Hope Galley: How to Leverage Partners to Drive Customer Success

Channel Journeys Podcast

As the IT channel transitions from large on-premise deals to smaller recurring revenue SaaS deals, customer success is more important than ever. And while vendors are very accustomed to using partners to drive new sales, many have not yet realized the important role partners can play in customer success.

In this podcast reboot, Hope Galley shares how Cisco is enabling partners to drive customer success through an innovative partner program. At the time of this interview, Hope was Sales Director of Software and Services in Cisco’s America’s Partner Organization. She is now the Cisco Meraki Global Sales Leader.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Cisco places a huge importance on customer success. Here’s what I learned from Hope on how they are transforming their channel to play a front-seat role.

• Customer success is a lot more than the initial sale. It’s about what comes after that. Post-sales support, adoption, and expansion are vitally important to you and your customers’ growth and success.
• As many companies move to the SaaS model, customer obsession is even more important to reduce churn and, better yet, reach negative churn.
• Start by looking at your partners and your partner ecosystem as a whole. 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.
• Cisco created the Lifecycle Advantage Program to enable partners to drive customer success. The purpose of the program is to align the partner’s services to the customers’ software life-cycle.

• With the Lifecycle Advantage Program, Cisco provides opportunities and incentive rewards to help partners land, adopt, expand, and renew business.
• Partners are evaluated for the program based on how committed they are to meeting with Cisco, going through the metrics, and whether they have some sort of customer success motion where they’ve been successful.

LINKS & RESOURCES

• Follow Hope on LinkedIn
• Pick up a copy of Customer Success.
• Read about the Cisco’s Lifecycle Advantage Program or watch the video
• Check out the TSIA blog to look at what they’re talking to customers about their leading industry indicators.

The post Hope Galley: How to Leverage Partners to Drive Customer Success first appeared on Channel Journeys.