125. 9 Reasons You Freeze in CSM Interviews (And How to Fix Each)

Speaker A: 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 your 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. There is one sentence I hear more than almost anything else in my job working with job seekers. And it's not I can't find a job. It's not. This market is brutal right now. Even though I do hear those two sentences pretty often, the one I hear the most often is, oh, huh, Carly, I'm just bad at interviews. And I totally get why a lot of people feel that way and label themselves as bad interviewers oftentimes. Just like when you used to take a test, like, you walk out of the test, you walk out of the interview, and your brain only wants to replay every weird thing you said, every word you mispronounced, every time you stuttered or stumbled or paused. Everything you wish you went differently is the only thing your brain remembers. And so yeah, you, you kind of like reinforce this thought that you are just bad at interviewing. But what I'll tell you is my team and I have now coached over 1200 job seekers. That is a crap ton of people. And pretty much all of them all also thought they were bad at interviewing. We rarely meet someone who's actually bad at interviewing. Oftentimes what we meet is people who are bad at prepping for interviews, or they have a bad mindset heading into interviews, or they just don't have the right structure and the right preparation to excel in the interview. So it's more about the skills that need a little refining and tweaking and less about you just innately being a bad interviewer. And you have no hope and you can never get better. So I'm really excited about this episode. I pulled together the nine things our coaches say to clients who tell us they're bad at, uh, interviewing. Whether it's they think they're bad because they freeze up, they feel awkward, they feel anxious, they ramble, they forget who they are and can't say anything. All of those, like, really common Things that show up in interviews that make us feel like we're bad at them. I'm going to share exactly what our coaches say. And this is all taken from real coaching calls. So this is kind of a nice way for you to get a lot of coaching from a lot of different scenarios and situations and from the perspective of a lot of really experienced CS leaders in one sitting. Actually, technically two settings, because I am going to break this up into two episodes just because I have a lot to share and I. I want to make sure I do this justice. So today, Part one, we're doing the first four pieces of advice. These are really going to fix what's happening before and during the interview, how you prep what to do when you're in the room and your brain just freezes up. These are things you can put to work, like today. So take notes if you're not driving, and let's get into it. So number one thing that I hear coaches say to our clients is, you're not bad at interviews. You are just prepping the wrong way. So we had a client. I'm going to call her, Sheena, who got on a call with one of my coaches and said almost word for word, I completely freeze during interviews. I stumble over my words. I do all the prep. I feel like I've got it, and then the second I'm live on that zoom call, my brain, uh, just goes blank. So our coach, Max, digs in, and what he finds is that Sheena had written out these dense, like, very full paragraphs, jargon packed scripts for essentially everything that she intended to say in the interview. She had basically memorized a bunch of speeches. And Max says this thing I want tattooed on every single job seeker's forehead so you never forget it. The second you memorize and go off script, it's going to cause absolute chaos. The scripting that you're doing before the interview is why you're freezing. So scripting is not a cure for freezing. It is the cause of that freezing. Because what happens is when you're relying on memorization, you are kind of letting go of the experience. You're not actually recalling an experience from memory anymore. What you're trying to do is retrieve exact word for word sentences from your memory. And that's why, like, if you forget one word or one phrase, the whole thing falls apart. And. And then you just start to panic. So really what you should do instead, and this is what we tell all of our clients to do, is go ahead and write a script. If that's Going to help you write a script. I like scripts personally, but once you write the script, you have to then practice it enough in your own natural language where you're not reading it word for word for word, trying to memorize everything exactly, but you. You're recalling it from memory, saying it naturally, looking at the script every once in a while when you get stuck or you forget something. And eventually that script needs to turn into just a very concise list of bullets. Where ideally those bullets are just like one or two words. Because if you're trying to again recall a script, things are going to fall apart. One of our other coaches, Steven, on a call, actually said to a client, like he got feedback in one of his own interviews that it felt like he was reading off a script. And he was like, yeah, it probably sounds like I'm reading off a script, because I am. So now he tells every client to convert all of your scripts to bullets so that you can't. So that you're not tempted to rely on a script. So write out the script initially, get it into natural language where you're actually recalling the story, and then just have bullet points to help you remember things so that you don't forget them. Number two is stop trying to have an answer for every possible question. This one is so, so common. We had a client, Amanda, who came in basically like, okay, I am super type A. I like to over prepare. So I want to have every possible question I could be faced with in an interview so that I can have my answers prepared for all those possibilities. And our coach, Zach on this call was like, uh, yeah, that's not going to work. Because let's say we sit here and we prep 40 questions and answers. There's still a very, very high probability that you get a question that is phrased a little bit differently from what we talked about, or you get a question totally out of left field. And then what's going to happen? You're going to panic, you're going to freak out, you're not going to know what to say. So that's another trap is over. Preparing, trying to anticipate every single possible question that you might be asked in an