Since the launch of Business Critical Services (BCS) 3.0 earlier this year, Cisco has continued to expand and enhance the value and monetization of the offer for partners. For example, Cisco has been working closely with partners to build a lifecycle practice that extends their own services on top of BCS 3.0 and creating joint BCS customer opportunities. While I've blogged about this initiative in previous posts (A New Paradigm for our Partners with Business Critical Services 3.0 and Partner Direct Orderability for Business Critical Services 3.0), it's the value to customers that sets BCS apart. Your customers want more value and faster transformation, but they need the right IT environment, talent, and skills to achieve these goals. That's what BCS is all about. It's about finding issues and bottlenecks before they become problems and helping customers create a resilient environment so that they can expect the unexpected -now needed more than ever.

So, how do you determine if your customer would benefit from BCS? And how do you initiate the first discussion? Here are some initial customer qualifiers to get you started:

• Has the customer had a recent major disruption to their network or data center?
• Are they having a hard time finding and retaining the right IT talent?
• Are they in the middle of a complex, stalled, or failed digital transformation within the company?

When positioning BCS, it's about identifying your customer's pain point and positioning the value of building a resilient, adaptive, and transformative environment that will help them survive, thrive and stay ahead of the competition. It's also about finding the right buyer -who more and more are not always the traditional IT buyer (See How Partners are Increasing Profitability by Accessing New Buying Centers).

Many of our partners are out there every day selling Cisco BCS solutions and taking advantage of opportunities to help customers of all types and sizes succeed. They're also capturing opportunities to grow their businesses and increase revenue potential through satisfied customers who renew and purchase more services.

If you're not leading the sales opportunities for BCS today, we want to align with you and work together hand-in-hand to identify leads and collaborate to jointly position BCS 3.0 to customers. By better aligning early in the sales process, partners will be able to position their own services that complement their BCS resell -driving greater customer value and increasing customer profitability.

With Cisco's "alignment checklist," partners can find helpful examples on how to best work with Cisco on joint customer opportunities selling BCS 3.0.  Such alignment checklist examples include: how to identify the customer use case; how to determine the right contacts or buyers to speak with and what to discuss; how to discuss customer expectations and expected outcomes, and review potential barriers to adoption; and ways to share customer contacts within Cisco sales teams.

This alignment between partners and Cisco sales teams not only reduces sales cycles and results in larger opportunities, it also has many distinct benefits for the customer as well, including:

• Speed time to value
• Ensure clear accountability for the services to be delivered
• Improve likelihood of achieving targeted business outcomes
• Highlight overall adoption risks and reduce that risk

By engaging with Cisco earlier in the sales process, partners can ensure that their customers reap these benefits. Check out our BCS Partner Resources for more information.