Anika Zubair (00:00.225)
Let me ask you this, when was the last time your company invested in your customer success team the way they invested in sales? Think about it. Every January and February, sales teams jet off to their big SKOs, aka sales kickoffs, and there's a stage, the music, the hype, the motivational speaker who fires everyone up for the year ahead. And don't get me wrong, I love that sales teams get to get that kind of investment. But here's the problem.

in customer success were often left out. Maybe we get half-day training on how to use the CRM better, or maybe we get a motivational talk about being customer-centric. But let's be real here. When was the last time your CS team got a dedicated, high-impact, SKO experience tailored just for them? The truth is, customer success deserves the exact same level of investment

because renewals and expansions are revenue. And without customer success, your sales wins wouldn't stick. So today, we're diving into why your customer success team deserves an SKO style training that makes you look good. And I'm also going to be covering what mistakes companies make when they don't invest and what a CS specific training can actually look like when it's done right.

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.

Anika Zubair (02:24.034)
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 (02:48.879)
Welcome back to the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I'm your host, Anika Zuber, and this is the place where we turn CS from reactive support into a revenue-driving powerhouse. In today's episode, we are going to be talking all about SKOs. And what that stands for is Sales Kickoffs. And what I want to cover today is why your CS team should have a annual CSKO.

I'll break down the common pitfalls I see when companies treat CS like an afterthought, and I'll show real examples of trainings I've run for teams that completely shifted their approach. And of course, I will always leave you with a weekly challenge to put all of this into action right away. But before we dive in, make sure you're subscribed and following the show. And if this episode sparked something for you,

then please leave a comment or a review. It helps spread the word and get more customer success pros listening to the podcast. And I really appreciate that. All right. I have seen companies bring in the most charismatic speakers and for an hour, the room is buzzing. Everyone is clapping, taking selfies, posting on LinkedIn. And then the next day, your CSMs are back at their desk doing the exact same thing they have always done.

check-in calls that go absolutely nowhere. And they're going to continue firefighting, they're going to continue escalating support issues, and then they're going to continue chasing customers who have ghosted them for weeks, if not months. Motivational speakers push you to keep going. But in customer success, we don't need to keep going. We are Energizer bunnies, and we just keep going regardless. But what we actually need to change is how we work.

day in and day out, and that's where the disconnect happens. Sales gets a roadmap, a playbook, frameworks, role plays, scripts, they get it all. They get things that they can actually use. But customer success, we often get fluff. And fluff doesn't close renewals, fluff doesn't land expansions. So let's talk about the mistakes that lead to this, because this is where most leadership teams fall short.

Anika Zubair (05:12.526)
So the first mistake that I see leadership teams make is that they end up treating their CS teams like a support function instead of a revenue driving team. If leadership still believes that sales are the only team that bring in the money and CS just keep customers happy, no wonder training investment is lopsided within your company. And another mistake I see way too often is assuming

that sales training can be just copy and pasted into customer success. So maybe your CS team is being invited to sales SKOs or even the sales coaching and training. And that's okay. But personally, I have sat in SKOs as a CSM and a CS leader. And my teams have specifically told me as CS professionals that they did not see any value in being at an SKO because

the sales trainer or the motivational speaker that was at that SKO, they just didn't get it. They didn't understand what it took to actually focus on the post sales revenue function that is customer success. Now, sales focuses on acquisition. We all know this. And CS focuses on adoption, outcomes, and long-term growth. Those are very different muscles and very different functions within your company.

and it's not fair to group all of that into one. That's like saying, let's start working out our upper body and expect our lower body to get stronger. Again, sales and CS are two different parts of the body and yes, they do have to work together and I'm not saying that otherwise. It totally helps to be at a sales training and it helps salespeople to be at a customer success training. But the thing is, you cannot expect

each team to only have one type of training. And that's a big mistake I see too often with CS teams being invited to sales SKOs. And then the other mistake I see happening within leadership teams and companies is they end up skipping structured frameworks in favor of what I like to say are feel good talks or rah rah or motivational talk.

