Blog

Helping Cisco Partners to be “Future Ready”

A recent blog from Jason Gallo, Global Senior Director of Partner Sales at Cisco, “IT Agility and Moving at the Speed of your Customer” really resonated with me. Jason highlights the focus of this year’s Partner Summit with a theme of “Future Ready” and shares his perspective that this is the time to be the beacon and drive comprehensive lifecycle leadership with your customers. He was spot on with a recommendation to focus on IT connectivity, security, and automation.

Jason is talking about the automation of the end-customer, though the reality is that Cisco partners need to move at least at the same speed automating their processes.

The Difference with Automation and IT Connectivity

Last week’s blog from Pete Eggimann, VP of Customer Success at Netformx talks about “A single pane of glass” (SPOG) and asks what does that mean to you and your business? This is a key component to moving quickly and requires having the IT connectivity to pull data from multiple Cisco sources and other sources to see where the opportunities lie to enhance your customer’s experience and align with Cisco’s strategic direction.

Lifecycle Selling Simplified

Pete highlights in an example the significant financial and operational efficiency of a SPOG in rebate and incentive management. When you consider Cisco’s new Lifecycle Incentives program (LCI), it takes you to a whole new level to increase profitability with LCI incentives to drive software use, adoption, and expansion. It’s difficult for partners to stay on top of ongoing changes and identify LCI Use opportunities early in the sales lifecycle, especially if they don’t have easy availability to all the data. I recommend you check out Pete’s blog, and am excited to share that there are significant enhancements coming soon for managing LCI in ChannelXpert with features beyond what we have today.

Extend Profitability with Several Ways to Refresh

Having access to the data to identify Cisco Refresh opportunities and built in automation, is another way to supercharge your business and support a more sustainable planet. This is where Netformx can help to identify opportunities with automated alternates in DesignXpert. We are also introducing Cisco Refresh opportunities to the upcoming release of the Partner Incentive Tool (PIT).

However, if you are instead looking for opportunities to refresh equipment, ChannelXpert provides a summary of client assets, assets confirmed in use, replacement opportunities, and converted sales revenue. Users also have visibility to the value of expiring, expired, or obsolete SKUs provided in a SPOG.

Do you need help with a digital-first approach and automating the manual processes that slow you down and delay you from moving at the speed of your customer? Contact sales@netformx.com for a chat to help you get “Future Ready”.