111. The Expansion Playbook for CSMs Who Hate Selling

Real quick, we talked to 1,500 customer success professionals about why they're leaving their jobs and the results were surprising. Turns out the vast majority are leaving because they're unhappy. Not because of money, not because of layoffs, they're unhappy. So if you're a CS leader worried about keeping your top CSMs or if you're a CSM feeling stuck and wondering if it's just you, we just released a free report called why CSMs leave the growth crisis in customer success. Go to CarlyAgar.com/tallantreport to get your free copy right now. What if the only thing standing between you and your next big career milestone is just a strategy you haven't heard yet? I'm Carly Agar, customer success veteran award-winning career coach and you're go to for getting hired and promoted in customer success. Whether you're breaking into the field or ready to level up into leadership, this podcast is your shortcut to real career growth. Every episode is packed with practical takeaways, data-back strategies and zero fluff advice that actually works. So you can start making moves towards your goals immediately. If you're ready to take control of your career, well then you're in the right place. Welcome to the customer success career coach podcast. Welcome back to the customer success career coach. Today I'm going to give you two ridiculously simple approaches to expansion that don't require you to become a salesperson. One of them you can literally use on your next customer call. Like finish listening to this episode, hop on a customer call and you can use things from today. So let's get into it. Okay, so I know that expansion makes a lot of CSM's uncomfortable. And I know it makes a lot of us uncomfortable because I get messages about it constantly. Whether it's expansion, upselling, cross-selling, revenue ownership, whatever your company is now calling it, what's happening in the industry right now and has been happening for the last couple of months is. Companies are expecting CS teams to do more with less and increasingly that more means revenue pipeline expansion, whatever you want to call it. And I get why that can be incredibly stressful for a lot of us. We signed up to BCSM's. We did not sign up for sales and I totally hear you. At the same time while I hear you and I empathize with you, I need to be incredibly honest at the same time. The CSM's who are landing top paying jobs right now, the CSM's who are getting promoted right now, the ones who are in that like 200k plus earnings bracket, they have figured out how to sell. They have not become salespeople, they have not fully transformed from CSM's into salespeople, but they've learned how to spot opportunities. They're doing it in a way that feels really natural and they're crushing it because of that. So the reality is selling can make you uncomfortable. You might hate it. You might feel that it goes against what CS is. But if you're listening to this episode, that tells me you care about your career. You want to grow your career, you want opportunities, you want to make more money, who doesn't want these things. So I'm going to tell you that right now you got to get comfortable selling in order to grow your career to the highest possible peak. Like I said earlier, today I'm going to give you two approaches to making expansion feel easy and effortless. The first one is quick and dirty, you can literally use it today on a customer call. The second one takes a little bit more effort, but it is the one that will make you sound and look and feel like a trusted advisor. And it's definitely the one that helps people get promoted. So even though it's a little bit higher effort, higher output as well. And just before we go any further, before we dive into these two strategies, I want to be extremely clear about one thing, which is everything that you do with customers right now naturally leads into selling. So the sooner you start to think about expansion as just, oh, it's just a natural expansion of what I'm doing, not a completely new job. The easier this is going to be. All right, approach number one, I call this the inside out approach to expansion. And this is the easier of the two. So we're going to start here inside out is basically what does my company sell that this customer doesn't already have. That's it. That's the whole thing. So you look at your company's product lineup. You look at what the customer already pays for and find the gap between those two things. That's your opportunity list. A lot of people, especially in sales call this a white space analysis, which sounds fancy and complex, but it's literally just what do we sell that this customer is not paying for yet. And let me make this super, super concrete. So let's say that you're a CSM hub spot. Hubsa has what like one, two, three, six products now, I think they have a marketing hub, a sales hub, a service hub, a content hub, an operations hub, and I think another one. Let's say that your customer bought marketing hub two years ago. They love it. Adoption is great. They're running campaigns tracking leads the whole thing. Whatever people do in the hub spot marketing hub. I don't even know these days. Cool, but you find out that they're doing all of their customer support in