interview. There are infinite versions of every question, so this is quite literally impossible. So instead, what we teach people to do is prep by first function, not by question. So what does that mean? Instead of what's my answer going to be to question X, you think in buckets. And we have specific customer success buckets. So expansion is a bucket risk, and churn saves is a Bucket driving adoption. A bucket managing stakeholders. A bucket working cross functionally, another bucket. So the idea is that if you have a couple strong stories for each bucket, when a question does come in, you're not frantically searching for the one that perfectly matches the question that you were asked. Instead, your brain goes, oh, this is a question where they're trying to suss out my adoption skills. I've got a couple examples I can share. Amanda told us this kind of heartbreaking, uh, thing too, and I want to share it because I'm sure a lot of you have experienced this too. But she had been in a previous interview where she was, like, saving her best story for a specific question that she thought they were going to ask her, and they never asked her that question. So she never got to share this, like, incredible story that she had. So that's just another example of how when you try to anticipate every single question, it's just gonna screw you up. So think about all of the functions and all of the themes of the interview and have your talking points ready for those themes. There's no way you can anticipate every single question that they could ask you. Number three. This is gonna be so incredibly useful for anyone, even if you get, like, the tiniest bit nervous or you tend to ramble in interviews. Number three is buy yourself time in interviews. So many people think that they can't pause before answering the interviewer's question. Like, it's going to be awkward or it's going to make them look unprepared. I would argue it's the opposite. So what we often tell clients to do is, first of all, you can just, like, take a breath and not speak right away if you need to think about your answer. But you could also buy yourself time by, uh, saying something like, oh, I haven't thought about that one in a while. Let me think. Or ooh, actually, I have so many examples that I could share about this. Just give me a second to think about which one I want to share. Even though that is technically just like filling in silence, if that's gonna buy you the three to five seconds your brain needs to go, okay, which bucket is this? Which story do I wanna share here? That's totally fine. It's not gonna hurt. Graham, one of our coaches, I love the way that he positions this. He says that if you give a thoughtful pause, that actually signals senior level thinking, it's going to read as being very mature and collected, which makes a lot of sense, because if you're in a conversation with A customer and they ask you a question and you pause or ask for a second to think about an answer that's not going to make you look bad to the customer. If anything, it's going to make you look good. It's like, oh, you're being thoughtful. You're not just going to like, throw shit at me. That doesn't make sense. You. You actually want to give me a real answer. So I love how Graham reframes a pause as actually being a really good thing. I would say if you're hesitant to do this, just think about a couple seconds of silence followed by a clear, well articulated answer is going to look so much better than if you immediately start talking and it's just a jumbled for frazzled mess. All right, moving on to number four. So this one is stay at, ah, 3,000ft, not a thousand. What we're talking about here is when you get asked something big, like, what does our company do? Or walk me through how you onboard customers, most of us, especially if we're feeling nervous, tend to dive way, way down into the weeds. We had a client on a call with our coach, Max, who was practicing a description of the company that she was interviewing with, and she went straight into like, it's a B2C CRM that automates SMS, email, social. There's an AI agent component. She's like, listing, feature, feature, feature, feature. And Max immediately pulled her back and said, at the most executive level, what problem does this product solve and who uses it? And all of a sudden her answer was, oh, this product helps businesses make more money from their email, social and, um, sms. And he's like, that's where you need to live. You need to live up there. When we get too far into the weeds and into the details, it makes you seem more nervous and it probably makes you more nervous because you're trying to remember all these little micro details that are just unnecessary. So don't forget to zoom out to back up. And this can also be true of your actual interview stories. You don't always need to go all the way into the weeds. Think outcomes, big picture. Okay, let's bring home part one quick recap of the four we covered. Number one, you're prepping wrong. Stop relying on scripts. Move from scripts to outlines. Number two, stop trying to anticipate every question you might be asked. Instead, prep by function and theme. And bucket. Number three, totally fine. To buy yourself some time in the moment. Pausing is not weird. It signals senior level thinking. And number four, stay at 3,000ft by all means go out to 10,000ft if you need to. Try not to go too quickly, too deep into the weeds. If you do nothing else this week, just take the first one. Stop memorizing word for word sentences, paragraphs, and build those bulleted outlines instead. That one change alone is going to fix a lot of your like I go blank in interview problems. Now, of course, if you're sitting there going, okay, Carly, this is all helpful, but I think I need more help. I think I need that one on one intense feedback. Practice brainstorming with a CS leader. That's exactly what my team and I do. So you can always apply. Just go to carlyagar.com forward/apply. If we can help you, great. If not, we'll be super honest and transparent about that and make sure if you're not already subscribed to the show, subscribe. Come back next week for part two. Because I'd say if the four we covered today are more like the mechanics, the back half, what I'm going to cover in next week's episode is more about mindset. And we know mindset dictates how you show up in interviews. So just as if not even more important than the concepts we already covered. Okay, that's it for part one. Uh, go build your outlines and I'll catch you next week.