95. Two Ways to Use AI to Level Up as a Customer Success Manager

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-backed 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. Chances are if you are breathing and have a heartbeat right now, you have found yourself in a conversation recently regarding AI. So today I want to talk about two ways that you can use AI that will actually make you more valuable as a CSM. And when I say valuable, I am not talking about like, wow, you saved five minutes writing a follow-up email after a meeting because you copied and pasted an AI summary. That's not value. Okay. Value will the way that I'm talking about it is your customers start viewing you as an actual expert. They start respecting you more. They come to you for more things. Your manager starts noticing that you are leveling up and leveling up faster than everyone else on the team. That's what I'm talking about when I say more valuable. Nine out of ten CSM's I talked to you are still using AI in the most basic of ways. It really upsets me asking AI to rewrite emails or summarize meeting notes is not a strategy that's not impressive. Sorry. Doing those things is not going to boost your career at all. In fact, if you're just using AI to summarize things, be a little bit faster, edit emails here and there, that's table stakes. That's like saying, I use the internet at work today. Okay. It's like no longer cool or impressive. The real leverage in using AI is using it to scale how you think. Not your busy work, but your brain. Today I'm going to walk through in detail two things that I've been working with my one-on-one CSM clients on. One is creating thought leadership content that actually adds value to your customers. And two is using AI to coach yourself, especially especially helpful when your company is not enabling you. And you're going to want to stay till the end because the second one is honestly my favorite thing I've discovered this year. It started implementing with clients this year. And it is going to make you better at your job faster than any manager ever could. So let's just jump right in. All right. We talk all the time and customer success add value always bring something of value. Talk about things that are valuable to your customers. But what does that actually mean? Those CSMs default to oh shit. I need to bring something valuable to this customer call. What am I going to do? I know I'm going to show them a new way to use the product. I'm going to show them a new feature. Oh no, I'm not going to show them a new feature. I'm going to show them a slightly different way to use a feature. So I'm familiar it probably does. We're all guilty of it. That's fine. But at some point, like your customers know how to use the product. They've been through onboarding. They are now at the point where if a new feature releases, they can learn it in a couple of minutes. Teaching your product is no longer a flex. Like that is your job. That is what you are expected to do. So I want you to stop thinking like teaching product equals value because it really doesn't. What customers don't know is how to solve the bigger business problem your product supports. That's why they purchase your product in the first place. They invested because there was something that was not working for them or somewhere they wanted to go that they could not get to on their own. And that is where you and AI, if you use it the right way, become a value multiplier. Because what you can do is create thought leadership content that's related to your product. But it's not about your product. Nobody cares about your product. How many times do we have to say it? So let me give you some examples because that all sounds really high level and fluffy until you hear concrete examples. Let's say you work for a recruiting software. Your customers are recruiters or just anyone in talent acquisition. Instead of another section of your check-in call going over like, here's how to build a better job posts in our platform. You could create content like how top recruiting teams are using AI to short list candidates faster. Five ways companies are attracting passive candidates in 2025. Why Gen Z job seekers ghost and what recruiters are doing about it? Do you see the difference? You are not talking about your product. You are helping your customer be better at their jobs. Another example. Let's say you sell a sales enablement tool. Your buyers are revenue leaders. You could create a quick loom or a quick like one page guide on how sales orgs are using data to coach their reps. Or like three new metrics every VP of sales is tracking this quarter. None of these things are about your products, but they are all directly relevant to the people using it. That is a ridiculously easy way now with AI to engage customers, add value to them and position yourself as a true partner. Let's talk about how AI can make this stupid easy. Let's say you only have an hour. All you have to do is go into chat, chbc, clawed, whatever you're using and say give me five trends in the recruiting industry right now that would interest talent acquisition leaders, summarize each and two to three sentences and include why it matters. Boom, five ideas. Pick one. Then ask right one slide outline for a quick presentation I can share on a check-in call. Or you could take all that same information and say draft a short email newsletter version of this that feels conversational and helpful and not salesy. This is going to current customers not perspective ones. Hey, like I don't want to hear the excuse I don't have enough time and I get it. We're all busy. CSMs are probably the busiest people on the planet. But the format is up to you. Make the format fit what you have time for if it's adding one slide to your regular check-in deck. Great. If it's a five minute loom that you record once and send out over email. Amazing. If it's a one paragraph email just like, hey, I thought this was cool and might be helpful. That's fine. If you have time to build out a 30 or 60 minute workshop do that. But if not, there's really no excuse like in today's world of AI. There is no excuse. This can take less than 30 minutes start to finish. The impact it will have is greater than any other way you're probably going to spend 30 minutes this week. Unless you're like prepping for a QBR. I don't know. But it just really is that valuable and it's so so easy. So don't let like I'm so busy. I don't have time getting the way. What this is going to do and if you start like working this into just your natural rhythm as a CSM is your customers are going to walk away from interactions with you. Whether that be over email or on a call thinking like, wow, I actually learned something or oh, Carly reminded me of this metric that I've been meeting to track. Or, you know, even though those five things Carly brought to the meeting are things I already know it was really nice to see her bring something specific to my world to our call. That immediately makes me trust her more and now I'm going to want to open her emails when she is emailing me asking me to join some product beta. Okay. Like the point is your customers are going to stop thinking of you like a vendor and start seeing you as more of a consultant. And when our customers view us as consultants, that means you're building stronger relationships. You are having easier renewals, your uncovering expansion opportunities need I go on. Oh, and one other point I'll make on this and then we'll move on to the second thing coaching yourself through it. which is so good is that creating this content not only is it good to bring to customer interactions you're already having but it's also a great way to re-engage customers. That is so much more interesting than hey just checking in or like is everything okay you haven't been responding to my emails send them something interesting and maybe they'll actually want to respond to