The Community-Led Growth Show: Recent Episodes
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The Community-Led Growth Show features rockstar community builders, wicked marketers, and dynamic growth leaders.
Guest: Mark Kilens, CMO at Airmeet (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Mark shares:
- What the term “event-led” really means
- The many forms events can take: user groups, webinars, etc.
- Why events are one of the most impactful methods of marketing
- Some examples of organizations driven by event-led growth (like…The Grateful Dead(!))
- How strategically nurturing leads at small events helps organizations close deals at large, annual conferences
- How setting clear goals for community events allows for better measurement and more meaningful KPIs
Additional Links:
- Follow Airmeet on LinkedIn
Guest: Ashley Dodge, VP of Community at Copado
In this episode, Ashley discusses:
- How she came to lead Community for such a technical company without a technical background
- Her team’s quick pivot from support programming to a virtual online community and academy during the COVID pandemic
- How her team created programming to build relationships and engagement retroactively after membership grew overnight
- Copado’s community-led conference that highlights the work and wins of their members
- The unexpected success of the community’s Testing Buddies program
- How measurement expanded from education metrics to cost-reduction and revenue-related metrics.
Additional Links:
- Follow Copado on LinkedIn
Guest: Tali Leibowitz, Head of Community at Agave Health
In this episode, Tali talks about:
- Determining where to hire and what to hire for (spoiler alert: soft skills!)
- Hiring and managing from non-traditional Community Management backgrounds
- Unbiased hiring methods
- Balancing personality types in the team’s makeup
- Taking a listening-first approach and managing with trust
- Developing team members through human-first conversations, “I am remarkable” sharing sessions, and celebrating wins and lessons learned
- Community trends in AI and data analytics
Additional Links:
- Follow Agave Health on LinkedIn
Guest: Evan Hamilton, Director of Community at HubSpot
In this episode, Evan chats about:
- Assessing career opportunities for Community professionals growing in seniority
- Determining whether a Community role’s compensation range and package are fair
- The SPACES model for measuring program impact and the parts he finds most compelling
- The value of tracking ROI, even when it’s imperfect
- How community is stepping into a space where traditional marketing and advocacy are faltering
- How he’s watching with interest as communities take on other formats, including VR
Additional Links:
- Subscribe to Evan’s newsletter: Community Manager Breakfast
- Follow HubSpot on LinkedIn
Guest: Emily Lonetto, Director of Community at Webflow
In this episode, Emily opens up about:
- Why Webflow set aside $10 Million for their Community Grants Program
- How they track value in a way that promotes ongoing investment in grants and some of their biggest wins
- How the Webflow community experiments with personas, segmentation, and triaging product feedback
- The importance of building bridges as a community team supporting PLG initiatives
- Her excitement for trends in sentiment data, co-creation, and community as a strategic function within companies
Additional Links:
- Follow Webflow on LinkedIn
Guest: Justin Levy, Director of Social & Influencer Marketing at Demandbase (at the time of this recording)
In this episode, Justin covers:
- The unique setup of Revenue Circle as a thought leadership community, distinct from Demandbase’s customer or marketing goals
- How and why his team maintains the community’s separation from brand and sales
- What led him to start incorporating silliness and fun into community conversations
- How he partners with influencers and thought leaders to bring value to the community
- The importance of building human relationships with community members in a 1-1 way and seeing members build relationships with one another
- Watching the trend toward more off-brand or “hosted-by” communities like Revenue Circle
Additional Links:
- Follow Revenue Circle on LinkedIn
- Follow Demandbase on LinkedIn
Guest: Katie Ray, Head of Community at Metadata
In this episode, Katie shares:
- The red lights and green lights she watched for when considering joining Metadata
- What it was like starting with the Metadata team, their process for growing the community with a member-led approach
- How the team’s very small, dedicated rollout of DEMAND led to huge engagement
- Why building a community for demand gen marketers can, in fact, change lives
- Reasons for creating the new Women in Marketing program
- Her preference for agile community building and building with heart over fearing mistakes
Additional Links:
- Follow Metadata on LinkedIn
Guest: Danny Pancratz, Director of Community at Unqork
In this episode, Danny discusses:
- Managing communities where the Community is the product
- The career-building value niche communities offer their members
- Applying product management frameworks to community building
- Why community managers should be unafraid to tackle learning technical skills
- Measuring engagement: active users vs active engagement
- Meeting members where they are
- The intangible, immeasurable benefits of a well-managed community
Additional Links:
- Follow Unqork on LinkedIn
Guest: Camille Trent, Director of Content & Community at PeerSignal
In this episode, Camille covers:
- Her career expansion from content to community
- Building her role with intent by looking for a company that focused on quality, meaningful content, investment in community
- Her work turning PeerSignal’s audience into a true community
- Creating a “growth loop:” Allowing content to fuel community and vice versa
- PeerSignal’s strategy for measuring the overlapping success of content and community
