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Over the past few years, I’ve worked in many amazing areas within Cisco, spanning Systems Engineering, Sales, IoT, and Digital Transformation. Today, I’m supporting our Partners in developing and enhancing their customer success practices. And with my new role,  I’ve taken up a new challenge: how to help partners drive attach, upsell, and renewal of our support service offers and grow their businesses.

As I transitioned to my new role, the first thing that stood out was how successful our partners have been in reselling the Cisco Customer Experience (CX) Success Portfolio by combining and leveraging their own customer solution offers. Every customer experience starts with an initial support services requirement.

In the past, support services were seen as insurance or a safety net…“when something goes wrong, let’s make sure we can fall back on the manufacturer.” But today, support is more than a break/fix solution – it’s a strategic component of the overall customer solution.

Customers want more value and to achieve their goals faster.  The Cisco CX Success Portfolio is designed with this in mind – by helping our customers get value for their Cisco technology investments at every step across the lifecycle. Our CX Portfolio is also designed with our partners in mind.  It provides more opportunities for you to add value-added services to help customers adopt and optimize their solutions and accelerate their success, while also increasing your growth and profitability.

So how can you get started on the path to higher profitability?

Today, Cisco partners have more customer data and insights to help them identify and capture services opportunities, accelerate customer outcomes, and provide greater value. This leads to happier customers with a greater propensity to buy more products and services, further leading to increased revenue for partners and greater Cisco rebates and incentives.

That said, we are continually looking for new ways to help our partners drive more growth and profitability. We are excited to introduce the new CX Partner Profitability Calculator which enables partners to clearly analyze deal financials when comparing different services offers in the Customer Experience Success Portfolio.  The tool provides a clear view of Gross Profit and Gross Margin before and after applicable rebates. This makes it possible to compare different deal outputs over the duration of the customer contract.

Some of the main revenue growth areas that partners can quantify by using this tool include:

  • Larger deal sizes: You can increase the deal size at purchase by bundling your offers and achieving a higher attach rate and price point.
  • Enhanced total bookings: Our services offers allow partners to drive more value-added services and to differentiate themselves by offering accelerators for deployment and adoption of technologies.
  • Increased renewal rates: Increased value results in higher customer satisfaction and more predictable renewals
  • Additional pull-through: A more holistic view of the customer infrastructure opens up new sale opportunities across our portfolio.

Our own analysis indicates that, by adopting the lifecycle selling framework, partners can expect to see a 50% increase in deal size on average, a 20% increase in additional partner services, a 10% increase in renewal rates, and 5% higher pull-through.

With the CX Partner Profitability Calculator, these benefits can be quantified on a deal-by-deal basis. This will help you drive additional revenue and higher customer success and satisfaction.

To learn more about Cisco Customer Experience, visit our SuccessHub for all the
latest CX news and resources for partners and the
Customer Experience Partner Hub on SalesConnect.

 



Authors

José Luis Salazar Valenzuela

Global Senior Manager, Mass-Scale Infrastructure

Cisco Global Partner Sales