← Cisco
Cisco role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
Networking gear plus security and observability software (Splunk) that helps big companies connect, monitor and protect their systems.
Who you'd be calling
CISOs, security directors, IT infrastructure and network managers, and SecOps leads at large enterprises
Your opener
“Hi [Name], this is [You] from Cisco. I know I'm calling out of the blue, so do you have 30 seconds to tell me if this is even relevant? I'm reaching out to security and IT leaders about spotting threats and outages faster, and I wanted to see how your team handles that today.”
Problems you solve for them
- Security teams drown in alerts and can't tell which ones matter
- Outages are slow to diagnose when data is scattered across many tools
- Networks and security tools from many vendors are hard to manage together
Discovery questions to ask
- How does your team find out today when something breaks or looks suspicious?
- How many different tools do your analysts check to investigate one alert?
- What happens when a system goes down: who gets pulled in, and how long does it usually take to fix?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm busy right now.”
→ Totally fair, I'll be quick. I just want to know if faster threat and outage detection is even on your radar this year. Is there a better time for a quick 10 minutes this week?
“Not interested.”
→ No problem, I appreciate you being direct. Out of curiosity, is that because your monitoring and security setup is working well, or because it's just not a priority right now?
“We already use something for that.”
→ Good to hear you have something in place. Most teams I talk to do, and they still run several tools side by side. What do you like about yours, and where does it fall short?
“Just send me an email.”
→ Happy to. So I send something useful rather than generic, what's the biggest pain on your team right now: security alerts, outages, or the network itself?
Competitors worth knowing
Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Datadog, Dynatrace
Interview tips for this company
- Know that Cisco owns Splunk, so be ready to say in plain words what Splunk does: it collects machine data so teams can search it for security threats and outages.
- Cisco is huge, so pick one product area (security, observability or networking) and practice a tight pitch for it instead of trying to cover everything.
Written from public information about Cisco to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.