Advanced Course on Cisco Customer Success Manager

This course is an advanced training curriculum that allows an aspiring Customer Success Manager to be successful in his/her role. This course covers the ways to better understand relevant stakeholders, and describes Customer Success in Action.

This course focuses on:

• Providing a thorough introduction, tools, concepts, and skills practice to prepare for the Customer Success Manager (CSM) role

• Giving you experience with common practices and expected tasks, including conducting executive conversations, addressing adoption barriers, delivering successful QSR, and more.

I recommend that students have:

• Experience with and interest in working with customers to determine, measure, and deliver business outcomes through the implementation of technology

• Time spent in a customer facing role, including technical sales, system engineering, or similar will be especially helpful

This course has been divided into two lessons:

1. Understanding Customers Better

   1. Customer’s Financial Picture and Cisco’s Value Proposition
      Knowing the customer’s strategy and financial priorities helps link to Cisco’s products and services to their greatest areas of value. Learn how to identify the customer stakeholders and business drivers, determine the customer’s expected business outcomes, define key initiatives, products and services that are aligned to them.

   2. Understandings Stakeholders Better
      This lesson provides tools, techniques, and resources that will help you get to know your stakeholders better and strengthen those relationships

   3. Customer Value Awareness Overview
      Understand the value proposition of Cisco’s products, aligned to customer business practices and be able to have that conversation with the customer from a consultative perspective

   4. Customer Value Awareness Solutions
      In this lesson, I’ll focus on four commonly deployed Cisco architectures, and discuss how they provide customer value, some ways to measure that value, and how we communicate value back to the customer.

2. Customer Success in Action

   1. Executive Conversations
      This lesson presents critical elements of successful executive conversations and illustrates how to apply these elements when speaking with customer’s executives.

   2. Addressing Barriers
      In this lesson, I’ll talk about how to detect and ultimately resolve barriers to Cisco offerings.

   3. Success Plan in Action
      Summarize the Success Plan information and use this for conversations with your customers to help them see what they might not be seeing, keep them focused on what they need to in order to move along in adoption.

   4. Delivering Value Across the Customer Ecosystem Overview and in Practice
      Describe common interlocks/overlaps of Cisco solutions within and between architectures. List the common business processes that these products will impact, and describe those impacts. Communicate the value to the customer

   5. Delivering A Successful QSR
      Describe steps in preparation leading up to the QSR. Create a succinct QSR. Deliver the QSR and confirm next steps with the customer for the next quarter.

   6. Renewal Strategies for Service Contracts
      In order to build a predictable Renewals Revenue stream, I present you with winning and proven strategies that you can incorporate into your practice.

   7. Customer Success Motion – Use Cases

It is a lot to learn; however, this self study takes it one step at a time, at your pace, and provides you with the tools that you’ll need to excel.

Who this course is for:

• Individuals who have experience working with customers to determine, measure, and deliver business outcomes through the implementation of technology
• Individuals who want to pursue the career of a Customer Success Manager