The EDGE360 team has heard from many channel experts about how the IT channel is dramatically shifting toward a subscription-based economy, and the importance of a well-executed renewals process cannot be understated. “When you have a renewal coming up – and remember, everything renews now – you should expect to get hard questions about whether the promised value was delivered,” said Joe Vlajcic, Director of Cisco Customer Experience for SYNNEX Comstor, in a previous discussion with EDGE360. “If you promised the solution would save them money or staff hours, you had better be prepared to demonstrate how it actually did that.”
The key in answering to the growing subscription economy lies in optimizing your renewals process, according to Ty Jenks, Distribution Renewals Manager with Cisco. In his role, Jenks is responsible for the development and support of his assigned distribution partners’ overall renewals practice. “I’m here to help guide, understand, interpret, and facilitate tools to develop best practices in that overall renewal motion.”
Jenks informed us about an upcoming webinar that addresses the mindset VARs should employ in their current renewals process. Titled “Recurring Revenue – The Shift to Lifecycle and How to Get Ahead of Your Competitors on the Racetrack,” this EDGE series webinar looks at how the overall IT business is moving to a consumption-based recurring revenue model and how partners can best align with their customers. “This will help them upsell and cross sell to those customers and, most importantly, retain them as customers year after year,” Jenks explained.
The value of better understanding the evolving renewals process is especially prominent in a complex and robust ecosystem like Cisco’s. Consistency and clear communication for VARs is crucial to strengthening customer relationships under these circumstances. Webinars like this one help ensure consistency and accessibility for the Cisco partner community.
In our conversation, Jenks also pointed to the specific opportunities that are unique to the renewal period and how a more software-based consumption model fuels those opportunities. “The shift to a software-based consumption model is the Cisco direction,” he stated. “On the Customer Lifecycle racetrack, the ‘renewal’ is an important customer inflection point where new solutions can be offered and existing solutions can be supported based on the needs of their specific business.”
Jenks encourages anyone in the Cisco community who works directly with customers, business development teams, and business practice managers to join the conversation on June 2 and learn about the power of a modernized renewals approach and how to stay in the race on the customer lifecycle racetrack.
Cisco partners can register here for the webinar.