Anika Zubair (07:33.482)
Now I get it, we are at the start of a year and the whole team and the company is coming together and they do want to feel good. They want to feel motivated and pumped up. And that is important, but an entire talk or entire session where someone is just motivating you to do better or to do more work is not going to land well with your customer success team. And the reason is, is your CS team is working to the bone. I know it.

that your CSMs, your professional services team, your support team, your entire post sales customer experience team, they are working hard day in and day out. And don't tell them to just go out there and delight customers. Don't tell them to just go out there and make customers happy. The whole point of training and the whole point of bringing your team together is to make sure that not only do you tell them to delight customers,

you actually teach them how to run a renewal negotiation when procurement is pushing back on price, for example. Or maybe you help them understand objection handling when a customer is saying that they're looking at competitors. All of these are skills and frameworks and training that are really, really important to make sure your CS team understands not again just why it's important. They need to understand

how to do these things. And a lot of times companies just leave this by the wayside. They think talking about the importance of something will naturally make everyone on their team understand that it's important and now I can go do it. But more times than not, your team is probably very, very lost on actually how to do this. They understand it's important. They're at their annual team event or annual sales kickoff.

And they've been told it's really important to delight your customers and to show them value. No one is arguing that. But the more CSMs and CS pros that I talk to, the more that I hear that they just don't know how to do this. And that is where the biggest mistake lies in when you are bringing your team together for training, you don't need to tell them why it's important. Of course, it's important to mention it, but it's extremely important to show them how through

Anika Zubair (09:56.078)
frameworks, through scripts, through structure, exactly how your sales team is getting it. All right, another mistake that I see happen too often when it comes to training your customer success team the same way that you train your sales team or similarly is that I see teams and executive teams and companies fail to build commercial confidence in their customer success managers. Now in 2025, I know and you know

that most teams and most SaaS businesses out there are focused on one thing, and that's probably profitability and revenue growth. That's what every business today is focused on. And as much as CSMs maybe know that the focus is on revenue and the focus is on making sure the company is profitable, what they lack is commercial confidence. Now, for years, if not over a decade, CSRs

pros have been trained to do activities and tasks. That's just how we've actually built customer success functions up until today. And now we are telling our CSMs or CS professionals to go out there and to drive value in every single call with our customer. But driving value with your customer, that means talking about revenue, talking about ROI.

talking about the strategic partnership that you're building between the two companies. And doing all of these things, they're not box ticking activities. It requires critical thinking mixed with commercial acumen. And commercial acumen is something that does occur naturally in some CS professionals, but too many teams avoid commercial training because they think CS should be purely relational.

or they should be building a stronger relationship with a customer. But as I said, in 2025, we're not just building relationships, we are building strategic partnerships and we're trying to make sure our customers see the strategic value and ROI of our product. And if you aren't training your CSMs on how to be commercially savvy and actually have that commercial acumen, you are holding them back. If your team can't

Anika Zubair (12:17.806)
talk about ROI. If they can't handle objections or if they can't spot upsell opportunities without the help of a salesperson or an account manager, you as a customer success leader or as a business leader that's listening to this podcast, you are leaving so much money on the table. And it is money that can be protected and can grow, but you do have to invest in your team and really help them understand

what it means to be commercially savvy and have commercial acumen. Now, I'm not saying to co-train your CS people like salespeople. That's the whole point of this podcast. We are not saying to train your CS people the same as sales. Now, but what I am saying is make sure that they have the commercial confidence to be able to go out there and have those strategic conversations because in 2025,

being a relationship manager or making sure a customer is happy or making sure a customer is actually attending a QBR, we all know that isn't enough. And the reason why customer success professionals are saying they've done their job and they've ticked a checkbox is because they don't feel comfortable having those strategic revenue driving conversation. And a lot of that, by the way, comes back to being able to be commercially

savvy. Now as someone who has actually come with a sales background and I worked as an SDR and an account manager before I moved into customer success, I was taught how to negotiate. I was taught how to actually handle objections. I was given scripts, playbooks, structure and taught all about medic and how to gauge urgency with a customer or a prospect. But the thing is, we don't teach that.

to our CS professionals. We just assume that when we give them a net revenue retention number or when we say, upsells is now part of your target and OKRs, we assume that because they're building a strong relationship, they know how to pivot and talk to customers in a commercially savvy way. And more times than not, your customer success professionals don't know how to make that pivot. And that is why as a CS leader,

Anika Zubair (14:41.994)
you are ending up leaving money on the table by not helping enable your team make that pivot and help them feel commercially confident in having those strategic conversations with your customer. Now, the last mistake that I see happen too often, and I know I've been guilty of this personally as a CS leader myself, is I've seen too many CS leaders ignore scalable playbooks and ignore frameworks for success when it comes to CS scale.

and commercial acumen. Now, CS teams are often drowning because everything feels bespoke. They almost go into every renewal conversation, every negotiation like it's brand new. Like, suddenly this customer is so different than the customer six months ago that was renewing. And when a CS professional goes in like this, they go in without frameworks and they basically reinvent the wheel every...

single time with every customer. And that is so costly. It is costing your CS team time. It is costing energy. And at the end of the day, it is costing your company so much money. Again, the main reason is, is that we suddenly treat every renewal or every new negotiation or every objection a customer brings to a CSM almost like it's the first time. And maybe it is the first time for your team or for your CSM.

