This is The Customer Success Pro Podcast, hosted by Anika Zubair. Customer Success is not a destination, but a a journey. Join me on this crazy CS journey as I chat to leaders, strategists and experts in customer success about their experiences and definitions of customer success and share with your their best practices on how to build and scale world class CS organization. Each interview will unlock tips, tricks and best practices to help scale your customer success career and company. I will dive into important and relevant topics to help spread knowledge about customer success in order to help companies put the customer at the center of their business. Because at the end of the day when customer are successful, so is the company.
Learn more at: thecustomersuccesspro.com
This is The Customer Success Pro Podcast, hosted by Anika Zubair. Customer Success is not a destination, but a a journey. Join me on this crazy CS journey as I chat to leaders, strategists and experts in customer success about their experiences and definitions of customer success and share with your their best practices on how to build and scale world class CS organization. Each interview will unlock tips, tricks and best practices to help scale your customer success career and company. I will dive into important and relevant topics to help spread knowledge about customer success in order to help companies put the customer at the center of their business. Because at the end of the day when customer are successful, so is the company.
Learn more at: thecustomersuccesspro.com
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The Objection Handling Guidebook for CS:
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In this episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast, host Anika Zubair speaks with Courtney Balban, VP of Customer Success at Leadr, a manager enablement platform. They unpack how Courtney went from therapist to CS leader, why curiosity is a true superpower in customer conversations, and how her team runs a full cycle CS model without relying on rigid playbooks. Courtney shares how she teaches CSMs to sit in discomfort, separate noise from impact, and use deeper discovery to uncover real business problems instead of reacting to surface requests. They also dig into psychological safety, call coaching, leading managers through the teddy bear plus bulldozer balance, and the shift from retention first thinking to treating CS as a growth engine that speaks in outcomes and revenue language.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
06:55 Inside Leadr, full cycle CSMs and structuring the post-sale team
14:16 Cutting through the noise, activity versus impact and root cause thinking
23:10 Redefining customer value and building a team without rigid playbooks
30:32 Curiosity as a superpower
36:54 Why CSMs stop one question too early and how to go deeper without feeling salesy
42:19 Psychological safety, call coaching and how the team transformed
47:31 Leading leaders, big lessons learned
Connect with Anika Zubair:
Website: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anikazubair/
RevUP Academy: https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/revup
Connect with Courtney Balban:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/courtneybalban/
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https://thecustomersuccesspro.com/resources
Want to be our next podcast guest? Apply here:
https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/podcast-guest
Book Anika as a speaker at your next team event: https://www.thecustomersuccesspro.com/team-event