135. You Nailed the CSM Interview and Still Got Rejected. Here's 4 Reasons Why

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. I know we've all had this exact scenario play out. For some of us, maybe only once if you're lucky. But for most of us, this has happened many, many times. I'm talking about when you walk out of an interview and you feel good. Like, genuinely good. You had an answer for everything. You didn't freeze, you didn't ramble. You, uh, felt prepared for every question that was thrown at you. And then a week later you get the email like, we've decided to move forward with another candidate. Oh, it was such a hard decision. Like, yeah, yeah, okay, this sucks. And it sucks even more because you feel like you nailed the interview. So I'm gonna use today's episode to tell you some of the things that nobody is telling you, but that you need to hear. You can answer every single question really well in an interview and still not be the one who gets the offer. Because largely interviewing, uh, is not about having great answers. That's a small part of it. There is so much more to winning an interview and winning a job offer. So I'm going to give you the feedback that you really need to hear, but that no interviewer is ever going to honestly tell you. Now, luckily, because my team and I have been doing this for so long, and by doing this I mean helping CSMs land jobs, helping them prepare for every interview stage, we are really quickly able to distill observations down into patterns. So I'm going to share four things that we see and hear most often in csm. Um, interviews that are most likely the reason why you're not getting an offer even if you had great answers. So I'll walk you through all four. For each one, I'll give you exactly what it sounds like when you get it wrong and what it sounds like when you get it right so you can hear and feel that difference and then you can go fix it before your Next interview. So let's get into it. Okay, Reason one, you answered the questions in the interview, but you never made them like you. This is the one that a lot of people hate hearing. So I'm putting it first. I cannot overstate this. The offer does not go to the best candidate with the best answers, with the best experience, with the most relevant experience. It goes to the person the team wants to sit next to for the next two years, three years, four years. So rapport building in an interview is not a soft, fluffy part of the interview. It is a huge part of winning an interview. It's just the part that nobody tells you they're assessing you on. I don't think anyone has ever heard we went with another candidate because we just kind of vibed with them more like, you're never gonna hear that. But I would venture to guess, eight times out of 10, that's the true reason why they went with a different candidate. So what this sounds like when you get this wrong is you might sound overly polished. Maybe you are a little bit robotic, so you're forgetting to be conversational. A lot of candidates do this and they don't realize it, but if every time the interviewer asks you something, you immediately go, that's a great question. And then you respond, it makes it awkward for the interviewer because it just doesn't feel like a conversation. Now, I am also guilty when I'm interviewed, even on, like, podcasts now that I don't interview for jobs myself. When people ask me questions, I usually say, like, great question. So listen, it's a hard habit to kick. So I'm going to give you some things that you can say or do to kick that habit and make yourself sound a little bit more human. What you want to do is just add a tiny bit of personality before you answer the question. So let's say they ask you something like, you know, tell me about a time where you dealt with a difficult customer. Instead of saying, yeah, that's a great question. You could say, ooh, just one time I dealt with a difficult customer. Honestly, I've been in CS for so long, I could probably give you 40. Um, but I'll go with blah, blah, blah, and then you tell your story. So you're just injecting a little bit of personality before you get into your answer. That makes a huge difference. Like doing that versus. That's a great question. That's a great question. Is going to make them feel more connected to you. And it's such an easy little thing to change. Now Another little bonus tip I will add for building rapport is when we're answering interview questions, we tend to, again, forget that it's a conversation. And so we go through our whole SAR story as a monologue, and we don't pause or check in or let the interviewer, like, take a breath. So if you can remember before you get into the final details of the story, a quick little check in is always helpful. Keeps things a little bit more human, makes it more conversational, makes them feel more connected to you. So you could just quickly say something like, oh, and, um, before I keep going, do you want me to, like, go deeper on that one aspect, or was that enough context and just let them give you permission to keep talking? The problem with monologue after monologue after monologue is it does start to sound scripted in most instances. And. And if you think about it, it's really like you're putting on these mini performances as opposed to connecting with a person. All right, reason one is done. Let's, uh, move on to reason two. You probably told them a lot about what you've done in your past roles, things you've accomplished, but you didn't tell them at all how you think. Now, really pay attention to this one, because