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I recently completed my three-year tenure as a Partner Success Executive (PSE), one of several roles I’ve held during my 17-year career at Cisco . Over these years, my Partner Success team engaged with Cisco’s top channel partners globally and executed several Customer Success programs. We worked closely with our channel partner executive teams to grow their software and services revenue, align their growth priorities, and establish a robust execution plan.

Customer Success is all about retention and how you deliver ‘value’ to your customers throughout the product lifecycle, from onboarding to optimisation. In order to replicate Cisco’s Customer Success playbook with our channel partners, my team drove the following initiatives.

Transition to Premium Services

Enabling our channel partner to transition their customers services contracts from legacy services (SNTC, SSPT,PSS)* into premium services (ST,PAS)* was the key goal in this initiative. These premium services have advanced product telemetry capabilities, lifecycle management, personalised expertise, and AI-driven support case handling. This empowers our channel partners to be proactive, predictive, and prescriptive, enhancing the efficiency of customer IT network operations. On top of this partner can build value added services to drive differentiation and profitable growth.

To assist our partners in this transition, my team guided them in understanding the $ATR (Available To Renew) data categorised by service types, architecture, and customer accounts. We also shared additional Cisco rebates available for partners who successfully transitioned their customers to premium services. Quarterly pipeline review and sales alignment activities to discuss opportunities, challenges and any additional enablement activities that the partner needed were executed with the partners.

De-risking Software Renewals

Cisco has developed a 150+ parameters machine learning based renewal-risk model with input parameters like product usage, offer mix, lifecycle stage, customer sentiment and so on. The model outputs list of customers that falls under either high risk, medium risk and low-risk renewal categories.

With careful account planning for medium and high risk customers, our team’s charter was to develop an adoption strategy for the selected use cases. We identified customers with uncovered or unaddressed $ATR (Available To Renew) by either Cisco or the partner and help assign partner CSM (Customer Success Manager) to drive adoption. Furthermore, $ATR data is reviewed by time horizon, architecture and sub-architectures to prioritise use cases for adoption.

Executing adoption strategy also involved working with partners sales, customer success and renewal teams to prepare a prioritised renewal pipeline. Prioritisation happens based on the value, urgency and architecture. Then based on the adoption status of these customers they are classified as high, medium and low risk customer. The adoption strategy is then executed.

Accelerate and Monetise Adoption

My team went a step further from the traditional adoption strategies that involved helping customer to accelerate their stalled use cases and earn partner incentives. We helped partners build differentiated services for the architectural use cases that not only drove adoption plus also helped partner monetize this services along the product lifecycle. we build a innovation methodology that brought together partners pre-sales, delivery, customer success and support teams together to ideate on new services across specific business verticals and business process. I have written a detailed blog earlier on this innovation.

Transforming Partner Services via Cisco’s Automation Portfolio

Here, our goal was to pick some of the fast growing services within Cisco automation & insight services portfolio and incubate within the partner’s services business. My team enabled partners with business alignment, internal lab build out, service design and co-delivery model and go-to-market activities. The partner was then be able to sell and co-deliver these automation services with their value-added-services thus increasing their delivery efficiency and profitability.

Conclusion

More partner initiatives like partner EA (Enterprise Agreement) adoption practice is in the works. In summary, these initiatives has been fruitful to the partners software and service business in driving internal efficiency and enhance customer experience.

Appendix

*List of Partner resell and Partner branded Services and Support offers

• Partner resell offers
  • SNTC – Smart Net Total Care
  • SSPT – Solution Support
  • ST – Cisco Success Tracks (New)
• Partner branded offers
  • PSS – Partner Support Services
  • PAS – Partner Advanced Support (New)
  • PST – Partner Success Tracks (future release)