Services not only expand the revenue of a deal, but also drive incremental margins. By building a robust services practice, you can strengthen the Cisco solutions you already sell, add depth and breadth to your portfolio, and increase differentiation.
Today’s market is evolving fast as customers embrace new technologies and new business models. Businesses are moving to cloud, virtualisation, big data, and programmable networks that can help them boost performance, improve agility, and control costs.
Selling Cisco Services is an easy way to profit from this transformation. Services can now account for over 50% of partner revenue and can help you extend, grow and transform your business, providing the opportunity for higher gross and net margin dollars as well as predictable recurring revenue.
Market shift
The market is transitioning to a recurring revenue model, beyond just selling perpetual licenses or just the hardware. In the past, the focus was on the initial sale with little work behind it to maximise the opportunity; once a prospect became a customer, the attention turned toward the next candidate.
In today’s subscription-based economy, actively managing customers throughout the post-sales relationship, with a commitment to helping achieve their desired business outcomes is key to success. How can this be done? It’s as simple as wrapping recurring offers (software and services) around every hardware sale.
Adopt, expand, develop
It is important to start having the ‘adopt’ and ‘expand’ conversation. From the adoption play, customers can achieve their business outcomes and increase their ROI. They use the services they purchased, and they begin to see their value. In some cases, you may need to provide training to ensure users understand how to use the services to ensure adoption takes place.
The ‘expand’ motion entails the ongoing process of delivering incremental value during which customers consume more features and functionalities.
From the expand conversation you, as the partner, can grow your pipeline, increase your customer retention while achieving seamless renewals. Renewals should be a non-event as customers realise the value of the solutions and services they purchased.
Customer satisfaction
We offer different Cisco Services that can flex, scale and adapt to your customers’ needs. Access proactive smart service features, all backed up by a robust partner programme (CSPP) to help you sell and deliver services, increase margins and build a successful services practice.
Services extend your customer interaction beyond the product sale relationship by providing comprehensive, strategic and innovative solutions which can position you to play a greater role in your customers’ success.
In addition, selling services offers the opportunity to earn higher margins generating a recurring revenue stream through the sale of services renewals and achieve rebates via the CSPP partner programme.
What’s in it for you and your customers?
1. Get peace of mind: protection against potential losses from network downtime and optimised performance, availability, reliability and stability
2. Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty: helping customers operate and optimise their Cisco technologies throughout the lifecycle of their network
3. Maintain business continuity: the financial impact of being without business critical applications can be huge
4. Increase return on investment: extend the productive life of the technology by adding new functionality
5. Reduce cost of ownership: long term solutions that are protected by a service contract are likely to cost less than those that are not
Conclusion
Cisco Services are designed to help your customers get the most out of Cisco products so their operations can become more productive, secure and successful. They also provide the tools you need to play a key role in this success, while helping build predictable revenue streams. And who doesn’t want that?
Talk to your Comstor team today and start building a successful services practice.
What are Cisco Services? Cisco Services are technical support offers that can give your IT staff direct, anytime access to Cisco experts and online self-help resources to resolve issues with Cisco products. They help customers by ensuring availability of their network and business critical applications, and reducing the total cost of ownership while increasing the value and return on investment of their technology. |
