Cisco Partners Have a New Superpower: Introducing Renewals Commerce Automation

One of the Biggest Renewals Innovations in Cisco’s History Is Now Available for Our Partners

Superhero movies have been huge the past few years. I’m a big fan. When it comes to the real world, we all dream of tapping into superhero strength from time to time. I can only imagine how superhuman speed and strength would impact my workday. Come to think of it, Renewals Commerce Automation, launched as part of the Lifecycle Advantage program, brings superhuman renewal powers to Cisco partners at a time when the channel has never been more complex.

Designed to Drive and Scale Recurring Revenue

As recurring revenue becomes more important to our partners’ businesses, developing a best-in-class renewal practice is imperative. But it’s no secret that renewals present challenges, particularly in the “long tail” or low-dollar space, where a high-volume of renewal opportunities exist. Unfortunately, because of the time and resources it takes to identify and transact these renewals, in the past partners have often ignored or even overlooked them.

Still, capturing long tail renewals can add up to substantial revenue for your business due to their sheer volume. They also drive partner profitability, rebates and customer satisfaction: they can be the glue that connects you with your customers over the long haul.

With Renewals Commerce Automation, we’ve taken all of this into account. By listening to our mutual customers we found out the #1 reason customers don’t renew is because they didn’t know they had a renewal available. And the #1 thing customers say they want is a renewal notification. They also say their preferred way of being notified of a renewal is via email. And lastly, most small business customers would prefer to simply order online, assuming they can edit their order just the way they want it. This aligns with TSIA’s recommendations for making the renewal process as frictionless as possible, especially for low-dollar, long tail contracts.

In developing this new release, we also talked to our partners. Your message was loud and clear: there are too many Cisco renewals to manage. Lower dollar renewals can be highly profitable but they require a lot of work on the part of the partner, which makes them a low priority. We recognized that to transact them in a way that makes sense for all of us – Cisco, our partners, and our customers — we needed to come up with a streamlined, simplified experience, backed by accurate data and automation to create scale.

Streamlined, Simplified Renewals

Lifecycle Advantage, now available with Renewals Commerce Automation, does all of these things. Now, our partners have access to all of their customers’ upcoming renewals in one place (the Lifecycle Advantage Portal). And via the Portal, it’s easy for you to orchestrate the automation of co-branded renewal reminder emails sent to your customers.

You also have the power to control who the reminders go to and who they don’t go to. And with the new Renewals Commerce Automation capability, you can move beyond just reminding customers to renew; you can also deliver an automatically-generated quote (using your own specific pricing), which customers can view, edit and click to order online. When your customer requests to order, you’ll be notified with the order details, and can then complete the transaction directly with the customer. It takes only a few seconds.

Cisco Partners React

Compugen Director of Communications and Collaboration Lorraine Bush had this to say about how the program is helping them scale and capture recurring revenue in the SMB space:  “Having Renewals Commerce Automation added to the Lifecycle Advantage program has allowed our customers to purchase their low-dollar renewals with almost zero touch from my renewals team.  We are seeing contracts renewing that we would not have had the cycles to work on, as my team is focused on the larger opportunities within the quarter.”      

And Insight Senior Manager of Warranty Cheryl Fischer said, “Commerce Automation has made a huge impact on our SMB Warranty Renewal business. Everyone tends to get tunnel vision into those Enterprise and Commercial renewals, losing sight of the large portion of our SMB space.  Commerce Automation has helped us create the right kind of Insight to ALL our clients without requiring us to fund additional headcount. Automation breeds success and Cisco has come up with a process that has proven to help us increase our Renewal Rate metrics and gives us better line of sight into our warranty business.”

Sign Up – It’s Free

Lifecycle Advantage is built for today’s subscription business models. It allows our partners to digitize and automate the renewal experience, accelerate product and service adoption, facilitate upsells, reduce costs and scale recurring revenue. It’s no wonder this new release is being called Cisco’s biggest renewals revolution in over 30 years and a game-changer for our industry.

In my view, this all adds up to incredible superhuman powers for our partners, and best of all – it’s free. You can learn more and sign up here today.