Coursera

Customer Segmentation and Prospecting (Coursera)

Offered by Northwestern University,
Customer Segmentation and Prospecting (Coursera)

In Course 1, we set the foundation for the Art of Sales Specialization and offer a new mindset for becoming a high-performer in sales. We will discuss the Knowledge, Skill and Discipline that you need to stand out in your industry, and create a goal for you to reach by the end of the specialization. Finally, you will learn how to talk about yourself and your business. You will build your personal Sales Trailer and learn how to get into and out of sales conversations quickly and effectively.

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

Course 1 of 4 in the The Art of Sales: Mastering the Selling Process Specialization.

Syllabus

WEEK 1
It All Starts With a Goal
Week 1 will cover the purpose of the course and the foundational framework of knowledge, skill and discipline. We will tackle the expectations for the course and what to anticipate over the next several weeks. Finally, we will discuss the flow of the course and the assignments required for success.

WEEK 2
Selling is a Contact Sport
Week 2 gets you ready to make contact with the market. What problem are you solving? What is your target market? Who are the customers within that target market and how will you talk to them? We will discuss and determine several ways to narrow your target list and learn how to write the perfect introductory email.

WEEK 3
Selling Happens in a Conversation
Week 3 will equip you with a framework for a sales conversation that you can use in social situations and many other settings. This part of the sales process is where you are trying to generate leads and determine which prospects are potential customers and which are dead-ends. We will explore how to “on-ramp” a prospect into the right kind of conversation such that you can quickly determine whether this person has potential.

WEEK 4
Qualify, Hard and Early
In Week 4 we explore the actions to take if the person you are talking to turns out to NOT be a prospect. We will also look at what changes when someone might be a prospect. Finally, we will talk about qualifying which helps quickly determine if someone can and will do business with you.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Subsistence Marketplaces (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Subsistence Marketplaces (Coursera)

Management & Leadership

The foundation for this course lies with unique synergies between pioneering research, teaching, and social initiatives through the Subsistence Marketplaces Initiative. Unique to this approach is a bottom-up understanding of the intersection of poverty and the marketplace. The goals of this course are to help you develop an understanding of marketplace activity in the radically different context of subsistence where much of humanity resides and survives, and for you to design solutions that can be implemented by individuals, businesses, and social enterprises through economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable products for subsistence marketplaces.

Aug 17th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Business Enterprise Leadership
Details
Behavioral Finance (Coursera) Coursera
Duke University

Behavioral Finance (Coursera)

Management & Leadership Economics & Finance

We make thousands of decisions every day. Do I cross the road now, or wait for the oncoming truck to pass? Should I eat fries or a salad for lunch? How much should I tip the cab driver? We usually make these decisions with almost no thought, using what psychologists call “heuristics” – rules of thumb that enable us to navigate our lives. Without these mental shortcuts, we would be paralyzed by the multitude of daily choices.

Aug 17th 2026
3 Weeks
Finance Business Money
Details
Customer-Centric IT Strategy (Coursera) Coursera
University of Virginia

Customer-Centric IT Strategy (Coursera)

Business

Now more than ever, corporations are investing heavily in IT. The quality of these investments affect the daily work of millions, yet it’s not uncommon to see industry surveys where the failure rates for IT projects is over 50%. It’s possible to do better and it’s possible to do so consistently. In this two-week course, we’ll step through major challenges within corporate IT and how to address them with the disciplined use of design thinking, Lean Startup, and agile as a team framework.

Aug 17th 2026
2 Weeks
Business Strategy Business Model Canvas
Details
Excel Modeling for Professionals: Best Practices & Pitfalls (Coursera) Coursera
Delft University of Technology,Erasmus University Rotterdam

Excel Modeling for Professionals: Best Practices & Pitfalls (Coursera)

Business

Through this course learners will gain the tools to decide whether or not Excel is the right software to use. They will learn how to set up good input data, format correctly, and the importance of good documentation. Learners will gain the ability to discern between different functions, to understand the pitfalls and strengths of commonly used functions, and to apply correct functions to their excel models. Those that follow the course will also gain understanding of logical spreadsheet structure, graphs and reporting, and protection and hidden information in Excel, and users will learn how to apply these things to their own models.

