Fix Cisco Quoting & Renewals

(CCW, CCW-R) | A Path Forward

Read time -2.5 minutes

Cisco CCW and CCW-R are essential tools for Cisco partners, but navigating them and generating usable quotes and renewals can be a time-consuming nightmare.

Especially for customers, because you have to send all this data back and forth on spreadsheets – it’s a mess.  Here in an excerpt from a Cisco customer on Reddit:

 

This thread is followed up by a comment by a customer saying he left his current VAR for another one for a $20,000,000 opportunity.  $20MM!

 

This entire process needs to get fixed.

Today we are going to paint a vision for a new and improved way to automate the process to run your Cisco practice and spend less time building quotes and renewing and upselling Cisco products to your customers.

It all starts with Cisco CCW and Cisco CCW-R

What is Cisco CCW and CCW-R:

•  

• • Cisco CCW: Cisco’s platform for configuring, pricing, and quoting Cisco solutions.
  • Cisco CCW-R: Specializes in managing and renewing these services.

Both provide data and quotes but access privileges differ significantly:

• • Partners: Comprehensive access to configure, quote, and manage renewals.
  • Customers: Limited access, primarily for viewing and approving quotes.

Tackling the Quoting Process:

While Cisco offers a great tool to quote and manage renewals, the process to get the data out of their system and into a usable quote a customer can view is slow and painful:

• • You have to download a spreadsheet from Cisco
  • You have to remove irrelevant columns
  • You have to import these spreadsheets into a CPQ or Quote Spreadsheet
  • You have to add serial numbers
  • You have to email your customer a quote and spreadsheet
  • They have to manually review it and determine what asset to renew or decommission
  • They have to send it back to you
  • You have to modify your quote
  • You have to send it back to them

This takes forever.

Add in the fact that most Cisco partners have 100s of customers and deals they are working on and it becomes a highly manual problem.

And the worst part….customers hate it.

Our Vision for Automation:

We envision an automated solution to significantly speed up and improve the quoting, review and approval process.

Step 1: Automate getting the data out of Cisco CCW and Cisco CCW-R

 

An API or Excel Template

• Giving you the ability to quickly pull in all the quote data, and strip out any unnecessary columns and minor items that don’t interest you and apply the serial numbers in-line to the quote.
• We see this happening in one click of a button.

Step 2: Streamline the way you can review renewals or quotes with customers

• Yes, if you want to send that spreadsheet, that’s great, but
• You will have the option to send your customer a link and for them to click on that link and see the assets that up for renewal – in your own white-label portal.
• They will be able to quickly select: renew, decommission and/or “I’d like to see upgrade options” on assets

It will look like this (this is demo account in our customer portal)

There are so many benefits of doing it this way

• You will save time
• Your customer will save time, and they’ll love you for it
• You will be able to respond faster to customers
• You will stand out and differentiate yourself from the competition
• You will have time to analyze the data for more service and upselling opportunities
• You will have more accurate quotes, because the data is pulled in without manual miskeys
• This all translates to more margin, recurring revenue and higher profitability for your VAR or MSP
• Each sales operations or renewal professional will be able to handle more renewals per person, because the system is doing more of the work

Transforming Renewal Teams:

The big unlock is automation like this frees sales operations and renewals teams to focus on:

• Training
• Upselling
• Exploring new client opportunities
• Running detailed asset queries for sales or pre-sales
• Enhancing customer service

Here is the good news…

We already have the technology, we just need to build the Cisco CCW integration.

• We have the quoting tool
• We have the IT Asset management software
• We have the customer portal
• We have contracts and renewal management
• We have security, white-label and a lot lot more (4 years worth of development from my previous VAR I ran and owner

 

We are looking for One Cisco Reseller Who Believes in this Vision.

Are you a reseller who is tired of dealing with these issues….

• Building manual quotes
• Wasting time going back and forth with customers
• Do you believe in automation and want to test self-service in your business?
• Do you believe the future is using this extra time and data to sell?

If you are this kind of person, we are looking for a partnership with a Cisco partner to connect our existing API to Cisco’s CCW API.

Together we can usher in a new era of efficiency and precision for MSPs and VARs interacting with Cisco CCW and CCW-R and you’ll get a front row seat to help drive the innovation.

If you are interested you can email our founder Reid here reid@owlytica.com or apply for our beta. Just put “let’s go” in the subject line and he’ll know what you are talking about :-).