Zendesk. They're managing their sales pipeline and spreadsheets and they have zero automations between any of it. That's white space. That's service hub and sales hub. That means that they are using other products to solve a problem that you have a product for. You sell sales hub. They're not paying for it. That is white space. That is a gap. That is opportunity. Honestly, like hearing this strategy, it doesn't take you long to figure out you do not need to be a genius to see this. You just need to actually look. But the thing is most CSMs are never even taught to look at this. They're so focused on making sure the customer is happy with what they already bought that they rarely ever zoom out and go, wait, what else do we sell that they could even buy? The reason I love this strategy is a starting point is it's really fast. You don't need a deep understanding of the customer's entire business strategy. You don't need a relationship map. You just need to look at what they have and what they don't have and ask yourself, would any of these things actually help them? If the answer is maybe or I'm not sure, that's fine. Maybe it's good enough to explore. You're not like closing a deal here. You're just opening a door. You're just opening a line of conversation. So here's what I want you to do literally like today or tomorrow, if you can. Pull up your book of business, look at five accounts for each one right down what products or features they're currently using. Then next to that, write down what your company sells that they don't have. If you're not sure all the things your company sells, you got to go figure that out. And then for anything on the list where you've written down, they don't have this thing that we sell ask yourself, like, is there a reason this wouldn't be valuable? If you can't think of a reason, congratulations. You just identified a potential expansion opportunity. If you cannot completely discredit and disqualify that thing is maybe being valuable, then that means there's still a chance. Now here's where most CSM screw up. They go, okay, I see the gap. I'm going to go pitch this absolutely not do not do that. That would be weird and salesy and your customer is going to hate it. Instead, you're going to go ask questions. And I'm going to give you three questions you can literally use on your next customer call. I'll stick with our HubSpot example so you can see just how natural these sound. I'll say that you get on a call with your day to day contact. Doesn't even have to be anyone that important. And you say, hey, Frank, by the way. Do you know what the support team is using today to manage their support tickets? That's it. Super chill. You're just asking about their tools. Maybe this guy Frank doesn't even know because he's like, I'm not on the support team. Chances are he does. But this way if he says like, oh, we're using Zendask. I mean, that's a potential opportunity. You didn't even pitch anything. They just told you like, we have this other tool. Means the door is still open. Let's say that your contact is on the marketing team. You could say like, hey, Sally, I don't know where I'm coming up with these names, by the way. Hey, Sally, you know, I'm curious because we've never actually talked about this. We spend so much time talking about marketing and generating leads. How do those leads get to your sales team? This one is gold because it gets them talking about their own internal processes. And in this example, because they're using marketing hub, but not sales hub, you're almost guaranteed to hear some sort of friction in that switch over between tools. So they might say, like, oh, we use this other tool. Here's how leads get to sales. But sometimes leads get lost. Sometimes there's no visibility. There's probably some sort of breakdown. And because you asked it and such an open-ended way, they're probably going to invite some of that friction right into the conversation, which is gold. Again, that means opportunity doors so open. Now, another question, this is one of my personal favorites, is, are there any other teams that you can think of who might benefit from having visibility into this same data? This is how you open up business unit expansions. So the marketing team might be like, you know what? Actually, yeah, I think the executive leadership team would love access to this data because they can use it for board meetings or whatever. I'm just kind of making this up. But that question of just like what other teams would benefit from seeing this or having access to this or being able to do this, however you want to word it, such an easy way to stoss out opportunity. So I just gave you three questions. We didn't pitch anything. We didn't try to sell anything. We just had a normal conversation with our customer where we showed up with curiosity and asked them questions about their business. And hey, if something comes up out of these conversations where you're like, okay, this might actually lead me to an expansion opportunity. You just continue the conversation. You just say, hey, that's actually really interesting. You think you could connect me with someone on that team so they could like walk me through that. We might be able to help them. You don't need to like make it super formal and fancy and complicated. Just