almost everybody gets this wrong. Not my clients, of course, but a lot of people get this wrong. You can have a really strong story. It can be the perfect example of what they're asking for. It can have a really strong result. It can make you look really, really good. But what happens is, if you don't share enough about you and how you think and how you approach things and why you approach things the way that you do, it could leave the interviewer thinking, hmm, maybe that's a little too perfect of an example. Or they might think, hmm, well, did you just get lucky in this scenario? Or is this a result that you can drive again and again and again should this situation arise in the future? So what you don't want to do when you're telling your stories is jump right into actions like, oh, okay, here was the situation. Blah, blah, blah. So what I did was I went on site, I got the customer to agree to a re onboarding plan, and I saved the account. Like, that's good. That's all good stuff, right? Nothing that you just said was bad, but you didn't tell me anything about why you did what you did or how you were evaluating different options of what to do with this account. So a better example of this would be, the first thing I did was looked at the Adoption data, I saw that their usage had dropped and I also noted that, uh, our main champion had been a little bit quiet. So my read on this was this was not at all a training problem. This was an account that was clearly not bought in. So instead of me just pushing more enablement, I pushed to get in a room with them. I could keep going. Obviously that's not a full story, but now you're starting to show the hiring manager the different options. You are evaluating, more steps that you took, why you chose one route over another route, and what that helps them do is go, okay, I'm getting a glimpse into how your brain works. I'm getting a glimpse into how you deal with escalations or how you problem solve. Are you creative? Are you analytical? How do you decide what step you're going to take with an account? I don't actually know how you decide that unless you explain to me your thought process through these stories. Now, uh, what's also really cool about this approach, just sprinkling in to every one of your stories a little bit about how you think and how you operate before you get into the specific steps you took, is it reassures whomever's interviewing you that this is a result that you can replicate. And that's exactly what we want them to take away from our interview is I've had all these great results and by the way, I can replicate them on your team. This. I know I'm sharing four tips today, but this one is genuinely the thing. If you learn how to nail this, if you can master this across the 1200/cs folks my team and I have coached, being able to master this is one of the single highest leverage tweaks we make to someone's interview skills. It is almost always the difference between someone who can get to maybe a first or second round interview, but never get to later stages to boom, boom, boom, passing interview stage, interview stage, interview stage, and getting an offer right away. Now that doesn't make tip number three or tip number four any less valuable. And these ones are so easy, so you might as well just keep paying attention. So reason number three that you might feel like you had a great interview but still not get the offer is you didn't quantify anything. This one's quick, but I need to mention it because it does absolutely just kill your interview. Unfortunately, you can be the most experienced, credible, amazing, rapport building person in the room, but if you don't have specific number results at the ends of your stories, that's not going to look good. On you. So I would not end your stories with like, I improved retention. Uh, it helped a bunch of my accounts. Adoption across my accounts increased. We got the renewal. It opened a bunch of expansion opportunities. Like, those are all really fluffy results. They're good, but they're fluffy. So no different from, you know what I would say about putting things on your resume. You need to have some numbers attached to these things. So I improved retention by what I helped specifically this number of my accounts drive this specific result. Adoption in my accounts went from 500 active users to 1500 active users. I'm just making these up. But, you know, this. It is just something that I feel like I need to remind folks of because I still hear a lot of interviews where you CSMs are not mentioning numbers. And I think a lot of the time it comes down to it feeling a little bit awkward, which I get. Um, unfortunately, a lot of us in customer success are like, very humble people pleasers. And so we don't want to take credit for things. And for some reason, mentioning all of our great numbers like, just doesn't feel good. But the problem is if you're not willing to get a little uncomfortable and brag and boast a little bit in your interviews, unfortunately, somebody else is willing to do that, and they're going to be the one that gets the offer over you. All right, moving on to our last reason you probably didn't get the job offer is you didn't interview them back. This is one that I would tattoo on the arms of every job seeker in the world if I could. The questions you ask at the end of the interview, uh, that is not a throwaway part of the interview. I hear a lot of people say, like, I just. I love the part where I get to ask questions because I feel like the pressure is off me. Sorry, but you should not feel like the pressure