Cisco acquired ThousandEyes over two years ago, and the opportunity we represent for Cisco Partners is now greater than ever. Our team is dedicated to helping Partners successfully sell ThousandEyes to help their customers deliver exceptional customer, workforce, and enterprise digital experiences through continuous visibility into the cloud and Internet networks they now rely on more than ever, but don’t own. Yet, after all this time, Cisco Partners are still asking how to get started selling ThousandEyes.
In this blog, I highlight five of my favorite resources available to Partners to accelerate their success selling ThousandEyes. I also encourage all Cisco Partners to visit Partner SalesConnect for a single view of all available resources, as well as who to connect with to get started.
Making It Simple To Show Value With the Service Finder Tool
To help you articulate to a potential customer how you can utilize ThousandEyes to improve their network visibility — and in only a few clicks — we created the Service Finder tool. Simply type in the prospect’s domain and the tool will provide a list of all the services the customer uses that communicate over the Internet, such as their SaaS apps, cloud providers, CDN providers, and VPN services.
A service listed in green is a service the customer owns. Simply click on the green box and you’ll get a description of the service and pointers to case studies. A good prospect has one owned service and could get valuable visibility with ThousandEyes, but a great prospect will own more than one service. The more green boxes, the better.
Partners can also demo ThousandEyes with real-world customer data right from the tool using snapshots, providing live visibility into the customer’s usage of that service over the Internet. With the Service Finder tool, Partners can easily show the value that their customers can deliver utilizing ThousandEyes.
Quantify ROI With the Value Realization Tool
After showcasing ThousandEyes’ qualitative value, Partners can then turn to the Value Realization tool to help quantify the customer investment ROI with ThousandEyes. The tool lays out the monthly benefit, ROI, and payback period.
For instance, if a customer has an outage, a lot of manual effort is often required to troubleshoot the incident. To address this, we’ve created questions and answer-input fields in the Value Realization tool that Partners can use to receive an estimate of the value their customer would receive by leveraging ThousandEyes to reduce the manual intervention and expedite their troubleshooting efforts.
In fact, Forrester performed a study to understand the economic impact of using ThousandEyes for End User Monitoring, looking specifically at return on investment. The study found that a composite organization experienced a benefit of $5.09 million over three years versus costs of $1.86 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $3.23 million and an ROI of 173%.1
By combining the results from this study with customer-specific, value-realization data, Partners are in position to quantify the potential value of using ThousandEyes to their potential customers.
Quote, Configure, and Deploy With the Channel Enablement Toolbox
Once a customer shows interest in using ThousandEyes, the Channel Enablement Toolbox is available to help Partners confidently quote, configure, and deploy five common customer use cases quickly:
- Cisco SD-WAN network performance and visibility
- Webex by Cisco end-user experience
- Microsoft 365 end-user experience
- Microsoft Teams end-user experience
- Customer website user experience
Each use case describes what tests are needed and their exact parameters, along with alerts, dashboards, and reports Partners will need to deploy ThousandEyes for their customers.
An online pricing tool is also available. After supplying a few simple parameters, Partners are given an accurate pricing bill of materials that matches the use case documentation. In addition, a step-by-step ordering guide is available for Partners who are new to ordering ThousandEyes with Cisco.
Automate With the Automator Tool
And instead of trying to manually walk through the documentation to reproduce what is available for an individual use case, Partners can utilize the ThousandEyes Automator tool, which understands each use case configuration and will instantiate all the component pieces automatically. This reduces the time partners need to deploy one of the five use cases down to only a few minutes.
ThousandEyes Is on the Cisco MSLA
Research reveals a huge, $113 billion global managed services total addressable market (TAM) across Cisco addressable product markets by 2025. For any Partner considering ThousandEyes as part of their managed service offering, we now offer consumption-based pricing through the Cisco Managed Services License Agreement (MSLA).
Coming Soon: Blueprints for Success
And we’re not stopping there. We are in the process of building success best practice blueprints to assist Partners in deploying ThousandEyes to help their customers resolve their larger network visibility challenges.
“ThousandEyes is indeed changing the game. We’re listening to our partners, understanding the way their customers engage and what drives their innovation and investment. Based on that cooperation, ThousandEyes is building the acumen, expert teams, tools, and structured guidance our partners need to successfully manage and deliver the best possible digital experiences for their customers, foundationally enabled by providing revolutionary visibility into the Internet.
—Tanner Bechtel, Global Director, Partner Strategy & Solutions Engineering
Ready To Learn More?
- New to ThousandEyes? Check out this overview video.
- Dive into ThousandEyes through the Cisco Blackbelt Academy
- Check out the Partner SalesConnect to view all available resources and whom to contact to get started
- Stay up to date on all the latest news by subscribing to our Partner Newsletter
1 A Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned By Cisco ThousandEyes, August 2022