ask a couple questions, figure out who the person is and go from there. Again, pros of this approach, it's really fast. It's going to surface low hanging fruit and it's going to build the muscle of even thinking about expansion in the first place if it's totally new to you. The cons here are it's limited by what your company sells. You're only going to find opportunities that map to existing products, which is fine. It's just not the whole picture of expansion. And this is going to bring me to approach number two, which like from my own career is the approach to expansion that honestly changed the game for me when I was a CSM. This is what I taught other CSMs when I was an enablement manager. This is one of the things that I know got me promoted as a CSM. So this is while a little bit more involved than strategy number one is definitely incredibly valuable. Okay, so what I just gave you is the quick and dirty version and it works. If you do nothing else after this episode, use those three questions and I promise you'll start servicing things you were not seeing before. But what I'm about to walk you through next is definitely the thing that separates CSMs who do some expansion stuff from CSMs who are seen as genuinely strategic revenue driving individual contributors. This is the approach that's going to make leadership go like, oh crap, we need this person because they are bringing in revenue. So stick with me. The second approach is called outside in. So it is the reverse of the first one. And instead of starting with what your company sells, you start with what your customer is trying to achieve. The first approach inside out was what do we have that they could buy? The second approach outside in is what does this customer need to accomplish and where can we help? It's customer first. And because of that, it's going to feel way less salesy and a whole lot more strategic because you're not leading with a product. You're leading with your customers' goals. They're KPIs, their desired outcomes. And then you're connecting the dots to how you can help. What's so powerful about this approach is it positions you as someone who deeply understands your customers' business, not just someone who knows your product suite really well. And that's how you transition into being seen as a trusted advisor. That's what gets you invited into executive conversations. And that's honestly something that's going to make you lay off proof and get eyed for more promotions. So here's how it works. There are two questions you need to be able to answer about every single account in your book of business. Question number one is what additional business outcomes does this customer want that we're in a position to help with? So let's go back to our HubSpot example. Let's say you have a customer using marketing hub and they're using that to run campaigns and to generate leads. That's exactly what they bought it for. Great. They're happy. But maybe they just told you on a call that their CEO is really focused on reducing churn this year. That's not a marketing problem. That's a customer success problem. And product and support. I know it's not just customer success. Okay, don't come after me. This is supposed to be a simplified example. But HubSpot has service hub which has a whole suite of customer feedback tools, ticketing, knowledge-based stuff that could help with churn. Or maybe this same customer mentions that I don't know. Their CEO really cares about shortening their sales cycle because deals are taking too long to close. That's not why they bought marketing hub. But if you understand that goal, you can then connect the dots back to sales hub, which is going to help them with their dual pipelines, sales automations, all of that jazz. That feels really different from, hey, I noticed that you don't have sales hub and that's something we sell. Do you want to talk about that? Completely different. We're starting with the customer's desired outcomes and seeing if there's a path back to things that we sell. Question number two is where else in the organization can we replicate the value we're already delivering? If your product is already helping one team do amazing things, chances are there's other teams that that company who have similar needs, who have similar roles, similar KPIs. Back to our HubSpot example, it's that you're managing a mid-market SaaS company. And you're only working with their North America marketing team, but they also have a European marketing team. And you find out that team is not using marketing hub. They're using MailChimp and Spreadsheets. Same company, same needs, same goals, different team. That's boom, easy expansion. We've now discovered maybe three or four, albeit fake, expansion opportunities, but still three or four avenues to pursue and found them pretty easily, simply because we zoomed out from like, how is my one contact using our product to what is this entire company trying to accomplish and where we might be able to help? Now, I want to talk about my favorite way to figure this stuff out, because a lot of CSMs, like I know that it's a struggle to know what other teams or other organizations within a company care about. So my favorite way about figuring out a customer's desired outcomes, across teams, across different