But it isn't the first time this has come up. And that is where we end up falling on our own sword and we end up really struggling because we spend so much time renegotiating it with each customer rather than building a framework and a structure around it. So what the heck should we actually be doing? You're probably listening to this podcast and thinking, Anika, my gosh, this resonates. I know my team are feeling these pain points. And as a CS leader,

I know what you should be doing and that is what we're going to cover throughout the rest of this podcast. So I just want to be very, very clear that your customer success team deserves an SKO style training that's designed for them, not designed for rah rah or motivation to kick off the year and make a salesperson feel like they're going to go crush their targets. No, what I mean is you need to have a CS level training that's

Anika Zubair (17:06.734)
Practical hands-on no fluff no in-between like salesy stuff You need something that shifts your CS professionals mindset into building the commercial confidence and building the strategic Partnership ability in each one of your CS professionals now. Here's what works Okay, here's what I've seen that actually works The first thing is training your team to actually shift from a tack

So, do a QBR to actually thinking about strategic executive partners and strategic executive conversations. So, instead of telling them to go and do this QBR or prep the quarterly business for you, what I would say is as a CS leader, I would be telling my team, I need you to think like you're the executive at the company. And what is it that they need to see?

Are they trying to gain some more money by using our product? Are they trying to save some more time by using our product? Are they trying to be operationally efficient? Or maybe they're trying to make sure that they are actually being compliant with using our software. All of these things are what the executives care about. So instead of telling your CSM to go put together another QBR deck, what I want you to challenge them with is tell them...

start thinking like the executive at the customer and just list out one or two things that that executive cares about. And instead of spending tens of hours on a QBR deck, have them spend tens of hours really strategically thinking about their executive partners and what they need to do to show value based on the one or two things that they care about. And while I say that, I also want you to teach them how to show value and ROI in every

single call, not just once a quarter, but every single touch point. Now, I mean in emails and I mean in just a quick 10 minute catch up call. And I also mean in their business reviews, every single interaction your CS professional has with your customer, it should be about value. Because if you go and look at all the emails or all the business review decks or anything that your customer success professionals are building right now or working on,

Anika Zubair (19:31.95)
I bet you there's a lot about your product and there's probably even more about your roadmap or the usage of your product. But come on, we are in 2025. If you are listening to this podcast and you have listened to my podcast all year, then you know that talking about the product without talking about the value that the product drives at that customer's company is going to fall on deaf ears.

And your customers are just suddenly going to be like, I don't need another review or I actually don't even need a CSM because they're not seeing value. So really teach your CS professionals how to show value on every call. All right. Let me pause for a moment, because if you're listening to this and you're thinking, wow, my team is exactly where she's describing their reactive firefighting, struggling to prove ROI, then this

heart is for you. Too many CS teams are stuck in check-in calls that go nowhere. They're in the renewal conversation that still feels like an uphill battle and expansion opportunities that slip through the cracks. And they're working really hard, but they're not equipped with the tools to actually change outcomes. Now imagine this instead. Your customer success team walks into every customer call

with confidence. They know how to demonstrate ROI, they can handle objections without panicking, and they have the playbooks that help them scale impact across dozens, if not hundreds of accounts. Imagine a team that doesn't just support customers, but they're actively driving revenue growth. That's exactly what Customer Success Pro Signature Workshops are designed to do.

These are not motivational talks that fizzle out the next day. They are hands-on, SKO-style training sessions that are tailored specifically for customer success. So whether it's mastering commercial conversations, building scalable success plans, or turning QBRs into ROI showcases, these workshops give your team the exact frameworks they need to succeed. So.

Anika Zubair (21:53.836)
The solution is to book a call with me today to design a training program that transforms your team. Just head over to the customer success pro.com forward slash team hyphen event and grab some time to chat. That's the customer success pro.com forward slash team hyphen event. will link it down in the show notes and I look forward to talking to you about your next team event. All right.

Back to the episode. Okay, great. Now that you've actually shown them how to show value on each single one of these calls, I need you to equip them with ways to deliver customer experience at scale without burning out. And this is what I mean by like playbooks, templates, and I'm sure you have them already, but you as a leader or your enablement team or your ops team, whoever it is, needs to actually build these things out.

