Now Cisco Services and Ingram Micro offer a broad range of resources to help you make services an ongoing source of revenue—and grow your services business long-term.
Smart capabilities available through Cisco Services’ main service offering, Smart Net Total Care, deliver insights to help you prevent network issues instead of merely responding to them. This is vital to addressing requirements across your customers’ physical, virtual and cloud-based environments. You’ll not only provide better customer service but also improve customer loyalty and retention.
See why selling services with Cisco Smart Net Total Care is a smart business strategy.
For starters, the Ingram Micro team will help you figure out which Cisco Services will best address your customers’ needs. Then we’ll manage the quoting, ordering and contracts for you—always making sure you and your customers get the most value from your service options.
In addition, the resources below will give you lots of insights into selling services smarter and advising your customers on the best service options for their needs.
Technical services are an excellent way for your customers to get the best possible value and efficiencies from their IT investment. Services help them:
Cut costs
Reduce risk
Make their networks business-ready
Increase productivity
Gain confidence
See why Cisco Smart Net Total Care is so valuable to customers—from SMB to midmarket and enterprise.
Your customers may not know the full cost of network downtime to their business. But as their IT advisor and someone they trust, you should make them aware of what they stand to lose. Network downtime may only last a few minutes or a few hours, but the business impact and costs can be huge.
Research firm Gartner has estimated that the average cost of network downtime is $5,600 per minute, or more than $300,000 per hour.
In light of these figures, the many benefits of technical services for your customers will easily justify the cost of purchasing them.
how downtime impacts business
sales
No Access=
No Conversions
PRODUCTIVITY
Employees in Paperless/Server-Based Workforce Can't Get Anything Done
DATA
Data Corruption or Loss Nearly 1 in 2 small business (2-20 employees) have endured data loss
SATISFACTION
No Sales =
Unhappy Customers
Attaching Cisco technical services to every sale is a smart way to do business for many reasons. It can help you:
Ingram Micro helps you make the most out of your services sales. We function as your liaison with the Cisco Services team and work with you on an ongoing basis to ensure you’re matching services to your customers’ needs. We also help you maximize your sales potential to ensure you’re leveraging Cisco Services to the best strategic advantage. We created this playbook to offer the insights you need to sell services smarter because we’re committed to helping you grow your services business.
Cisco Smart Net Total Care, part of Cisco's technical services portfolio, combines Cisco's industry-leading and award-winning technical services with an extra level of actionable business intelligence. It’s designed to help customers lower support costs and improve efficiencies and network availability.
Through the smart capabilities in the Smart Net Total Care portal, customers receive:
Your customers may not understand the difference between the two. But they need to know that a warranty does not provide adequate coverage to help them realize the full value of their IT investments.
Warranties simply guarantee the integrity of the product and offer the assurance that Cisco will replace or repair it if there’s a defect. It does not address issues relating to the proper operation of devices or systems.
A service contract is the best option to enable your customers to succeed long-term with their technology. Without one they’ll have to pay high transaction fees and wait longer for delivery of replacement parts (if they do not self-spare). And they won’t have the benefit of 24-hour access to the Cisco technical experts who can help to rapidly resolve network problems and keep software current—or access to the Cisco.com knowledge base.
In short, service contracts enhance your customers’ overall IT experience — and provide rapid response to problems that can affect network availability and reliability. By relying on a warranty alone, your customers’ businesses will hemorrhage hard-earned dollars in the event of a network outage—a scenario they can’t afford.
Customers often object to purchasing technical support services. Most of the time, this is because they do not understand the true value of the services to their business. Shown here are some common customer concerns and suggestions for how to respond to them. These are merely suggestions. Feel free to adjust your responses based on your customers’ specific circumstances.
But remember, it’s easier to sell service early in the sales process.
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OBJECTION:
“We should wait to order services until the warranty expires or rely on the limited lifetime warranty when available.”
