How To Leverage Partners To Drive Customer Success
By Rob Spee, Channel Journeys Consulting
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Hope Galley Sales Director of Software and Services, Cisco Headquarters San Jose, CA Year Founded 1984 Mission Shape the future of the Internet by creating unprecedented value and opportunity for our customers, employees, investors, and ecosystem partners. Channel Experience 19 years |
"It's always been more than just a sale. How are our customers using the technology? What business concerns are we meeting? Are they loving what they're doing?" -Hope Galley, Cisco
Cisco is an excellent example of a vendor that places a huge importance on customer success. And they are transforming their channel to play a front-seat role.
Customer success is more important than ever with the transition to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. SaaS vendors are learning to use partners to drive new sales. But most have not yet realized the important role partners can play in customer success.
Hope Galley, Sales Director of Software and Services in Cisco's America's Partner Organization, is fired up on partner and customer success. She shared her thoughts on this topic on my Channel Journeys podcast. Hope describes the critical role partners play. And she shares how Cisco is enabling partners to drive customer success through an innovative partner program.
Key Take-Aways
- Customer success is a lot more than the initial sale. Post-sales support, adoption, and expansion are vitally important to you and your customers' growth and success.
- As more companies move to the SaaS model, customer obsession is even more important to reduce churn.
- Start by taking a closer look at your partners. Look at their staff, their business processes, their financial incentives, how they recognize revenue, how adaptive they are, and how open they are to change.
- Create a program through which you offer your partners opportunities and incentives to land, adopt, expand, and renew business for you. Track key metrics and reward them for their success.
Take Action — One Thing You Can Do Today
Pick up a copy of Customer Success to learn more about why your business success is linked to the success of your customers. And learn more about Hope and the Cisco's Lifecycle Advisor Program by listening to Hope’s complete Channel Journeys podcast.
About The Author
Rob Spee is founder and CEO of Channel Journeys Consulting and host of the Channel Journeys podcast. Rob applies his channel expertise to help clients create and execute channel strategies to accelerate revenue growth. His global channel experience spans from building channels at startups to vendors and distributors like Arrow, BMC, Carbonite, and SAS. Follow Rob on Twitter and LinkedIn.