I am sick and tired of hearing CSM saying that they're building business reviews from scratch or they're building value emails from scratch. These should be template things. Now, should the template be something that is just copied and pasted to every single client? Of course not. We want to customize things. We want to make the customer feel like this is a true experience, but working with their customer success professional and working with their strategic partner. And that is where the CS professional is going to tweak

the template, but there should be a template and an outline. So once you showed them how to show ROI, then build them a deck or build them an email template or build them a webinar outline or whatever it is, go out there and build it for them so that it's a matter of them going and researching the customer data or the customer value points or the customer outcomes. And all they have to do is plug and play because

The more your CSMs feel like it's plug and play, the more they get to practice showing value to your customers in every single call. And then the more they practice, the more they build that commercial acumen muscle and the more comfortable they feel. And honestly, it is going to prevent your team from burning out because too many CS professionals are running from pillar to post and trying to recreate the wheel with every single customer.

Anika Zubair (24:12.31)
I don't know why we all wear this badge of honor, but take this podcast episode as a personal reminder. Doing all the work is just gonna lead to burnout. It is not going to lead to you hitting NRR any faster. What will help you hit NRR faster is when you actually go out there, have a template, have a script, have an outline of exactly what you're supposed to do, and then spending the hours

actually thinking critically rather than building the decks. Okay? That is what's going to get you that momentum to hit the 120, 130 % NRR. All right. Another thing I do want to let you know that you have to train your team on and they have to understand is how to handle objections. Now, as CS leaders, we naturally work with executives all the time.

And even our CSMs and our CS professionals work with senior executives all the time. But you have to remember that most of these CSMs were trained and taught to teach the product, to onboard the product, and to monitor the usage of that product. Okay? Even though they were told how to, that they have to handle renewals, they were never actually taught how to handle objections.

And the reason being is five years ago, or even just a few years ago when cash was cheap and the economy was very different, we didn't have to handle objections because most companies were buying software like it was going out of style. And most companies were just dishing out money. They didn't even care about the renewal. They weren't even looking at it. They were just like, oh yeah, we're going to renew because the product is being used. But we all know that in 2025, a product being used

does not mean an automatic renewal. And just because we've trained our CSMs on how to monitor adoption and how to actually show the adoption usage to their executives, that doesn't lead to a renewal. And what happens is when they start talking in this way to their executives, the executives on the other end start objecting, saying, we're just not seeing value or the price isn't justified and we're considering not renewing.

Anika Zubair (26:34.968)
So your job as their leader, as the person that they are looking to, is to make sure you train them on how to handle objections during renewals and upsells. And the final thing that I will mention that your team can benefit from, especially as you're bringing them together to train them to be unstoppable revenue driving strategic customer success professionals, is showing them how to multi-thread accounts.

So expansion doesn't rest on a single champion. But I can almost guarantee that your customer success professionals are probably speaking to one, maybe two people regularly. And then they expect that champion to go and speak to their executive within the business and show the value of the product. This might have been true a few years ago, but CS has changed so much in the last 12 to 18 months.

that it is really, really important to remind your CSM that they cannot rely on the opinion or the outcome of one single champion. That single champion might love your product and service. And that's amazing. That's a great start. But the problem I see happening way too often is that they see the champion use the product and see value, but that does not translate internally at your customer.

And then what ends up happening is the executive or the CFO or whoever's paying the bill says, actually, this isn't helping us grow as a business. This software isn't helping us increase our revenue or become operationally efficient. And then suddenly you're on a conversation that isn't a renewal, but rather a churn mitigation conversation because your CSM is only focused on that one champion. So you do have to show them how multithreading is the key.

to renewal success. And what I can tell you from my own experience is this is exactly the kind of training leading organizations are already investing in. Just in the last year alone, I've worked with teams at Workiva, Atlassian, Microsoft, Flywire, iBinder, GSMA, and Arbor Education. And these are global organizations who recognize that their customer success teams are revenue drivers.

Anika Zubair (28:56.3)
and they are putting real investments into developing their customer success professional skills to be the revenue generating team that they know they can become. So here's my question for you, especially if you're continuing to listen to this podcast and nod your head, and especially if you're a CS leader, are you doing the same for your team? Be honest, like truly be honest with yourself. Are you dedicating

at least an hour a week to enable your team? Are you dedicating enough time to really not only show them why value is important, but show them how? And then also giving them the frameworks and structure that they need to be more confident in their roles as commercial leaders? Because if the answer is no, you're already falling behind. And I'm not here to make you feel guilty about this. Listen, I have been in your shoes as a senior

CS executive leader, I have felt overwhelmed and training my team has always been a high priority, but sometimes time gets the best of you and it's just really tough. So let me take you back to a moment in my own career. I was leading a CS team at a fast growing SaaS company and the sales team was off to their SKO and they came back with new pitches, new pitch decks.