you. Okay let's move on to the second thing I'm kind of obsessed with this one it is working so well for my private one-on-one clients using AI to coach yourself especially when nobody else is coaching you and listen I have a lot of conversations with a lot of CSMs and probably the number one theme I hear aside from how shitty the job market is is no one's coaching you so I know if you're listening to this right now you need this so pay attention if you feel like your manager doesn't give you feedback doesn't give you feedback consistently enough you are not getting enablement you're not being coached you're probably right a lot of CS managers are stretched so thin and a lot of companies just do not invest in enablement for CS if you want enablement go join sales they get plenty of enablement so it's not just you you're very valid in feeling that you're not getting that attention but the good news is with AI now I truly feel like you can fix this yourself AI can give you better feedback than most managers ever will if I'm being frank and you just need to know how to use it and honestly it's so freaking simple so here's what I would do and this is what kind of like what I'm doing with my one-on-one clients it works a little bit different because we're doing it together but here's how to make this super easy for yourself every quarter pick one skill you want to improve say this quarter is like you want to get better at your discovery skills specifically you feel like you could be uncovering more pain points from your customers maybe you feel like you could do a better job of tying pain points to specific metrics like tangible numbers maybe you still struggle with mapping desired outcomes up to the executive level to business outcomes get specific don't just say like I want to get better at discovery figure out exactly how you want to get better at that thing and then I'm going to show you how to use AI to coach yourself through that skill and pick one skill per quarter because if you try to pick more you're going to get overwhelmed and then you're never going to do it so just set the bar low just pick one skill for now all right step one is you're going to get your raw data raw data in this context is call transcripts so if your company uses gong, chorus, zoom, fathom, whatever go get the call transcript then you're going to put it into AI and you're going to set you are an expert customer success coach review this call transcript and identify three areas where I could improve my discovery skills focus on uncovering pain points, quantifying impact and connecting to executive goals boom instant feedback and honestly this feedback is usually way more specific than what you get from a manager who's half paying attention and just trying to get you feedback to check a box then you're going to ask the AI for specific examples so you're going to follow up with like thanks so much show me examples from the transcript where I missed an opportunity to dig deeper or ask a follow up question or you could say rewrite one of my questions to sound more consultative or you could just have a conversation with it and say how could I have tied this conversation more clearly to ROI or KPIs so now you're actually digging in you're asking the why behind things you're asking for specifics you're asking for examples and what you're going to take from this is specific talk track specific things that you can actually go use in your next customer conversation so not only is it going to tell you where you're not doing the best job and where you could improve but it's also going to tell you how to improve so you don't even have to think about it now this is where like I truly don't think most CSM's understand like what a game changer this can be you're not just getting feedback you're now like building this system of constant feedback and improvement and improvement and refining and perfecting your craft you're building that system for yourself 99.9% of CSMs do not have anything like that so just by doing these couple little steps you are separating yourself from 99.9% of other CSMs step three of this is because you need to hold yourself accountable you want to turn that feedback into weekly goals so what you might do is take those couple of top tracks that I gave you and set a goal like okay next week go look at your calendar I have two customer calls where I'm definitely going to be wanting to do some discovery so after I have those two calls I'll then upload those two transcripts and ask if I did a better job like did I follow the advice did I improve and you just keep doing that over and over and over and over again over the course of a quarter that's at least 12 weeks of finding your week areas getting feedback on how you can improve it then boom trying to implement it uploading getting feedback refining so on and so forth and you just repeat this loop for the whole entire quarter so when you go and upload those new transcripts you're just going to say like review this week's calls and tell me how I improved against what we talked about last time or last week and just like that you've literally built yourself an invaluable feedback loop doesn't matter if your company doesn't have one doesn't matter if your manager hates you or ignores you or gives terrible feedback doesn't matter if your company never invests in enablement you are getting better enablement than they could have given you anyway the point is with AI you do not need to wait for your manager or your company to invest in your development in fact there is no longer any excuse for you to not be investing in your development because you can do it yourself literally starting right now for free and I promise if you do this consistently you're going to level up faster than anyone else on your team I literally this week that I'm recording this I'm recording on a Wednesday on Monday how to call with a client we talked through using AI to identify what she could be doing better in her calls on Tuesday she used that feedback in a real customer call and this morning Wednesday the started Monday this morning Wednesday she sent me a slack and was like oh my god that call yesterday went so much better than the one on Monday that's not even 48 hours and she's already improved the skill so there's really no excuse okay so just to recap the bad news is if you think that using AI to like summarize emails summarize call follow ups is leverage and it's great and is impressive it's not it's no different from saying I used the internet at work today if you really want to get ahead and leverage AI you need to use it in one of two ways number one create thought leadership content that is going to make you more valuable to your customers and number two is use AI to coach yourself up level yourself stop waiting for someone else to do that for you by the way with end of year rolling around new year writer on the corner if you're worried about being replaceable in your role I just gave you two incredible ways to stand out and become more irreplaceable so there you have it if this was helpful please share it with another CSM or bring it to your manager and say hey I think as a team we should all listen to this episode and like commit to using AI together maybe you like take charge on creating a slack channel and make it a group activity make it fun hold each other accountable tell each other how you're using AI that could be cool just don't forget the part where you share this episode with them and of course if you want to help landing in your role especially with the new year right around the corner reach out sooner rather than later to us at carlyagar.com/apply we absolutely will be on a wait list for coaching before the end of November and trust me you do not want to wait until the new year to get started because if you wait until the new year you're going to be behind a lot of people thanks for listening I'll catch you in the next episode.