deal registration process will open doors to future enhancements while accelerating your sales and helping you on your profitability journey. After we go live in Q3 FY’21, we will continue working on creating more opportunities to reward you later in FY22. Below are a few of the planned future enhancements:

We already offer Enterprise Agreement (EA) Expand today and know that renewals are a critical profitability component. Through new platform enhancements, you will have access to deal protection for EA renewals and renewals based on Lifecycle Incentive Adopt records.
Managed Services (MS) partners and will be offered deal protection on MS deals.
Differentiated discounting on the front-end services based on Customer Experience specializations will be addressed.

The foundational release of the simplified deal registration is part of the NEW Cisco Partner Program and will be available in Q3 FY’21, which will open the door to future enhancements. Stay tuned for more information from your partner programs and incentives teams and your partner account managers on how this new single, guided deal registration experience will help further demonstrate the value you bring to customers while accelerating your profitability and speed to market! Then get ready for future enhancements to go live in FY’22.