Building an Adoption Practice Leveraging a Customer Success Approach

For the first time ever, the Americas Partner Organization hosted Partner Xperience at Cisco Live in Orlando last month – a powerful event for both our resellers and ecosystem partners. It was very exciting and, in my opinion, an inflection point for all of us. During the week, we engaged with Cisco partners of all types on how to “change the conversation” with customers to align and deliver digital business outcomes they really are demanding from us.  As I mentioned in my keynote, according to IDC this is a $1.7T opportunity for us!

Driving full adoption of our complete solutions is a foundational critical success factor we all need to be firmly committed to if our customers are going to derive the financial, experiential, customer service and transformational benefits they signed up for when they invested in our digital solutions.

It’s not just about adoption of point solutions – it’s about Customer Success!

Cisco has made no secret about wanting to deliver customer value faster. Building world-class hardware with software layered on top enables technology updates right away – delivering customer business outcomes faster.

For example, a partner delivering a business outcome might be integrating a secure network with wireless access solution, patient record systems and nurse call systems in a hospital. The real win for everyone is the adoption of the complete solution – not just adoption of the Cisco products that helped build the solution.

Customers demand successful outcomes of their investments. A customer success approach and culture strengthens the ability to optimize the customer experience by engaging throughout the lifecycle of Land. Adopt. Expand. Renew. This fuels customer success – ultimately experiencing all the benefits of the solution they implemented – and coming back for more! Adoption is an integral part of customer success. It allows partners to build trusted relationships by monitoring and maintaining customer health, which in turn increases renewal rates, loyalty and expansion opportunities.

Profitability and Financial Impact

Partners with customer success practices see significant increases in renewal rate revenue, as well as in expansion-related revenues and new sales revenues. Ninety-percent of the profit comes after the initial sale in a software/SaaS world (Boston Consulting Group 2017).  What I love most about the chart above, is that in year 5 the annual revenue is nearly 2.5 times higher when a customer success practice is in place.

Next Steps

We’ve made it our charter to drive successful customer outcomes through adoption of Cisco solutions – driving business results for Cisco and our partners through renewal, expansion and loyalty. We’ve created adoption programs enabling partners to justify, build and optimize their Cisco adoption practices profitably.

Reach out to your partner account manager today to start capitalizing on digitization and take a moment to check out these programs designed just for you:

• Learn more about our Lifecycle Advisor Program
• Take advantage of our Lifecycle Advantage Program
• Check out our Customer SuccessHub

Let’s build and strengthen our muscle with this this important practice capability. We all win. Our customers win as they realize all the benefits they anticipated when they signed up. Our partners and Cisco win with profitable, high growth, long-term customer relationships.