The Customer Success Pro Podcast
This is The Customer Success Pro Podcast, hosted by Anika Zubair. Customer Success is not a destination, but a a journey. Join me on this crazy CS journey as I chat to leaders, strategists and experts in customer success about their experiences and definitions of customer success and share with your their best practices on how to build and scale world class CS organization. Each interview will unlock tips, tricks and best practices to help scale your customer success career and company. I will dive into important and relevant topics to help spread knowledge about customer success in order to help companies put the customer at the center of their business. Because at the end of the day when customer are successful, so is the company.
Learn more at: thecustomersuccesspro.com
The Customer Success Pro Podcast
The Expansion Mindset: How Great CSMs Drive Growth Without Selling
In this episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast, Anika Zubair discusses how customer success professionals can drive customer growth without feeling like salespeople. She emphasizes the evolving role of customer success as a revenue-driving function and the importance of building trust with customers. Anika outlines common mistakes in customer expansion, the significance of the expansion mindset, and the need for collaboration between customer success and sales teams. She provides practical steps for engaging customers and highlights the importance of tracking expansion signals to unlock growth opportunities.
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Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:53 The Evolving Role of Customer Success
05:55 Overcoming Hesitations in Commercial Conversations
08:49 Common Mistakes in Customer Expansion
12:07 The Expansion Mindset: Enabling Growth
15:01 Collaboration Between CS and Sales
17:58 Tracking Expansion Signals
20:48 Practical Steps for Customer Engagement
24:07 Final Thoughts
Connect with Anika Zubair:
Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/
CSM RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revup
Want to be our next guest? Apply here: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest
Podcast Editor: https://podcastmagician.com/
Anika Zubair (00:00.856)
Hey friends, welcome back to the Customer Success Pro podcast. I'm your host, Anika Zuber, and today I want to tackle something that so many Customer Success Pros are struggling with right now. And that's all around how to drive customer growth without feeling like a salesperson. Now listen, I have heard it time and time and time again from CS Pros that they're not in sales. Just a little disclaimer, I have spent the last
13 years in customer success. But before customer success, I spent over three years in sales. So I get it. I'm also not in sales. I consider myself to be a customer success professional. But let's be honest, most of us didn't get into CS to pitch products or close deals. Most of us didn't want to be in sales. We wanted to be in the elusive customer success club.
But here's the truth, the best customer success pros do drive expansion. They just do it differently than AEs or salespeople. They do it without pressure, without feeling sleazy, and they definitely do it without being pushy to their customers. I know you're gonna find this hard to believe, but you are a CS salesperson. But you're not a sleazy one, don't worry. And it all starts with trust.
You build trust with your customers to show them their outcomes and you actually strategically time your selling in customer success. So if you've ever felt stuck between being helpful and hitting a quote unquote NRR or GRR number, today's episode is for you. Hello everyone. I'm your host, Anika Zuber and welcome to the Customer Success Pro Podcast, your go-to space for real talk.
expert advice and actual insights in the world of customer success. I'm a CS executive leader, award-winning strategist, CS coach and customer success fanatic. I help CSMs and CS leaders build the skills and the confidence to become revenue driving pros and scale world-class CS teams. So whether you're brand new to CS or a seasoned leader, this podcast is here to support your growth because customer success isn't a destination.
Anika Zubair (02:25.568)
It's a journey and I'm here to be your guide and navigate every step of your journey. So join me every Wednesday where you'll get fresh CS tips, tricks and strategies you can actually use. Some weeks I'll share my own insights and best practices from working in CS over the last 13 years. And once a month, I'll bring on expert guests to dive into the most relevant and pressing topics in customer success today.
So if you're ready to level up, hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in. And let's make your CS journey a little bit easier together.
