Become a Customer Success Manager - Official Anthropos Skill Path
Intermediate7h 43minLast updated 08/2025
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SkillsThe Customer Success Manager is becoming a popular role across multiple industries, starting of course with the software and digital service ones. Customer Success are usually in charge of managing large and small customers and help them get value from the products and services they have purchased. This role is fundamental for companies to keep their customers happy and upsell them to new services.
This skill path at Anthropos is designed to give you a very comprehensive introduction to the role, teaching you skills related to customer management, communication, negotiation and even sales. You will find out that CSMs are a great mix of abilities and roles in one. This path is highly suggested for account managers, sales representatives and people with a mix of skills that want to get into a role where they will spend tons of time with customers and other stakeholders and will have to master several skills, including project management and team management.
Content (38)
Intro to the role and skills of the customer success manager
We are going to start learning more about the responsibilities and usual activities of the Customer Success Manager.
Customer Success Programs
This is an introduction to the role of Customer Success Manager with a detailed explanation of what you need to do as CSM and what are the core areas of focus.
Learn practicable tips on what really matters as you become a Customer Success Manager: it's key that you learn what really makes the difference in your role
How to manage and lead your customers
In this chapter you will learn the fundamentals involved in managing with customers, creating a relationship with them and helping them. It takes time and the content here will make you think and help you improve things you already do today.
Client Communication and Satisfaction Management
Client Engagement
Client Relationship Building
Jim Donovan is a famous top executive at Goldman Sachs - in this course recorded at the University of Virginia School of Law he explains - in details and with several examples - what you should do while approaching, talking and managing customers relationships.
A quick recap of the most important skills you can learn to start interacting with your customers.
Learn how you can easily get the right information from your customers asking for the right questions. It's easier than you think and it allows you to understand a lot more about your customers expectations and deliver a successful project.
Managing expectations allow you to prevent problems and difficult scenarios. Learn how to manage expectations upfront and what to do when customers have impossible requests.
Setting expectations is critical as we just learned, but even the best customer success manager will find a customer that has unrealistic goals, ideas and expectations. Sometimes this evolves over time: at first you thought you were aligned and then you discover the disconnection in a meeting. What to do then?
No matter the difficulties and challenges in serving your customers, your role as CSM is to build trust and rapport with your customer base. In this course we review what are the simple and more complex things you can do step by step to build trust with your customers.
Learn from Customer Success professionals a recap of the most important things we have seen in this chapter about managing and building relationships with your customers. This is a live interviews done at Pulse, a famous conference dedicated to the world of Customer Success
Managing your team and solving problems
Managing a project will challenge your leadership across many fronts. In this chapter we look at two critical skills that will help you in most situations: learn how to manage a team and improve your ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently.
Problem Solving
Team Management
In your role you might need to be the person selecting and assembling the right team for a project. The way you do that and communicate the scope and goals to your team will influence their ability to execute and how they will look at you as the leader of the project.
This is a more specific take on how you involve your team in the project and make them feel part of it. It goes into examples and specific of what you can do and say to constantly keep everyone engaged.
Problem solving sometimes sounds like a buzzword: what does it mean to be a great problem solver? Way too many things! This course wants to be as practical as possible and give you some skills that will be useful as you face challenges in this role. In any project, especially when you have customers and teams involved, there are daily or weekly problems.
Our objective here is to help you build and maintain the right approach toward problems and learn how to manage them (or delegate them) in an effective way.
This course gives you a series of simple things you can do immediately to improve your ability to solve problems. Together with everything else we have learned in this chapter you will be able to connect the dots and start applying these skills to your project and team immediately.
Communication and presentation with customers, team and stakeholders
Learn how presentation and communication skills will make your work 100% more effective: your presentations and your way of saying things will improve with new ideas and concepts.
Client Communication and Satisfaction Management
Collaborative and Communicative Skills
Communication and Collaboration Tools
Presentation Skills
Zoho CRM
Every presentation starts with your introduction. A quick video to help you make it as effective as possible to get your audience attention from the first minute!
In this video, learn three simple structures for organizing your next presentation. These structures will help you be clear and concise, and will help your audience understand your key messages.
You will find yourself presenting to customers and audiences that don't really know what you have been working on or the main elements of the project. In this quick course you learn how to develop content and presentations that can connect with your audiences immediately.
As a Customer Success Manager you will find yourself in several meetings where you have to coordinate not only your customer's group of people but also your internal team.
Public speaking: learn how to present to different audiences
In this chapter you will learn how to be an effective public speaker in several occasions. From a quick presentation to a conference in front of a large audience.
Presentation and Public Speaking
In this course you will learn how to start become a better public speaker step by step. In multiple lessons you will learn the basics, from your presentation to how you can win your fears before a big presentation.
This first lesson is about controlling your nerves when you need to speak in public.
