Anika Zubair (00:00.554)
Let me ask you something. Have you ever looked back at a quarter and thought, I worked nonstop. I was in every meeting. I did all the right things, but my team still missed our targets. If you're leading a customer success team and feeling like you're doing everything right, but still not seeing strategic impact, this episode is for you. Today, we're diving into the top mistakes customer success leaders make, the kind that keep you stuck in reactive mode.

costs your team their confidence and ultimately slow down growth. And more importantly, we'll talk about how to fix them. So whether you're brand new to leadership or years into this game, you're gonna wanna take notes. So let's get into it. 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, 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 (02:08.312)
been in customer success leadership for over 11 years now, and customer success leadership has evolved massively in the last five years. You're no longer just managing a team. You're responsible for revenue, influencing the product, aligning with sales, and shaping the entire customer experience end to end. But here's the thing. Most CS leaders weren't trained for this version of their job.

you're probably promoted because you are great at being a customer success manager. And while that should be a good thing, leading a CS team requires a completely different mindset and set of skills. It's no longer about doing great customer success work, it's about building the systems that enable your team to do great customer success work at scale. And if you're still leading like a super CSM,

you're gonna burn out and so will your team. So let's break down the most common mistakes I see CS leaders make. And don't worry, I've made tons of mistakes as well. And some of these mistakes are true to my career experience. But I want to share these all with you today in today's podcast so you too can learn from my mistakes, but also maybe course correct and not make these mistakes yourself. All right, the first mistake that I see happening way too often is that

CS leaders are staying too deep in the weeds. You're reviewing every QBR deck, sitting on every customer call and firefighting issues instead of building your team's capabilities. Now that's an entire recipe for burnout, not leadership. Time and time again, I have seen leaders think that to be a great leader, you need to be a super CSM. And I'm just here to tell you that that's just not the case.

Being a super CSM doesn't make you a great leader and we'll jump into that a little bit later. But let's talk about another mistake that I've seen happen way too often when it comes to becoming a perfect or great customer success leader. And the mistake I see happening too often, and I did this early in my career as well, is not aligning customer success with revenue. Now, if you're still reporting on NPS and churn risk alone,

Anika Zubair (04:27.17)
you're missing the bigger picture. Executives who really want the seat at the table and executives who want to know how customer success is protecting and growing revenue, this is what you need to start to track. You need to start to track activities, outputs, and just overall themes of the customer success team that is focused on growing revenue. If you're not bringing that to the table, I'm going to let you know someone else in the business probably is.

And if you want that elusive seat at the executive table, everyone in executive leadership, by the way, whether they're a CFO, a CEO, a CRO, or a chief customer officer, all of them are trying to grow the business. Now, your part as the customer success leader is going to be able to show how customers are able to grow the business.

And the way to grow business and the way to grow business with customers is focusing on revenue growth, not just protecting it, but growing it. All right, the third mistake that I have seen happen time and time again, and I'm also guilty of this as well, is hiring customer success professionals for experience and not coachability. The best CS teams aren't made up of the most experienced people. They're made up of the most adaptable ones.

Listen, skills can be taught, mindsets can't. So if you're always just hiring people with 10 plus years of experience or who have done it time and time again, the thing that's gonna happen is your team is gonna think that they're all good on their own and they're not gonna really take your leadership or coachability skills to help guide them to what's next.

You need to have a balance. You need to have a team that fully understands that, experience matters. Understanding how to work with specific customers or in specific industries is super important. But let me just say that you can't have a team full of super experienced CSMs that don't want to be coached on the playbooks and the tactics that you are trying to build. Building that kind of team is only going to lead to people trying to do their own thing.

Anika Zubair (06:42.102)
rather than be part of the bigger customer success org. All right, the fourth mistake I see happening is that most CS leaders are not setting clear success metrics. Now, if your team doesn't know what good looks like, they're gonna default to doing more activity, just doing more. Because early on in customer success, we were told do more, achieve more, spend more time with your customers, and that's gonna result in customers being happy.

