Best practices to earn Lifecycle Incentives from savvy Cisco Partners

I talk to partners all the time. Some are having great success capturing Lifecycle Incentive (LCI) rewards, and others are lagging. Let’s start with a few questions to see if you fall into the savvy category for capturing LCI rewards.

• Are you waiting to create CSP’s until after the sales process?
• Are you slow to deliver Proof of Performance for Use?
• Are you missing Annuity Opportunities because you can’t get the data fast enough?
• Are LCI Opportunities being denied, and you can’t find proof of eligibility?
• Are you finding that your due dates are inaccurate in the enrollment portal?
• Are you having trouble tracking your Opportunities, Plans and Activities by Subtrack?
• Are you struggling to align with Cisco’s strategy to secure timely renewals?

If you can say NO to these questions, then you probably have visibility to the right information at all stages of the partner journey. Congratulations! But if you say YES to any of these questions than this is where we can help. Savvy partners are leveraging Netformx automation tools for various stages of the Cisco Lifecycle racetrack to have the important information they need to be more successful in all of these challenging areas.

 

Need → Purchase

Is your CSM team engaged with your sales team for early LCI insights?

Partners are finding that when they connect the CSM team with the sales team during the sales cycle there are significant benefits. But the game changer is when the CSM team has automatic full visibility into the LCI Pipeline of Approved Deals without relying on the sales team for information.

You may know how powerful the Pipeline Insight Tool (PIT) is in providing insights into your presales business. Its financial analysis of Estimates and Deals ensures you are maximizing both the Lifecycle Incentive program and VIP calculations.

Partners leveraging PIT experience key LCI benefits, such as:

• Easily identifying LCI eligible SKUs on approved Deals and Estimates
• Visibility into their potential LCI reward pipeline
• Segmenting opportunities by Use and Adopt incentives

But partners uncovered several unexpected advantages of PIT:

• One best practice is to set up automated weekly emails with LCI-eligible reports—no weekly login required!
• Since Netformx provides automated access to LCI data at the Deal approval stage, partners are documenting their conversations about challenges, goals, and desired outcomes that helps close the Deal, delighting their end-customers and showing they care.
• They also get an early jump on the 90-day window for CSP submissions by starting their planning before the Deal is closed.
• This early notice gives the partner time to restructure the deal, if it is short of the minimum threshold to be LCI eligible.

Onboard → Optimize

Are you missing some steps to ensure you collect your LCI rewards?

Having automated access and visibility to their LCI opportunities, with a streamlined process to manage the reward capture has helped many partners to be more successful in collecting their LCI rewards. We hear that they are having significant success staying on top of their LCI motions with LifecycleXpert. This is because of being able to analyze and prioritize LCI opportunities, determine where to take action on plans and activities, milestones and due dates, and track payments. They say it has simplified the entire LCI process.

Partners have shared that they were typically handling their LCI motions manually and only periodically due to lack of data and the time required to sort through the data once they were able to get it. But automating data acquisition and analysis has really changed the dynamic of capturing rewards.

• In the first week of using Netformx tools, a mid-sized partner found 3 Adopt opportunities (at $20K each) that they didn’t know existed.
• Deanna Davenport, Director of Lifecycle Services at ConvergeOne shared this comment: “It is easy to track our success with the program thanks to at-a-glance analysis, charting, and reporting of our historical and new opportunities. Netformx LifecycleXpert enables us to take a bird’s eye view and to really manage our LCI program rather than getting lost in the details of data acquisition and analysis. That is a huge benefit to us.”

Renew → Advocate

Are you achieving the ultimate goal of completing a timely renewal?

The beauty of what Cisco is doing with the LCI program is to keep you engaged with your end-customers throughout the process. That is great for your relationship with the customer and means the renewal doesn’t come as a surprise. Partners are finding that staying on top of the entire renewal process by leveraging AssetXpert is key for several reasons:

• One customer commented “With Netformx AssetXpert we no longer need to dedicate a person to dump Cisco data and then slice and dice it. AssetXpert’s central repository of customer information is a huge time-saver and a game-changer that would be very hard to move away from. AssetXpert addresses all of our biggest problems and inefficiencies.”
• Additionally, partners have shared that sorting through multiple naming conventions can be a nightmare for renewals. By leveraging the AssetXpert mapping tool they are easily able to consolidate all customer name variations instead of scouring contracts manually.
• With a customer centric view, of both SmartNet contracts and software subscriptions partners claim they can more readily and clearly find opportunities for expansion and growth.

The Customer Lifecycle

How do you plan to Supercharge your LCI Motions?

CSM teams are leveraging our automation tools to analyze and prioritize LCI reward submissions throughout the customer journey. With visibility to all the data to properly plan during presales, they definitely have a much better grasp on the LCI motions required to manage activation and adoption post-sales and ensure timely renewals. Savvy partners are seeing the advantage of the Power of 3, combining the Pipeline Insight Tool, LifecycleXpert, and AssetXpert, to automate their entire lifecycle management process, significantly increase their reward capture and ensure a quality customer experience.

We are here to help you become a savvy partner who maximizes capturing all of your LCI rewards. If you want to hear more about how any or all of these tools can help you, feel free to reach out to your account manager or sales@netformx.com.

We would love to hear from you as well if you are finding creative ways to gain value from any of the Power of 3 solutions. Just let us know.