Become a Customer Success Manager - Official Anthropos Skill Path

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.