But listen, if your team really doesn't know what good looks like, they are going to default to more activity metrics, meaning more meetings booked, more tickets closed, and not really focusing on business outcomes. That leads to confusion. It leads to your team underperforming, and it leads to overall low morale. You need to not only tell your team what customer outcomes to focus on, but you need to show them.

The one thing I love doing is showing teams how to lead so that you can set up the future leaders of customer success. You can't just tell your team, hey, focus on customer outcomes or focus on business outcomes. You can say it, you can tell your team that is what you're focusing on. But if you don't actually lead them to what is next, they're gonna be confused and they're gonna be like, well, my manager told me to focus on customer outcomes.

And I think customer outcomes is spending more time with my customers. And again, that's just gonna lead to more confusion. That's just gonna lead to more and more people underperforming. And it's gonna lead to you as a customer success leader being super frustrated with your team. Now let me tell you, in order to truly lead and be successful, you need to show them how. All right, mistake number five is waiting for permission to lead cross-functionally.

Now, customer success is one of those unique functions within SaaS businesses where we touch everything. We work with the product team all the time. We work with marketing. We work with sales. We work with engineering. We work with finance. We work with every single team. But for some reason, I see great CS leaders feel almost hesitant or embarrassed or maybe not confident enough to actually go out and lead cross-functionally. Now, I'm not telling you to become a product.

Anika Zubair (09:01.683)
I'm not telling you to become a marketing leader, but what you do need to do is you need to stop waiting to be invited to the table. You need to proactively collaborate with product sales, marketing, ops, and not just when things go wrong, by the way. You need to shape the entire customer life cycle and that needs to happen proactively. You need to work with all different teams to really shape that customer journey and that customer life cycle. And you need to do it before a big turn.

incident happens or before renewals come around. And my biggest tip is to make sure that you really understand your customer journey and that you bring in your counterparts in marketing, sales, product, you name it. Bring them all in and make sure that they understand that you guys are all building together. Again, you don't need to be their leader, but you do need to lead them to understand that customer life cycle and building a collaborative customer journey comes from everyone working together.

All right, now I've talked about tons of mistakes. I want to flip the script and I want to talk about what to do differently if you truly want to be an exceptional customer success leader. Like I said, there's a number of ways that I've seen CS leaders, including myself, fall on their own sword because they think that being a super CSM is the way to be a super CS leader. And I'm here to let you know as your CS bestie that you need to delegate.

the best leaders in the world delegate and empower their teams. Like, I need you to start by identifying repeatable tasks and create playbooks. Just think about when you were a CSM and every single thing that you did that was repeatable, whether you did it once a week or once a month, anything that's repeatable, a task, take that task and create a playbook. Show your team exactly what you did as a super CSM, but I don't want you to actually do the work for them.

just create the playbook and then train them to own everything fully. Train them to fully own everything so that you can spend your time on leading and not just executing. You wanna give them the tools to succeed, but you don't wanna do the work for them. And a lot of that happens when you actually end up creating a environment where your team can lead through the playbooks that you build.

Anika Zubair (11:23.15)
Okay, the next step in becoming an exceptional customer success leader is I want you to build a revenue story. I know I talk about revenue a lot on the playbook, but I'm telling you, this is what shifted the game for me personally. And focusing on revenue, by the way, is what all of your executives care about. So if you want to be a customer success executive leader or build more executive presence as a customer success pro,

You need to tie revenue into everything. And I mean everything. I need you to start to think about all of your team's impact and tie it back to revenues. Think about expansion or maybe even influence across expansion or renewal saved or product adoption that drives upsell. You need to start to speak the CFO's language and not just the customers. All of your C-suite

care about revenue growth. They're trying to build a profitable company. And I hope you realize that in order to be a business leader, as well as a customer success leader, you need to start to understand the language of revenue. All right, the third thing I'm going to share with you when it comes to being a great customer success leader is hire for growth. Now, I want you to hire for growth potential in all of the customer success professionals you bring in to your team.

I need you to ask questions and interviews that reveal how people learn, how they take feedback, how they adapt. And when you find those people, you need to invest in coaching them as well. Being a leader, by the way, is not just about building shiny playbooks and reading metrics at board meetings. It's about coaching your team to succeed.

