2020 reminded us of the power of technology. In 2021, accelerating your customers' digital transformation will be key to your business success. Cisco has developed several Sales Plays to significantly enhance your ability to meet your customers' digital business outcome needs, especially when you leverage the Cisco Customer Experience (CX) offers aligned with them.

It's essential to consider two things carefully to deliver the end-to-end solutions that meet your customer business outcome requirements:

• What is the best cross-architectural solution for your customers' transformational goals?
• What services will your customers need to adopt to realize the solutions' total business value throughout its lifecycle?

The Solution and Cisco Sales Plays

Let's start with the solution. At Cisco, we've developed tools to help you identify the technologies needed to build the solutions your customers want. These new tools are organized into our Cisco Sales Plays and designed to simplify, standardize, and validate your customers' outcomes.

Our Sales Plays include industry use cases, recommended ecosystem partners, and CXO discussion guides to help you have rich, outcome-based conversations with your customers. They also provide best practices to enable you to focus on delivering outcomes at each stage of your customer's lifecycle while differentiating your value as a Cisco partner.

Services Augmented by Cisco CX

Cisco's CX Partner Transformation to Lifecycle initiative includes a strategic focus on building partners' capabilities and capacity to accelerate lifecycle and drive mutual growth and profitability. Assets from this initiative guide you on enhancing your services to accelerate the adoption of the technology solutions in the Sales Plays, and your customers can achieve the objectives outlined. If you do not have all the required capabilities in house, there are new ways to work with Cisco CX to augment your services offers and provide the end-to-end solutions your customers need.

The key here is to position lifecycle services when you sell the solutions outlined in one of the Sales Plays. Start the lifecycle motion at the very beginning of the journey. During presales, set expectations about your customer's services to realize the solutions' business value fully.

Example: The Trusted Workplace Use Case

Many of our customers are facing the challenge of returning safely to their offices. Currently, we have a cross-architectural use case called the Trusted Workplace to help. From a technology perspective, this use case includes Cisco Collaboration solutions (Webex and Webex endpoints) and Cisco intent-based networking as part of the foundational platform to achieve a robust and resilient workplace.

From a services perspective, as a Cisco specialized partner, you have the capabilities to design and install this solution. Additionally, you can position Cisco CX offers, such as Solution Support and Business Critical Services, to complement your professional services, as you support your customers throughout their lifecycle.

Leverage Cisco Sales Plays and Cisco CX

By utilizing Cisco's available Sales Plays, along with our CX offers, you will provide your customers digital business outcomes that increase their competitiveness and have measurable returns on investment. You will also deliver them the right solutions and the full suite of services required to produce the desired outcome.

Sales Plays give you a set of tools that help you up-level your conversations with the C-level and lines of business, opening access to new budgets and larger deals. They also validate standardized business outcomes and testing of the foundational platforms so you can be more profitable and confident in driving adoption.

By leveraging Cisco CX offers to complement or augment your services, you can confidently set the stage for valuable conversations. When services are considered and positioned from the beginning of the lifecycle, you not only create a seamless renewal motion, you also build additional cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Get started today on accelerating your customer's digital transformation with these three steps:

• Learn more about the Cisco Sales Plays, and CX offers that align best with your priorities and capabilities.
• Identify the technology solutions, your services, and the CX offers you need to drive a complete end-to-end solution experience for your customers.
• Engage your Partner Account Manager (PAM) to create your plan of action and visit SuccessHub for additional CX resources.

While 2020 revealed the impact of technology as an enabler of business continuity, it is evident that digital transformation initiatives will be the backbone to succeed in 2021. With Cisco CX, you will be ready to accelerate and prosper this year and beyond!