Battle cards, scripts, and the energy was contagious. All the AEs within my company were ready. They were fired up and they knew that they had to go and chase and close deals to make sure we hit our annual sales targets. Meanwhile, my CS team, we were given nothing. We were just keeping the customers happy. And that was the message. And I saw the personal impact that it had on my team.

My team struggled with renewals because they didn't know how to push back on the procurement team when they were negotiating or renegotiating terms. And they tiptoed around expansion opportunities because they felt that sales should be handling this conversation. They were working so, so hard, but without frameworks. And it's not that I didn't want to give them frameworks. Again, I was a busy customer success executive leader working with the board, working with my CS executive team.

Anika Zubair (31:19.852)
and I was spinning a million plates, and so was my team. They were spinning their wheels and they just weren't sure what to do next. So I personally started running my own workshops with my team. I designed them as SKO style training tailored for customer success. We role played renewals, we built account maps, we practiced ROI and storytelling until it became second nature. And the result, well,

They spoke for themselves. My team's renewal rates went up, expansion started to become more natural and started landing for my team. And my CSMs went from reactive to proactive. And what I really love seeing is that their confidence skyrocketed. All because once a quarter or once every, I'd say half year, probably every six months, I took out time dedicated to really help enable my team.

and build again an SKO style training for them so that they can too feel confident about what they were going to do for the year ahead. And that's when I realized that CS doesn't just deserve an SKO style training. They need it. It is necessary in the world that we live in and the customer success function that we're all trying to build. Now, you might be wondering what does this training actually look like in practice?

Well, here are some of the signature workshops I've delivered to CS teams. Now, first of all, I've helped coach CS teams around commercial CS skills. So we're not talking about like salesy tactics. We're talking about helping CSMs build confidence in revenue conversations. I also have a signature workshop that's delivering high value customer experience at scale. And these are practical and tactical tips for scaling

impact without burning out. again, working on playbooks, on strategy, on tactics with teams. I also have a very popular signature workshop that I've actually done three times this year already, which many teams are probably feeling this, but it is moving from check-in calls to value-driven calls. So really transforming customer touch points into ROI moments rather than box ticking exercises.

Anika Zubair (33:46.412)
And then of course, I also have a signature workshop that's all around account mapping for customer success. So really teaching teams how to multi-thread accounts and identify hidden opportunities within their existing accounts. And then the final workshop that I do that is very, very high impact and leaves the team really feeling motivated is showcasing how to drive value and ROI.

in customer success plans. So really building a structured approach to providing business outcomes for your customers. And again, showing your team not only why customer success plans are important, but how to actually build them. Now, each of these workshops is a results-focused, interactive, and hands-on experience. And it's designed to solve real challenges

that your team is facing every single day. All right, I'm at the point of the podcast where I want to challenge you and this is your weekly challenge. I need you as a CS leader or as a CS pro within your company at this moment, I need you to go in and audit how your company invests in CS training. I need you to ask yourself, when was the last time your team had a practical skill-based workshop

that actually gave them frameworks that help your CSM succeed in the role that they're doing now. Now, if your CS team had an SKO tomorrow, what would you want them to walk away with? Okay, really write this down. Go and really think about it. Like, what does your team actually need training on? What are the gaps missing within your customer team right now?

And then I want you to bring that insights into your next leadership conversation, whether it's a weekly leadership team meeting or anything like that, because the more you advocate for CS training, the faster your CEO or your C-suite are going to start to shift the culture and see the value in training your team. All right, here is the bottom line. Okay, if you've listened to this podcast to this point, you're probably wondering,

Anika Zubair (36:08.044)
Why does all this matter? Well, let me just tell you that your customer success team deserves the same investment as sales does. They don't need fluff. They don't need the rah rah motivation. They need the playbooks, frameworks, and practical skills that make them confident revenue drivers. And I've seen firsthand the difference this makes, and I've worked with teams across the globe

to really help them put CS professionals as the center of the revenue driving function within their organizations. And they're investing in their people accordingly, and it's really up to you to really think, are you investing in your people correctly? So my question is to you, are you doing the same for your team? Are you actually investing in their growth and their ability to be the revenue leaders?

that I know that you know that they are. Right, if you are ready to give your CS team the kind of SKO style training that actually drives results, let's talk. I wanna help you out. Just go to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash team hyphen event and book in time to talk with me. Let's design that training that equips your team to deliver real business.

outcomes. Thank you so much for listening today and I'll see you in our next episode next week. 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,

Anika Zubair (38:31.382)
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.