And if you hire those hungry CSMs that are willing to be coached, that are willing to be taught, and that are willing to be better at what they're doing, I'm telling you right now that those are the team members that are gonna make you look like that stellar VP of customer success that's gonna hit all the metrics. But if you only hire people that wanna work in a certain way, that only know a certain industry, that only work a certain way with certain customers,

Anika Zubair (13:33.968)
I'm sorry to say those types of team members are going to cause your downfall. You want to make sure that you hire for growth and that all starts in the interview process. Definitely start to ask questions about how people take feedback and how they learn on the job because that's going to really set you apart as a leader that wants to lead, that wants to coach. Because like I said, being an excellent leader is not just about sitting at the executive table, reading board metrics and understanding the data.

It's about leading your team. All right. I just want to jump into this podcast episode and be honest for a second. One of the biggest mistakes CS leaders make is not tracking their team's impact. And if you're an individual contributor hoping to become a leader, the biggest mistake I see is even bigger when you don't track your own success. You can't expect to get promoted just because you're doing great work.

If no one knows about your wins, especially the revenue driving ones, then they don't exist. Now imagine this, every quarter, you can clearly show how your work influenced retention, expansion, or product adoption. You walk into your next review with confidence, data, and a revenue story that your boss can't ignore. That's exactly why I created the Customer Success Promotion Tracker, a simple and powerful tool

to help you document your accomplishments, visualize your revenue impact, and pitch your promotion like a pro. Whether you're a CSM, a team lead, or you're already in leadership looking to build a culture of recognition and advancement, this tracker gives you the structure to stop relying on hope and start leading with proof. Head to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash resources.

to grab the Customer Success Promotion Tracker today. Let's make sure your impact isn't just felt, but it's seen. Just head over to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash resources and grab your tracker today. Now let's jump back into the episode. All right, the next step in becoming that all elusive, amazing customer success leader is define what success looks like. A lot of times as leaders, we tell our teams, hey,

Anika Zubair (15:56.69)
we need to hit 110 % net revenue retention. And that's okay, I've been there. I've told plenty of teams that I've worked with and that I've been a part of companies where I'm like, listen, our goal is 110 % net revenue retention. But the problem I see time and time again is most of your CS team don't know how to actually get to that 110 % net revenue retention.

And what you need to do as a CS leader is you need to create what success looks like. You need to create a success rubric or plan or outline or playbook. Like what does an amazing onboarding call look like? Show your team what outcomes should they be hitting in 30, 60, 90 days to make sure a renewal is a non-event. What are they asking in customer meetings to make sure that they uncover upsell opportunities?

Make sure that all of this is visible and trackable and clear. I personally love using Notion to build basically operating systems for my customer success teams. I build out playbooks, I build out questions, I build all of this out so that when my team has any questions or maybe they're not sure, they have a trackable system and a trackable place where they're able to actually see everything and see all my playbooks. You wanna enable your team to succeed

And the best way to enable them to succeed is by giving them all of this in front of them. Okay, and the final thing I will share about really truly being that customer success leader that everybody wants to work for and that everybody wants to work with is you need to become a strategic partner internally. I want you to start to schedule regularly syncs with your sales or product leaders.

I normally meet with my sales and product teams every other week, and I'm talking about the CPO or the CRO or whoever. I meet with them every other week and I share customer insights. I advocate for CS involvement in the deal cycle early on and also in product planning. So I make sure that we're not just seen as someone who answers support tickets.

Anika Zubair (18:07.086)
and hands-off to customers, we're seen as a partner in the entire customer journey. And the only way to be seen as that as a leader is making sure that your internal team understand what it is your team is doing. And the best way to do that is setting up those internal sinks. Now, as a customer success leader, I also say that there are three types of people that you are trying to look after. And those are...

the board or anyone that reports above you, so the C-suite. The next is your internal team. So again, the head of sales, the head of marketing, anyone internally that you're advocating for. And then the third person that you're looking after is your team. And like I said, you need to support your team. And the best way to support them is making sure that the internal teams understand what it is you're doing. You need to make sure you're across in these three different ways.

to make sure the company sees the value in customer success and that you're not just seen as a support function. Being a CS leader isn't being an exceptional CSM. Hire and train the exceptional CSMs, but you have a lot of other work to do to be that executive leader in customer success. Now I wanna share a little story with you. I'll never forget one quarter early in my customer success leadership career that I moved from being a

senior customer success manager into a head of customer success role. And honestly, I still acted like a super CSM. I was on calls daily. I was tweaking QBR decks, double checking customer comms, and doing everything. And that's because I thought that what it takes to be a good leader was being even more of an exceptional CSM.

