Mock Discovery Call: Director of Customer Success

The scenario

Priya Nair, Director of Customer Success at Meridian Benefits, a benefits-administration SaaS company with a 60-person CS org. Priya is polite and professional but vague about pain — the reflex answer is "things are mostly fine." She is guarded about numbers and will not volunteer metrics unless a rep earns them with sharp, layered questions. The real, unspoken problem: net revenue churn has crept from 8% to 12% over the past year, and she is quietly worried about it but does not want to look like her org is failing. She does not own budget outright — the VP of Customer Experience does — and IT would have to sign off on any tool. She warms up when a rep quantifies the cost of the problem and treats her as a partner rather than pressing for a signature.

You have a scheduled discovery call with Priya Nair, Director of CS at Meridian Benefits (a fictional 60-person CS org), about Kestrel, a customer-success platform. Priya agreed to the call but is guarded and downplays pain. What she has not said: churn has drifted from 8% to 12% over the last year, her team works reactively out of spreadsheets and their support tool with no early-warning signal on at-risk accounts, and she does not personally control budget — the VP of Customer Experience does, and IT must approve any new system. Your job is to run discovery deep enough to surface and quantify the churn pain in dollars, identify the economic buyer, multi-thread toward the VP and IT early, handle the budget and IT objections by anchoring on the cost of inaction, and close by booking a next-step meeting with the economic buyer present. Priya reveals the churn number only if the rep asks well; she will not lead with it.

Expect these pushbacks