organizations is goal trees. A goal tree is basically what it sounds like. So you start with the company's big goal at the top. Let's say it's revenue and then you break it down. So like what drives revenue? Okay, it's new customers and existing customer expansion. What drives new customers? Lead, Gen, and conversion rate. What drives conversion rate? And you keep going and going and going. So it's kind of like you start with one KPI at the top. What are all the KPI's that feed into that down below? Kind of like a family tree, but it's a KPI tree, goal tree. Google it. You'll find a million examples incredibly helpful. I'm also super visual. So I think this is why it works really well for me. But basically what you end up with is a map of every metric that matters to the customer's business. You're never going to get it perfect, but it will give you a good general idea. And then you can look at it and you can ask like, okay, what KPI's or metrics on this map are we already influencing? And what are we not influencing? The not influencing spots are your potential opportunities. So let's say that your HubSpot customers' goal tree breaks down to revenue equals new customers times conversion rate, times sales cycle length. And you know that marketing Hub is already helping them with conversion rate, but you're not helping them with sales cycle length. That's your opening. That's where your product fits in. And you found it not looking at what you sell and they don't own, but by understanding all of their KPI's and what they're trying to accomplish as a business. By the way, goal trees are also just an incredible tool for customer conversations because now, conversation you have with your customer, you can just use to validate that tree. So you're going to sound really well versed in their business and you're also going to be coming in with genuine curiosity and learning a lot of helpful stuff. So you can start coming in asking questions like, what do you consider to be like your biggest drivers of revenue right now? Or like, what are the two things that you think influence conversion rate and which one is underperforming? Or you could just say something like walk me through how you measure customer acquisition and they're basically going to create the gold tree for you. These are normal discovery questions that any good CSM should be asking by the way, but now you're asking them with like a framework behind it and you're collecting all this information that now all goes together really nicely helps you build this perfect gold tree of your customers entire business and that's just going to give you so much opportunity for expansion. Okay, I know some of you are thinking like, this sounds like a lot of work. You're just through a lot of stuff at us and I know I'm not going to be SEO. The outside and approach, the second one I shared, does take more upfront effort than the inside out one. It's definitely a slow burn. It's not something that, you know, is going to find you expansion opportunity overnight quite like the first approach, but the entire idea of this episode is like, you don't need to be blocking off one day a week just to work on expansion. You should be folding this into the things you're already doing. So the next time you're prepping for a customer call, spend five minutes asking yourself, what's one thing I can learn about their business goals or their or structure? Just one thing. That's going to get you one step closer to finding expansion opportunity. Doring the call, ask one of those discovery questions I gave you. You don't even have to ask all of them. Just ask one. When you're doing your account planning, whether it's at the beginning of the quarter, you're sitting down with your sales partner, whenever you're doing your account planning, pull up the white space analysis. Look at some of your gold trees. Pick one account and go deep and you're going to be further along than you were. Had you not done that? And finally, I'll leave you with this. The CSM's who are crushing it right now, career rise, getting top paying jobs, getting promoted. They are not the ones who magically became salespeople overnight. They're just the ones who realize like understanding my customer's business is the job and expansion is just a natural output of doing that really, really well. So if you have to trick yourself into thinking like I'm not selling, I'm not becoming a salesperson, I'm just solving problems. I'm connecting dots. I'm getting curious. Then do that. That will work. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you love today's episode or you want to continue the conversation, come find me on LinkedIn, connect with me, follow me, send me a message. I pretty much respond to every message these days. And if you haven't already, don't forget to follow the show wherever you listen to your podcast. I do this all the time with podcasts that I love. I'll listen to you a couple episodes and forget to follow it. And then months later, I'm like, wait, I was really loving that podcast. I wish I got notified every time a new episode came out. So just make sure you're following the show. That way, you get notified when future episodes come out and you won't miss any. Again, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next week.