Aug 17th 2026
4 Weeks
Business Spreadsheets Excel
Details
Leading Diverse Teams & Organizations (Coursera) Coursera
University of Michigan

Leading Diverse Teams & Organizations (Coursera)

Management & Leadership Business

In this new course, you'll gain evidence-based knowledge and practical tools to help you design and lead diverse, equitable, and inclusive (DEI) teams and organizations. You’ll better understand yourself and your personal identity in the workplace and gain new skills to identify privilege, implicit bias, and microaggressions in your organization and to take action as an active ally and change advocate. After hearing from experts representing a diverse array of real-world perspectives, you’ll understand best practices for equitable organizational processes and norms and inclusive behavioral practices in teams.

Aug 17th 2026
4 Weeks
Business Management Workplace
Details
Business English: Marketing and Sales (Coursera) Coursera
Arizona State University

Business English: Marketing and Sales (Coursera)

Languages & Literature

If you work in marketing, sales, or advertising, you already know that effective communication is a requirement. This can be even more difficult when expressing your ideas in a persuasive manner in English. In this course, you will learn to use English more efficiently while joining successful global professionals around the world.

Aug 17th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Marketing English Languages
Details
Sustainable Vikings: Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility in Scandinavia (Coursera) Coursera
Copenhagen Business School

Sustainable Vikings: Sustainability & Corporate Social Responsibility in Scandinavia (Coursera)

Management & Leadership Business

This course gives you immediate access to the world leading sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Scandinavian firms dominate the major sustainability and CSR performance indicators including the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI). In this course we explore the concepts of sustainability and CSR and focus attention on how Scandinavian firms, like Novo Nordisk, have achieved superior sustainability and CSR performances.

Aug 17th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Business Sustainability Strategic Management
Details
New Product Development - develop your own new product (Coursera) Coursera
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

New Product Development - develop your own new product (Coursera)

Business

New product development is essential for the survival of many companies in the Hi-Tec sector, as well as other sectors. The percentage of sales of successful business organizations tied to the successful Introduction of new products and services is high. However, the failure rate of new products development projects is also high and therefore there is a need for a methodology based on a well-designed process as well as tools and techniques to manage New Product Development (NPD) projects. Since most companies develop new products, it is important to you as a manager to be familiar and understand the basic concepts and terminology of NPD projects. This course will give you holistic view of the new product development arena and will help you gain specific knowledge in how to select, plan, monitor and control a new product development project, using the proper tools and techniques.

Aug 17th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Business Entrepreneurship New Product
Details
Design Thinking and Global Startup (Coursera) Coursera
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology - KAIST

Design Thinking and Global Startup (Coursera)

Business

This course offers a systematic engineering design methodology: Stanford Design Thinking for preparing global startup. The course empathizes the whole Stanford design thinking process, "Empathy-Define-Ideation-Prototype-Test," for building a startup with a business model that has a “customer truly need” component.

Aug 17th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Business Startup Business Strategy
Details
Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera) Coursera
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Infonomics II: Business Information Management and Measurement (Coursera)

Business

Even decades into the Information Age, accounting practices yet fail to recognize the financial value of information. Moreover, traditional asset management practices fail to recognize information as an asset to be managed with earnest discipline. This has led to a business culture of complacence, and the inability for most organizations to fully leverage available information assets. This second course in the two-part Infonomics series explores how and why to adapt well-honed asset management principles and practices to information, and how to apply accepted and new valuation models to gauge information’s potential and realized economic benefits.

Aug 17th 2026
4 Weeks
Business Big Data Accounting
Details