RESPONSE:
If the issue isn’t a defective part, warranty will not provide the coverage your customer needs. Customers may have to pay high transactional fees and wait longer for delivery of replacement parts.
Your customer will not have:
Multiyear service agreements, which typically last three years, benefit both you and your customers.
They help your customers:
Selling them helps you:
Cisco Software Support consists of Cisco Software Support Service (SWSS), Software Application Support (SAS) and Software Application Support Plus Upgrades (SASU). It's a subscription-based offering that provides comprehensive coverage for software application products and suites.
Watch how Cisco Solution Support services can provide a single point of contact for all your service contracts—on most devices from most leading vendors.
With Cisco Solution Support, whatever the technical issue, you get centralized support from Cisco’s solution experts, who own your case from the first call to resolution. Even complex issues can be resolved on average 43% faster than with product support alone.
Cisco partners with leading vendors—Apple, BMC Software, Citrix, Dell EMC, IBM, McAfee, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, VMware and others—to offer a broad range of product support.
Cisco Solution Support can also help increase the size of your deals and recurring revenue—and improve customer satisfaction. Learn how:
Partner Sales Acceleration: Solution Support Services (login required)
With the customizable Smart Net Total Care portal, you can view support information for your customers when and how you want to. It’s an easy, efficient way to access critical device, contract and alerts data.
Hover over 
below to explore what’s available.
See how the Cisco Smart Net Total Care Collector offers the visibility to proactively support your customers’ infrastructure.
Consultative service to enable and support Smart Capabilities
Cotermination means arranging for all service contracts to be renewed at the same time. It’s designed to reduce the time account managers and customers spend negotiating contract renewals.
Cotermination benefits you by:
The Ingram Micro team is here to make the process easy and seamless for you. We’ll start by helping you figure out which Cisco services will best address your customers’ needs. Then we’ll manage the quoting, ordering and contracts for you—always making sure you and your customers are getting the most value from your service options.
The renewals process is an important time to emphasize the value and return on investment that services provide to your customer’s business:
Service contract renewals offer several key benefits:
Service contract renewals are important to your business because they:
Pursuing renewal opportunities with your existing customers enables you to re-engage and keep informed about their business challenges, uncover service opportunities, and position yourself as a trusted advisor.
Let’s say, you attach service on 60% of products sold in year 1.
With a 70% annual renewal rate, you know less about the products on your customer’s network every year. That’s because each year, fewer products will have a technical service contract.
After five years, all of the products you sold in year 1 are reaching end of life.
But now, you only have details about 15% of the products you sold. The rest are invisible.
So, how can you advise your customer on which products need replacing, where they are on the network or the risk they may pose to the business?
Without service, you expose your customer to competitive threats.
When service attach and renew rates are low, you lose an easy and predicable annuity revenue stream.
The grey arrows in the diagram show how more profit is lost every year. You can capture these lost profits by increasing your attach and renew rates—and start selling higher margin services by creating an efficient professional services practice.
The Cisco Services Partner Program provides resellers the opportunity to earn quarterly rebates based on attaining sales performance metrics, including:
Cisco Commerce Workspace Renewals (CCW-R) makes it easier than ever to generate quotes and order new or renewal services and software subscriptions—and even create service contracts. Through a single portal, part of the Cisco Commerce platform, you can do all this and more—quickly and accurately. Partners who have already used CCW-R report time savings of 30% to 40% with far fewer errors.
CCW-R eliminates many of the challenges long associated with renewing services and software—including complex quoting processes, lengthy error resolution processes and multiple platforms. All of which translates into greater productivity—and more time to spend on selling and growing your business.
Here are some statistics that underscore the value of services renewals.
75%
of Cisco resellers' overall profit comes from services.
3.5
the average number of times a Cisco Services contract is renewed.
10%
of Cisco resellers receive quarterly rebates for achieving pre-defined attach and renewal rates.
1%
of annual customer revenue is lost due to network downtime.