A series of aspects that will help you define the objective of your speech
Storytelling is what will help you transform your ability to speak in public. In this lesson there is a structured approach to transform your presentation into a story.
Part of your success in public speaking will derive from the structure of your content: how it starts, what it tells, the anecdotes and so much more
The second part related to the importance of structuring your content.
Let's now focus on your body language and learn how to control it as you speak
How you can remove that bad pauses and "ehm" that are so frequent in many public speeches
A practical set of suggestions to speak at a conference
How to present in front a class
For all those instances where you will need to present a project or summarize something recording a video. This will help you be a more effective speaker for it.
Delivering a presentation to your own team requires a different setup and sometimes a different style. Learn how to deliver one with this lesson.
A recap of what you have learned about public speaking in this course.
Now that you know the fundamentals of public speaking, this famous course by Matt Abrahams - a lecturer of strategic communication at Stanford GSB and the host of the award-winning podcast "Think Fast, Talk Smart" - will bring you into a very engaging talk where he explains how to use communication in multiple situations.
Introduction to sales and negotiation for CSMs
Sales is mostly about creating value and solving problems: this is what you will learn in this chapter. How to upsell and let your customers buy more of your products and services. A critical aspect of being a Customer Success Manager.
Digital B2B Sales Fundamentals
Direct Sales Fundamentals
Negotiation
Negotiation Techniques
Negotiation is a critical part of our daily life, as a Customer Success Manager you will find yourself negotiating with customers, stakeholders and colleagues as well. If you are new to negotiation and want to learn more about persuasion, this course will help you interact with people in a way that allows you understand what motivates people.
Gillian Ku, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, is really engaging in this course and shows you how to start with small gestures and things to persuade people and engage them.
Let's introduce the delicate topic of sales with a simple question: do you need to sell in this role? The quick answer is yes! A lot of people think that sales is a dirty work, but in this skill path we will show you why that's not true! Even better: most of the times, customer success professionals are better at sales than sales people themselves.
As a CSM learning to sell and specifically get into consultative sales can be easy and very useful. Your customers already know you and they know how you can create value for them. In this initial course we learn how to think about sales for CSMs and what are the real advantages you have.
We will not start immediately with sales training and skills: for Customer Success professionals you need to learn how to create value and position your product and services before you can sell. You are already in a privileged situation most of the times, you already have access to your customers and you have been working with them.
This course will teach you what positioning means in terms of marketing and sales and why it matters so much to create value for your customers and make sure that selling a product or a service to solve a problem becomes just the consequence of that. At ByTek you will also meet a lot of different businesses and opportunities working with our customers, this course will teach you how to think about positioning and sales for them first and foremost.
It's now time to dive deep a bit more into what sales is about with an initial course on basic sales techniques. There are plenty of courses out there that want to teach you how to sell: this one is slightly different because it will teach you what matters in sales and why leading with questions is so important to create a relationship with your customer.
For customer success managers leading with questions and learning how to create a strong relationship from day 1 is even more important. A lot of what you will sell will be an additional service or product (like Audience AI) and you can use questions and curiosity to learn as much as you can about your customers.
In this last part you will learn about the specific aspects of consultative sales and specifically how to apply it for software and SaaS (Software as a Service) products. This is important because it gives you yet another set of skills to work with your customers and solve their problems while upselling them to new products and solutions offered by our company.
With this final course you should have a strong understanding by now of how you can start selling and building value for our customers in your role.
Crisis management for Customer Success Managers
Things can go wrong all the time. With customers, teams and colleagues. In this role you will learn how to become more resilient but this chapter will teach you simple principles and strategies to manage a crisis or potential disruption of your plans.
Crisis Mitigation Strategies
Stakeholder Management in Crisis
What's a crisis? A customer unsatisfied with results that decides to churn with a critical and important contract. It could be a misunderstanding that generates a big problem across your organization or a project that fails to be completed on time creating issues to your customer's business. Crisis can happen at every time and as a CSM you will need to recognize them and lead through them.
In this initial video we review a few core principles you should use that will always work, no matter the size and consequence of your crisis. They might sound too simple, but if you start using them you will notice how powerful they can be.
In this short course we step into the world of projects to review a few examples of potential crisis and learn how to deal with them. From someone in your team not being available to a change of scope in the project that you did not see coming. You should watch this course thinking about everything else you have just learned in terms of principles and you will have the skills to manage a crisis dealing with your external stakeholders (your customer, for example) but also with your internal ones, starting with your team.
Introduction
Stefano BellasioCEO/co-founder Anthropos Inc.
Stefano Bellasio is a serial entrepreneur and CEO and cofounder of Anthropos Inc. He has spent several years building small and large teams of Sales and Customer Success professionals in the SaaS world and has learned what makes a great Customer Success professional through...
Skill objectives