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If you haven’t heard about Cisco Lifecycle Selling, it is about conversations with customers around outcomes and use cases alongside product feature, scale and performance during the sales cycle. Due to the industry shift into subscription and recurring revenue, Lifecycle selling is gaining traction. Partners equipped with industry knowledge and have a compelling story that can tie technology, architecture and use cases to customer business outcomes have strong prospects to land the sales deal.

But whats also important during the Lifecycle Selling motion is to agree on a data handshake with the customer that would help partner across several fronts during the operation and renewals stage. A data handshake between the partner and the customer involve fulfilling the partner’s promise to deliver on the agreed business outcomes in exchange for the telemetry data from the customer’s infrastructure via CX (Customer Experience) Cloud platform. Without the telemetry data from the customer’s network it becomes hard for the partner to optimize service delivery, drive adoption and monetize on new service offers.

Data handshake is agreeably hard one to successfully execute due to customer’s concern on security and privacy concerns in this current environment of cybersecurity breaches. So this has to be a 2-way street where the customer share their raw data and partners repaying them with optimal ROI. Cisco partner’s can adopt the following approaches to earn their customer trust :

Explain what data is stored, where it is stored, how it is processed, and how it is disposed.
The data stored includes information about customer network health and performance. It is securely stored in dedicated servers using encryption measures to ensure confidentiality.

Explain how the partner can help the customers operations with the data and insights. Examples: Deliver outcome and KPIs, drive adoption and so on.
Partners can support customer operations by delivering actionable outcomes and key performance indicators (KPIs) based on the insights obtained from the data. They can also drive adoption of best practices and provide strategic guidance to maximize the use of the insights for operational improvement.

Explain how the partner will perform necessary intervention actions to advance customer goals and objectives if the necessary data is available
With access to the necessary data, partners can perform targeted intervention actions to advance customer goals and objectives. This may include tailored recommendations and proactive support to help customers achieve their desired outcomes.

Along with the above, partners can offer promotional service offers like Accelerators and discounting strategies to do a successful data handshake.

Partner’s are better off when the data handshake is executed at the sales cycle rather than at the onboarding or Success planning stage.

Cisco partner success team around the world are highly experienced in helping partners to align data handshake conversations with their customers and shares required content. Please contact your cisco account team for more details.

References:

B4B : How Technology and Big Data Are Reinventing Customer-Supplier Relationship’ – Authors J.B Wood, Todd Hewlin and Thomas Lah – TSIA (Technology Services Industry Association)