Anika Zubair (03:09.369)
So we're in a new era of customer success. Gone are the days when CS was just about adoption or term prevention or NPS. Today, CS is a revenue driving function. I need you to hear that again. CS is now a revenue driving function and I want you to let that sink in because this means that we own the customer relationship and in many cases, we are the
first people to spot expansion opportunities. Yes, you might hand those opportunities off to a salesperson because that's the way it works within your company. And again, that's totally fine. But remember, you are the one that identified that opportunity first, which means you are part of the revenue generating team. But here's the challenge. Most sales pros still hesitate when it comes to commercial conversations. They
don't feel like they have the commercial confidence to sell to the customer. And I say sell in quotes because remember, we are not selling in customer success. We are guiding, we are helping, we are enabling our customers to succeed. But in the very basic world of SaaS, what we are doing, for the lack of terminology out there, we are selling every single day to our customers. And I really hope that
If anything you take away from this podcast episode that you find that selling isn't something that's sleazy and it's something that is helpful to you and your customers. Anyways, as I was saying, most CS pros are very hesitant when it comes to commercial conversations, negotiations, objection handling, discovery, all those sales things that I've mentioned in previous podcast episodes. And this hesitation, it ends up costing you so much money.
It limits your impact as a CS pro and it keeps you from becoming the strategic partner that your customer actually wants from you. What if I told you from the very first second you start interacting with your customer, you're actually selling to them. I mean, right from the kickoff. That is all CS sales. It's the art of selling. There's an art of selling that exists.
Anika Zubair (05:26.777)
to existing customers. And I am telling you right now that you are actually already doing it every single day, even if you don't want to call it that. But the easiest way to get out of fear, the easiest way for you to feel confident in having these conversations is owning it. You need to own that you are commercially capable of having these conversations. And you also really need to own the fact that you are the one
that influences this relationship. So you're the one that's gonna influence the upsells, you're the one that's gonna influence the renewal, you're the one that actually holds the keys to the kingdom. And once we start owning it, and once you start feeling like you own it, that is where true confidence is gonna be unlocked. And that is when you're gonna start to feel comfortable having these commercial conversations with your customers that you are already having, by the way. Again, this is happening every single day as a CS Pro.
But the more you own it, the more confident and comfortable you're going to get and the more revenue that's going to drive for your customers and your company. Right. Let me ask you, have you ever seen an opportunity for a customer to grow? Maybe it's using a new product or a new use case, but you didn't say anything. Maybe you thought that's sales job. That's something that my AE or my account manager has to do. Or maybe you're saying something like, my customer just isn't ready yet.
Or heck, maybe you just didn't even bring it up because you felt like you were going to be super sleazy if you brought it up to your customer and you're going to sound like a typical salesperson. Well, you're not alone in feeling any of those feelings because again, even though I've come from sales and I've coached and worked with so many people who have come from sales, sometimes those commercial conversations, they're just not natural for most of us. And I just want to remind you that you're not alone, but
Having that mindset where you can't actually bring up new features and pitch those new features or tell a customer about a case study of another successful customer, that's the type of mindset that's going to be holding you back in your career. And it's not going to help you hit your NRR or GRR goals this year. When you show a customer a new feature or share a client success story with them, or heck, even share the product roadmap with them, this is all
Anika Zubair (07:54.127)
quote unquote, selling. And CSMs are doing it every single day. And it's really time that we start to own this, by the way. I want us to stop feeling like we don't have sales skills. again, anything you take away from any of these podcast episodes, I hope you start to build commercial confidence and acumen and start realizing that the simplest thing that
we do every single day as customer success pros is exactly what selling is. We are just doing it to a warm audience. We are doing it to an audience or customers that trust us, that we've been working with, that build rapport and trust. And we need to start owning that we own the commercial relationship with the customer. And once you start owning it, you will build that confidence muscle that I mentioned earlier. And once you have those muscles,
Flexing them will be so, so easy. Okay, well, we're gonna be talking about expansion in this entire episode, and I wanna be super clear that expansion is a commercial skill that you can practice and train as a CS professional, and you can get better and better at. If you do not already own expansion in customer success, I am going to be the first person to tell you that your role is evolving.
at some point of your CS career, you are not only gonna be responsible for onboarding a customer, but you're also gonna be responsible for growing that customer in some shape or form, whether that's, again, expanding in revenue, expanding in product usage, all of that is expansion. But I am seeing so many CS pros make so many mistakes when it comes to expansion. And I'm just gonna highlight three of the top ones that I see happen.
too often when it comes to expansion. So let's break down the three most common mistakes I see when it comes to expansion in customer success. First mistake I see time and time again is thinking that expansion lives with the sales team. Remember how I said at the top of this episode that you are actually a CS salesperson? Well, it is not a salesperson's job to handle expansion. This is the biggest myth and lie that you've been told in SaaS.
