Three Ways to Make Money with Software

Digital Transformation. We hear that phrase a lot these days, and for good reason. Companies are focused on delivering the best digital customer and workforce experiences using technology. Most of the time, this digitization is enabled by software.

As this accelerates, are you prepared to keep up?

More importantly, are you poised to take advantage?

Software creates a tremendous opportunity for you to move from selling boxes to selling software solutions that address your customers’ specific needs. As their consumption requirements shift, we can help drive new opportunities for you to build out your software practice and increase profitability.

Here are three ways you can make money with Cisco software.

Expand your software and solution sales motions

You probably sell software today. Most likely you sell Cisco WebEx, Unified Communications, security, and analytics software. There’s more. By selling Cisco ONE infrastructure software for specific use cases, you can help customers achieve their business objectives. To maximize profitability, expand your software selling capabilities by helping customers choose the best buying model for their business goals.

For example, you may sell collaboration Enterprise Licensing Agreements (ELAs) with unlimited access to software. But do you understand the merits of offering software through other flexible consumption models? This includes software subscriptions, or the ability for customers to consume software licenses and services against an available balance up to a pre-defined ceiling of usage. Thus, you can grow your sales by using the flexibility of buying models to elevate the conversation to why the customer is buying, not just what they are buying.

Go beyond the sale by offering Lifecycle Advisor Professional Services

Landing the sale is just the first step. That’s where the relationship begins. By offering Lifecycle Advisor professional services, you stay connected with your customers as their trusted advisor, while growing your revenue, and ultimately make the renewal a “non-event.”

Building an adopt, expand, renew Lifecycle Advisor practice is critical for your success.

The first step after deployment is to drive Adoption of the software, when customers realize and appreciate the value of their investment.

Then you can Expand your business by selling more licenses, identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and developing a digitization roadmap for the customer.

When it’s time to Renew licenses or subscriptions, you’ll be that trusted advisor who has been with them along the journey.

To develop a practice, we advise you to hire Customer Success Managers, invest in Software Asset Management tools, and define adoption use-case catalogs. This approach improves customer loyalty and differentiates you from competition, and increases sales pull through. It will also provide higher rebates and incentives from Cisco.

Develop custom software integration capabilities

Your customers want their software to be worth the investment. They want new customer experiences that differentiate them from their competition, new employee experiences that help them attract and retain top talent, and new manufacturing processes that save money.

Software developers are finding that an agile, DevOps approach to application development must be adopted to meet the needs of lines of business, which can shift quickly depending on market demands. Rarely can IT departments design, build, and deploy applications at the speed of business. To meet these challenges, you should build competency as a Software Integrator.

There is a significant opportunity for you to expand your services with software development capabilities to help customers with advanced integration of enterprise applications running on Cisco infrastructure. This means having access to software code and using Cisco APIs for Collaboration, IoT and Data Center – available through our DevNet developer community . You can build your own practice by hiring software integrators, team with other Cisco Partner Ecosystem firms that specialize in software development, or acquire an advanced software integration company.

Growing your software revenues and high-margin, high-value services means investing. But the results can be impressive for your business. As we continue to evolve our programs, enablement, and incentives, we want to help you along this rapid transformational journey. Let’s do this together.

Wherever you are, take the next step.

Get started with Cisco Software

Visit our Cisco One Software Community to join the conversation

As always, feel free to chat with me on Twitter or provide any questions and feedback below in the comments