And that's what I thought. And honestly, like I said earlier on in this podcast, that was a big mistake of mine. And it's a big mistake that I still see leaders make today, especially if you're a first time leader. And you know what happened? The result was that my team underperformed and I was completely drained and exhausted. And there's something that one of my managers said to me, something that changed everything for me. And it stuck with me till this day. And I want to share it with you. And my manager at the time told me.

Anika Zubair (20:26.842)
that you're not a leader if you're doing the work. You're a leader when your team is doing the work exceptionally without you. So even when I left to go on holiday or maybe went to see a customer or maybe I was in board meetings or anywhere else, what I had to do to be a great leader was to enable, empower, and really help my team succeed when I wasn't in the room. And a lot of that came with building out the

processes around customer success and the playbooks that I talked about earlier in this podcast, all of that was built out. And then I hired people that knew how to use my processes and playbooks and they succeeded without me. Of course, you don't have to be there all the time. And of course, you're not going to be gone all the time. You're still going to coach and help your team. But you need to really set your team up for success to do 90 % of the job without you.

And when my manager shared that with me, that stuck with me. Honestly, it stuck with me till today. From that point on, I focused on building processes, trust, and scalable impact. And I made sure that scalable impact translated to revenue so that the executive team and the board really understood what it is I was doing. And honestly, I never looked back. That's how I built out everything I've done in my career and how I continue to build the most exceptional customer success teams.

and businesses by following that exact rule book or playbook as I like to call them. All right, we've come to the point of the podcast where I'm gonna challenge you and this week's challenge is I want you to write down one thing that you're doing right now that someone on your team could do instead. Now, if you're even a CSM listening to this, I want you to delegate something to a product manager or to a marketing person.

And if you're a CS leader listening to this, I want you to delegate something to your team, something that you think only you can do, but you would be really, really, really surprised to learn that your team can probably do it better than you once you delegate it. Then I want you to go ahead and schedule a meeting to hand it off. Clearly, completely, and confidently hand off that task to someone else in the business.

Anika Zubair (22:46.694)
Bonus points, by the way, if you create a checklist or an enablement doc or something that they can repeat constantly. Like I said, I like to use Notion and I create a playbook in Notion, but do whatever you want. But if you can create almost like a mini playbook as well and hand it off in that meeting, that's bonus points for you. All right, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. I just want to remind you that leadership is about multiplication, not about duplication.

Today we talked about the top mistakes CS leaders make and how to avoid them. And I hope that you got something to take away to your team and to your own experience and make sure you feel empowered to lead like a future leader and not like a super CSM. Because like I said, super CSMs are great, but honestly, more times than not, they end up flopping as leaders.

And I hope that you took away all the mistakes that I've made as a CS leader and that I've shared. And we flip those mistakes and we explore tactical ways for you to fully step into your leadership role and delegate and make sure that you are the revenue leader that everyone is expecting you to become. So if you're ready to stop reacting and start leading with confidence, then it's time to join us inside of RevUp Academy. RevUp isn't just for entry-level CSMs.

We've had everyone from first time customer success managers to VPs of CS and even chief customer officers go through the program because leadership isn't about your title, it's about your mindset and your ability to drive revenue with clarity. So inside of the academy, you'll learn how to coach your team towards outcomes, lead strategic conversations and tie every initiative back to business impact.

all with the repeatable system you can use quarter after quarter after quarter. If you are interested in RevUp, we're currently full, but our next cohort is going to start enrollment soon. So go ahead and head over to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash RevUp to learn more and join the wait list for our next cohort. Your next level of leadership starts here.

Anika Zubair (25:00.156)
Thanks for listening to this week's podcast and I will catch you next Wednesday for our next episode. 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.