Anika Zubair (10:18.049)
Yes, sales may close the deal. Yes, they work with prospects and new leads and they warm them up and they bring them on to your platform or service. But you, the CS Pro, you're the one that builds the trust and gathers intel and works with showing them outcomes and value over months and years. And once and only once they've seen all of that trust built up and all of that value shown over time, that
and is the only time that a customer starts thinking about expansion. So really, expansion actually starts with customer success. And I hope you're starting to believe it more and more as we go through this podcast. Now, the second mistake that I am seeing happening way too often when it comes to expansion is waiting too long to talk about growth. It's almost like we're afraid of it.
And I get it, I get it. We've talked about this. Expansion is a sales skill and I'm not in sales. La dee la la la la la. I'm sorry to say, expansion is a CS skill. It is something that we have to train and we have to get better at. And most CSMs wait until a renewal or maybe a few weeks or a few months before a quarterly business review to bring up expansion. Expansion.
isn't a moment in time. Heck, I have done an entire podcast episode on identifying expansion opportunities, and it happens every single day in a customer journey. It's not only when you're doing a QBR, it's not only when you're doing a renewal deck or even an onboarding call, it happens all the time. But when we wait for the renewal call or when we wait until a quarterly business review to bring up an expansion, by this point,
The momentum is gone. Your customer has either moved on to investing that expansion money into another platform or they're busy working on another project or plan within their own company. All our customers are super busy. We as humans are super busy. Just think of your day to day as a CS professional. We have so many things that we're doing and momentum is the key to keeping things going, right?
Anika Zubair (12:35.019)
As we do one call, we book another call with a customer. And that is exactly the momentum I want you to think of when you are planting the expansion seed with your customers. You want to keep it growing and you want to do it early and plant that seed early. So even during onboarding or even during a random call where your customer asks about a new feature or even when your customer is having a support ticket issue, I want you to start
planting the seed early. Once you fix that support issue, you need to start planting the seed of momentum and expansion. Okay, and the third most common mistake I see happen with expansion, and I can almost guarantee that even you listener listening right now has probably done this. But what I see happen too much is focusing on product features and not business goals. Let me say these
Loud and clear. Customers don't care about features. I'm going to say it again for everyone in the back of the room. Customers do not care about features. They did not care about features during the sales pitch and they sure as heck don't care about features when they are doing a quarterly business review. Your customers are looking for outcomes. That's it. If one of your features helps them reach this outcome,
That's awesome, but you can't talk about the feature. You've got to talk about their outcomes. That is what matters. Expansion happens when you connect what they want to achieve with what you can deliver. So how do great CSMs drive growth without selling? They use what I call the expansion mindset. And here's what it looks like in practice. First of all, you've got to be that strategic advisor and
I know I've said it time and time again, but it really does start with that. You need to be seen as a business analyst, as a business consultant. You cannot be seen as a product support person or as someone who's the first to answer a customer's email. Then you're just a glorified AI bot. You need to be seen as a strategic advisor. And you need to start with questions like, what is your long-term business goal?
Anika Zubair (15:01.827)
that your customer is trying to reach with your product or service. When you can start to answer that, then you become that strategic advisor. And let me give you a little hint, a little insider tip. Every customer that's using software today are trying to achieve two things in the world. They are either trying to make more money as a company and they're hoping your product and service helps them make some more money or
they are trying to become more operationally efficient or cut costs. So they're trying to use your software or service to become more efficient as a business and either save time or save money. And like I say, cut some sort of operational cost. These are the two outcomes that almost every single one of your customers is thinking about when it comes to long-term business goals with your product or service.
