Help Customers Unlock their Collaboration Potential

Often times, one of your best bets to expand business is to look at your own existing customers and their current investments. Taking the time to analyze how many of your customers are actively using Cisco Collaboration products is the first step. Are your customers fully trained? Are all of the applications activated and being used on a regular basis across multiple devices? Going beyond your IT relationships and talking to line-of-business executives about how to use collaboration tools in their daily work lives will expand their use cases, drive greater adoption and unlock their collaboration potential. What it means for you is greater long-term sales, deeper customer relationships and increased business relevance.

Get Your Customers Current
By moving your customers to the latest version of Cisco Unified Communications Manager, you can help them take advantage of more powerful collaboration capabilities such as native connectivity TelePresence and mobile video on any device (including the new Jabber for Android), and also achieve a lower cost of management. The Cisco Drive to 9 initiative makes upgrading your customers much easier for you. We’ve created a simpler, streamlined licensing and ordering process for upgrades – that leads to cost and time savings for you. We also have a new tablet-based tool – CUCM Upgrade Central – that lets you analyze your customer’s readiness, determine a recommended path, and estimate the potential savings.

Accelerate Activation for Faster Time to ValueSales strategy in the era of the Old Normal was about developing relationships at a new account, outlining the potential ROI for your major IT project, closing the deal, and hunting for the next one. In the New Normal, ongoing account development depends more on ensuring activation and adoption across your customers on an ongoing basis. By helping your customers quickly activate their products you can accelerate how soon they begin realizing value and productivity gains from their collaboration investment. If you land and activate Jabber licenses, for example, you can more quickly expand to other collaboration product sales, or even services revenue opportunities such as Jabber integration with Salesforce.com, SAP or Google Mail. Cisco has a new Software Activation Incentive to help you with this process. The program is available in the United States, Canada and Asia Pacific, Japan and China (APJC). Visit the Partner Central SAI website for more information and to get started.

Adoption Is the New Account Management
Adoption of tools such as Cisco Jabber and WebEx leads to an even greater desire for more collaboration, such as Cisco TelePresence. One way to demonstrate value is to always use collaboration when interacting with your customers. For example, use video for all of your remote meetings to increase engagement. WebEx-enabled TelePresence easily makes video meetings available to any user on any device. You can also hold workshops for your customers’ employees to explain how to improve meeting effectiveness using WebEx. Widespread use of WebEx will increase the likelihood of annual renewals, recurring revenue and more predictable revenue streams for your business. Leverage our series of email templates to help encourage your customers to learn and use the wealth of Cisco WebEx capabilities.

Learn about our latest collaboration product and partner program updates at one of the Global Collaboration Launch October Partner Webcasts in your region. Both partners and customers can also watch a live announcement and keynote address broadcast by Rowan Trollope, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration Technology Group, on October 23. Register here.

Inspecting your collaboration installed base is a sure bet to incremental revenue and increased customer stickiness – what are you waiting for?