is off you. If anything, there's even more pressure on you when it comes to you asking the questions. So things that are not gonna sound good here are absolutely. If you say something like, no, I think you covered everything. I, uh, don't have any questions like, no, don't do that. Even basic questions such as, what's the culture like here? Like, snooze fest, boring. Please don't ask questions like that. What you wanna do when you're asking questions is show off your CSM skills, show that you've done some research, you've done your homework. Uh, you can really dig in, get deep, you're curious. So a good question. I also love this Tip of, like, mentioning things from previous conversations that you've already had with this company. So you could say something. Let's say this is like a third round interview. Say, oh, when I met with so and so in my last conversation, he mentioned that you're trying to rebuild your onboarding this year. I'm just curious, like, what's driving that? And where do you see this role fitting into contributing to that? Or you could just say, like, what's driving that? And how do you plan to measure success of that initiative? So asking real good, curious questions, if you want. Specifically on the topic of questions, I have a whole podcast episode, if not more than one episode on this topic. I know at least one of them is episode number 62. So if right now you're hearing this and you're going, oh, crap, I'm asking really bad questions in my interviews, go listen to episode 62. I go through 10 questions that you can ask that I love for the end of an interview. And by the way, just so that you know, this is not just my personal preference, if you listen back to some of the folks who I've interviewed on the show recently, these are very experienced customer success leaders who have hired tens, hundreds of CSMs throughout their careers. They all say the same thing about candidates asking questions in interviews. Some of the folks that I've interviewed have said, uh, I am mostly assessing a candidate by the questions they ask me. Dan Ennis specifically said, when candidates ask good questions, what they're thinking is, hey, if this candidate can ask me questions this good, they're obviously going to ask our customers questions that are this good. So, like, it proves that they have the CSM skill set I'm looking for. All right? So stop being lazy with your questions at the end of the interview. That is such a silly reason to not get a job offer. But I guarantee there are people out there who are not getting the offer simply because some other candidate outperformed them in the questions they asked. Okay, so let's zoom out for a second. None of the four things I mentioned, by the way, are about your experience, about career gaps, about skills gaps, nothing. Everything I went through today, building rapport, building, telling them how you think, quantifying your results and asking good questions are easy, easy things that literally anybody could do. I don't care if you have a year of CS experience, if you have five years, if you have 10 years, if you have 20 years of CS experience, anyone can do these four things. So my advice to you is, right now, pick one of the four which one gave you the most anxiety? That's probably the one that you need to fix first and just focus on that one in your next interview and then you can always add more later. But you don't want to try to master all four at once because that might make you a little overwhelmed. And by all means, if you're sitting here going, okay, this is all helpful, but I still don't feel a hundred percent confident in my interview skills or in my interview stories. That is exactly what my team and I do. Inside our one on one coaching program. We spend so much time, all day, every day, Monday through Friday, sitting down with customer success job seekers, um, of all levels, from entry level through director, helping them not only create their interview stories, but refine them. We help them with the delivery of their interview stories and of course we help them with all four of the things we talked about today. So just your overall interview presence, if you want some help with that, um, or if you even just want to explore what getting help with that could look like. I know that this is a new concept for a lot of people. Most people have never worked with a career coach, certainly not specific to customer success. So if you want help or you're even just a little bit curious about what help would look like, go to carliagar.com apply. It will take you less than a minute probably to fill out an application and from there we'll have a quick chat. We'll see if it makes sense for you to work with my team or not. Worst case scenario, we point you in a helpful direction. Last thing I will say, if this episode was useful to you, do me a tiny favor. But really do yourself a favor and just make sure you subscribe to the show. Make sure you follow. Follow the show wherever you get your podcast. That does two things. Number one, it helps you not miss any future episodes, which by the way, they drop every single Wednesday. And also it helps me because when I can see that folks are following and subscribing, I know that the topics I'm talking about are resonating. You can also always just shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I'm literally always in my LinkedIn DMs. So if you have a topic request or you just want to say, hey, this episode really helped me. Like, by all means, please don't hesitate. Thanks for listening and I'll catch you in the next episode.