Now your job as that business analyst or consultant is to go back to your customer and relay this message and dig in deeper and figure out what they really care about because it's not the features. The features don't help them save the time. The value that your product delivers is the time that they're saving. Right, when you get to know their why, you can then align every conversation that you have with them.
to outcomes and expansion. Because when you start to align every conversation to outcomes, and when you start thinking about that bigger goal or bigger vision that they have with your product or service, expansion becomes a natural next step. It's no longer scary, it's no longer forceful, it's no longer a pitch. But when you start to show your customers that your product and service is either making them money or saving them time,
Expansion is just natural. It's literally the next step. Okay, the next step in all of this is you've got to start framing growth as enablement and not a pitch. I think the reason why most CS pros end up feeling super scared about expansion or renewal conversations is that you see it as a pitch. No, no, no, no. Sales are doing pitching. CS are doing enablement. So instead of saying something like, hey customer,
Anika Zubair (17:29.059)
Would you like to buy feature ABC? What I want you to try to start saying to your customers is based on your goals, teams like yours have unlocked even more ROI by adding this feature. Should I walk you through what that could look like for you? Do you see how that's more of enablement rather than pitching? And that is where you're gonna stand out as a CS pro is when you're able to truly enable your customer.
to see success in their business. OK, the next thing that you want to take on board when it comes to the expansion mindset that we're talking about is that you want to start to collaborate with sales. Do not compete. I don't know when it happened, but at some point in the SaaS world, we started to compete with our counterparts, and especially between CS and sales. Now, I'm going to let you know that
The reason I have actually hit NRR and GRR goals is because my sales leaders or my sales counterpart have always been my BFFs at every organization I've been in. And I want you to start to loop in your AE or account manager early when you sense any growth opportunity. Listen, this isn't about ownership of the expansion. It's about partnership with your sales counterpart.
And if you're feeling shaky or uncomfortable or maybe that commercial muscle hasn't been worked out in a while, loop in your sales team. They know exactly the outcomes that this customer was hoping to achieve when they first bought your product and service. And they can be a guiding light for you. Even if it's your job to close the expansion, ask for help. Don't be the hero and remember that working together as a partnership with your sales counterpart is
only going to benefit you. Kicking the sales team when they're down or telling them that they haven't done good enough handovers, it's never going to lead to a positive outcome for you. Your sales team are your best friends. They know everything about customer outcomes because they were there. They were the ones that were doing the early discovery with that customer. And I want you to tap into that partnership and know
Anika Zubair (19:50.314)
that even if you have to warm up a lead, like make a CSQL for an upsell, and then you have to pass it over to the sales team, that's okay. Please don't see that as competition or, the sales team is gonna get all the credit. No, your team, your company is gonna get all the credit, and you need to work like a partnership, and you need to make sure that you guys are working to drive customer outcomes together. Because I'm telling you, between sales and CS,
When that partnership is solid, it is unstoppable. And that's how the best SaaS businesses out there hit 110, 120, 130 % NRR. OK, the fourth and final step in the expansion mindset that I've been talking about is all around tracking and logging expansion signals. Now, here's the thing. We tend to have tons of conversations, tons of emails, tons of interaction with our customers.
but we tend to miss the small clues in these conversations. For example, your customer might say, hey, more teams across the business want access to this software in a few months, or we've actually outgrown this workflow and we need to build something new, or maybe we need a deeper level of reporting. And all of these, by the way, are sales signals. These are commercial signals and expansion milestones that you need to be logging as a CS Pro
and making sure it's super clear that a customer has flagged them. So I want you to document them, flag them, use AI if you have to, go back into Gong or Fathom. They will do this for you, but don't let them slip through. Let me give you a quick metaphor I love using in training. Imagine you're a personal trainer and you help get a client in shape and they start feeling really, really good, like you really a great personal trainer.
And then one day this client asks, hey, could I start training for a marathon? You don't just go say, go talk to a salesperson. You say, yes, here's how we shift your program to get you there. And that's exactly what expansion and CS should feel like. You're not pushing, you're supporting their growth because you already earn their trust.
Anika Zubair (22:10.334)
Okay, quick pause before we keep going. If you're enjoying this episode, I got a special treat for my podcast listeners. I just released a brand new guide called Train AI to be your six figure revenue generating customer success co-pilot. It includes step-by-step plans on how to actually train AI to help give you clear and concise answers. This guide will help you for discovery calls, QBR prep,
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forward slash resources and grab your copy now and make sure you use a special discount code podcast 50 that's podcast five zero to get 50 % off. I'll make sure to link it in the show notes of this episode. Now let's get back into the episode.
