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Understanding Customer Needs

  • Course Code UCN
  • Duration 1 day

Public Classroom Price

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Course Delivery

This course is available in the following formats:

  • Company Event

    Event at company

  • Public Classroom

    Traditional Classroom Learning

  • Virtual Learning

    Learning that is virtual

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Course Overview

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Succeed in the Cisco marketplace by learning to understand customer needs.


This course features activities and role-playing exercises that will help you improve your business acumen and gain skills that are critical to growing your business while understanding and serving the needs of your clients and potential customers.


You'll examine the major vertical and horizontal markets and the competitive and environmental factors that drive behaviors within these markets. You'll identify the different types of decision makers and influencers and the ways their roles and responsibilities affect their decision-making criteria. You will review what drives change in an organization and the ways in which success is measured.

Course Schedule

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Target Audience

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The target audience includes: Account Mangers, Pre-Sales, Solutions Sales and anyone who plays an active role in selling and implementing customer solutions.

Course Objectives

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After you complete this course you will be able to:

  • Evaluate the customer's business environment
  • Address the customer's business challenges
  • Gain techniques to map business challenges to solutions

Course Content

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In this course:

  • You will discover Cisco's approach to the market and learn how Cisco positions their products to solve different customer needs.
  • In practice activities, you will have the opportunity to align your message with Cisco's, map customer needs to Cisco products, and communicate how these solutions address customer needs.
  • At the end of class, you'll get suggestions on how to review proposals with clients and how to conduct internal debriefing meetings to gauge the success of your own approach to understanding customer needs.

This course features activities and exercises that will help you improve your business acumen and gain skills that are critical to growing your business while understanding and serving the needs of your clients and potential customers. In this class:

  • You'll examine the major vertical and horizontal markets and the competitive and environmental factors that drive behaviors within these markets.
  • You'll identify the different types of decision makers and influencers and the ways their roles and responsibilities affect their decision-making criteria.
  • Through case study exercises, you will learn how to explain to your customers through a business case how a solution addresses business challenges.

You will spend a day learning how to map business challenges to solutions. During the business case alignment component:

  • You will assess the realization of ROI and other business benefits of the solution relative to those defined in the business case.
  • Students will learn the Cisco ROI Methodology and how to conduct an ROI analysis.

Role playing and use of a specific customer proposal from participant’s own experience (past or present), you will receive peer feedback on the proposal for:

  • Identification of business strategies and goals
  • Understanding of business architecture
  • Mapping solutions to needs
  • Justifying decision to approve solution