[c-nsp] Cisco Smartnet Sales Rep??

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

There is no business out there to want.

Go to whoever sold you the Cisco hardware.

The margins on smartnet contracts are virtually zero,
and the amount of work that Cisco requires the reseller to 
do to register them now, costs much more than the margin.

Also once you get a contract, you can renew it from your
login, without involving the reseller.  Thus what little
margin the reseller would get for a renewal, they get cut
out of.  And the renewals were the only chance for the reseller
to make any profit on them anyway.

Note also that unless you buy the contract within 30 days
of purchase of the new device, you can't use it for hardware
replacement anyway.

If you got the stuff off Ebay then maybe someone like
DatacommWhorehouse might sell you one.  Good luck with it.

We tell all new cisco device customers of ours that if they don't
buy the service contract as part of the purchase, we won't sell
it to them later on.  Of course, that isn't really true because we
would in fact sell it to them - if they had bought the devices
from us in the beginning, of course - but it usually prompts them
to pay the extra for the contract.

Which is, of course, exactly how Cisco wants all this to play out.
And frankly, look it from the resellers POV.  It costs a couple hours
of top tier tech time to properly spec out the devices that the customer
needs for their environment, to even put the quote together.  While
your in the Cisco website doing all this, it is only a few extra seconds
to select the service contract box for the devices.

If a customer comes to you months or years later, you have to re-do all
of this work to quote them a service contract that your lucky enough
to maybe clear about 2% on.  And of course, if the customer is looking
for contracts for used gear - which is most of the people who are in
this boat - they aren't going to agree to pay for Used Gear Relicensing,
they just want the service contract, which means they are not ever going
to buy anything significant from you, like a new router for example,
they will just go back to Ebay.

And this doesen't even address the issue with the rampant counterfeiting.

Cisco, you should know, requires the reseller to supply the product
serial number when the contract is registered.  Do you know what would
happen to us as a reseller if you bought a service contract from us for
a device you got off Ebay, we registered it and the serial number turned
out to be counterfeit?  We would be very lucky not to find ourselves being
sued, and if you didn't fully disclose who you got the gear from, you
would be sued.  And of course, you would have to surrender all the gear
you bought as part of a settlement, Cisco would insist on that.

All of the decent used Cisco gear resellers out there also sell Cisco
service contracts.  They also check serial numbers of used gear they
get, with Cisco to make sure it's not fake.  But there's a huge number
of them that you see on Ebay all of the
time who are selling counterfeit stuff and naturally they are not going
to sell service contracts.

Sorry to have to spell out the facts of the problem for you, but
you are going to have to engage a reseller for more than just a
few miserable low-margin sales, to build up the level of trust needed.
Find a local dealer, meet with them, get to know them.  Buy some
devices from them, that means, spend some serious money with them.
Then bring up the issue of service contracts for your devices.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
> [mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net]On Behalf Of Deepak Jain
> Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2007 10:03 PM
> To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
> Subject: [c-nsp] Cisco Smartnet Sales Rep??
> 
> 
> 
> I need a couple of referrals for reps that would sell small smartnet 
> contracts (1 at a time, for CPE equipment like 2600s). Our other rep(s) 
> don't seem to want the business.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> DJ
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