Anika Zubair (24:26.878)
Okay, I love solo episodes because I love challenging you guys. I love being a tactical and practical coach and I wanna give you your weekly challenge. So here it is. I want you to pick one strategic customer and write down three signals they've shared recently that could point to expansion. Go back into your CRM, go into your health scores or go look at a call recording on Gong and find the clues.
Find those three moments where your customer has given you indication that they are ready for an expansion conversation. Then I want you to reach out to that customer and start a value-based conversation. Don't pitch. Remember, we're not here to pitch. We are here to enable our customers to their next level of success. So I want you to do something like, can I show you a few other ways customers in your stage have grown their impact using X?
And that's it, no pressure. Just show them the path, let them lead the pace. If they are ready and willing to buy more features and they want to actually move forward, they will ask you to show them more. If they're not, they're gonna try some line or something along the lines where, hey, we're busy right now and maybe another time. And if that's the case, don't feel down, go to another customer that you've identified and try it all over again.
The one thing that I have learned about selling over the last decade is that people buy when they are ready to buy, but you have to subliminally give them the right messaging. And if saying they want to see a demo of other customers using your platform before the next renewal, if they say something like that to you, that is still a positive sign. They are ready to buy and all you have to do is you need to not push the sale.
but you need to guide them there slowly over time. need to enable them and you need to show them the route. Remember, we're not here to be pushy. We're here to guide them. So just remember that when your customers give you these signals, I want you to have those value additive conversations. And I want you to go back and listen to this podcast and use some of the questions that I've outlined in this podcast so that you can have value driven conversations and strategic conversations with your customers.
Anika Zubair (26:47.506)
Right, let's wrap it all up. We covered so much in today's episode. So let me cover a quick recap. First of all, we talked about expansion and it's not just about selling, it's about enabling growth for your customers. I also covered how great CS pros plant the seed early and often and align customer outcomes to customer upsells. And they guide with trust. They don't
act like pushy salespeople, they're just guiding to the next step. And we also covered tons of mistakes that I see CS pros using when it comes to the expansion, like for example, waiting too long, or maybe even avoiding commercial conversations altogether, or deferring to the sales team. And all of that, by the way, it's just holding us back. Just a reminder, all of those mistakes are just stopping you from hitting your NRR goal today.
I also broke down the expansion mindset and how it's about being a strategic advisor, not a feature pusher. And I gave you step by step of exactly how you can tap into this mindset. And the best part of all of this is you already have the relationships. The relationships are the hardest part of selling. Honestly, selling is easy once you build a strong relationship with your customer. And the one thing I know about
all the CS pros that I coach or work with is that they are great relationship builders. So if you too feel like you are a great relationship builder, let me just say you've got it. That's it. You've already got it. You actually have the commercial competence to do the next step, which is guiding your customers into an expansion. Now it's time to unlock the revenue that's hiding in plain sight. So
Please, if anything that you take away from this episode, please make sure that you feel that you know you are not a salesperson, but you are doing CS sales and you are actually the revenue owner in the customer journey. And stop hindering yourself. Stop stopping yourself from an upsell that's hiding in plain sight. Now, if you want to turn these insights
Anika Zubair (29:07.887)
that I covered into these podcasts into repeatable systems. Don't forget to download my AI guide, Train AI to be your six figure revenue generating customer success co-pilot. And remember, the 50 % off is exclusively for my podcast listeners. And you just have to head over to the customer success pro.com forward slash resources and use the code podcast 50. That's podcast five zero. And I will link it all in.
this show notes. Now, that's all for today's episode and I'll catch you next time on the Customer Success Pro Podcast. Thanks for tuning in to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I hope you picked up something valuable to take back to your team. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean the world to me if you took just 10 seconds to leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more CS pros like yourself discover the show.
And creating new episodes takes a lot of work, so leaving a nice review keeps me motivated to keep creating. And don't forget to hit subscribe on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to podcast episodes. I drop a new episode every Wednesday packed with practical tips. And if you've got a topic you'd love for me to cover or want to be a guest on my show, send me a message. All the details are in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. And hey,
If this episode helped you, share it with a fellow CSM or CS leader. Remember, sharing is caring. Cheers to your CS journey and I'll catch you next week for our next episode.