- Trends in influencer marketing, owned communities, community tech, & decentralized audience building
Additional Links:
- Follow PeerSignal on LinkedIn
Guest: Arthur Castillo, Head of Dark Social & Evangelism at Chili Piper
In this episode, Arthur divulges:
- How Chili Piper company decided to approach a community strategy by sponsoring ones
- Embracing a “Seek to understand before being understood” philosophy
- Creating integrated marketing campaigns within sponsored communities
- Listening on third-party platforms as a retention strategy
- How measuring ROI matured from hypotheses to solid metrics
- The future of community consolidation and acquisition, as well as the rise of customer communities
Additional Links:
- Follow Chili Piper on LinkedIn
Guest: Laura Roth, Community & Marketing Consultant (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Laura shares insights about:
- Connecting the dots between community and leadership priorities
- Infusing community mindsets or moments into other business programming
- Working cross-functionally, particularly as remote work gains traction
- Building trust through the use of feedback
- The importance of paying attention to norms and inclusion when planning programs
- A future in which community supports a human side beyond the business
Guest: Christina Le, Social Media & Community Manager at OpenPhone
In this episode, Christina digs into:
- Her expansion from social media into a Community Management role
- What it’s like to create brand-focused content and then switch into a community mindset to build engagement
- Recognizing and overcoming imposter syndrome
- Using empathy and goodwill to drive engagement
- Her vision for separating the roles and platforms as her company grows
- A trend toward online authenticity and advocacy
Additional Links:
- Follow OpenPhone on LinkedIn
Guest: Jeph Abu, Product Community Manager at AhoyConnect (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Jeph shares:
- His perspective on incorporating the full spectrum of diversity in community building
- His challenges in breaking into the Community Management space
- Tactical ways to improve community inclusivity
- The benefits to companies of truly embracing DEIB in their communities
- Alternatively, the pitfalls of companies not putting their money where their mouth is
- The value of feedback when things don’t go your way
Additional Links:
- Follow AhoyConnect on LinkedIn
Guest: Jocelyn Hsu, Director of Creator Community at Picsart (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Jocelyn shares:
- How she turned a recognition program into a thriving community
- How she finds and nurtures top creators
- The need to provide value and make content creation easy
- Reasons for maintaining an exclusive community
- How her team sets goals and tracks value, including a biannual survey
- Trends in community consulting, DEIB, & using community strategies for internal groups like ERGs
Additional Links:
- Follow Picsart on LinkedIn
Guest: Tara Pawlak, Head of Marketing at GetAccept (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Tara talks about:
- What a decentralized community looks like
- The value of inviting all employees to engage in community efforts
- Supporting employees’ personal goals as a business strategy
- Establishing clear goals based on high-level strategies and iterating over time
- The future of micro-events and brand partnerships
Additional Links:
- Follow GetAccept on LinkedIn
Guest: Vera DeVera, Head of Community at Vareto (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Vera walks us through:
- What it means to optimize for trust and create a space where members feel seen and heard
- Her process for interviewing potential community members to learn what they need
- Connecting experienced professionals with rising stars
- Benefits of a hybrid approach (online and in-person)
- How personas are helping her drive advocacy
- The importance of “Asking for AIR – Advice, Information, and Referrals”
Additional Links:
- Follow Vareto on LinkedIn
Guest: Seth Wylie, Director of Customer Success Ops & Admin Community at Gainsight (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Seth explores:
- Transitioning from a subject matter expert role to managing a community for that role
- Value of Human-First community leadership
- Community members’ hunger for connection beyond resources
- Prioritizing programs that most matter to both the business and members
- How non-Community teams engage in community-building & how Community teams should play a role
- Continued trend toward virtual connection
Additional Links:
- Follow Gainsight on LinkedIn
- Gainsight’s CS Ops Central-Connect Community
Guest: Corrina Owens, Sr. Manager, Enterprise ABM at Gong (at the time of the recording)
In this episode, Corrina opens up about:
- The meaning and purpose of Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
- Marketing to champions while also multithreading within accounts
- How Gong’s community supports ABM through peer-matching and building soft-touch marketing relationships
- Community’s role in connecting with accounts on a personal level, not just a business level
- Doing well by doing good: recognizing and celebrating community members’ passions and successes – big and small
- Trends she’s watching, including creator-led community and AI
Additional Links:
- Follow Corrina on TikTok @featuring_corrina
- Follow Gong on LinkedIn
Guest: Leslie Greenwood, Founder & CEO at Chief Evangelist Consulting
In this episode, Leslie covers:
- Evangelists as advocates who tout value of their own volition
- Evangelism vs Community
- Finding evangelists through community engagement, product usage, NPS, & referral programs
- Nurturing evangelists through white glove experiences
- Best practices for setting up referral programs
- The trend toward a standardized definition of community
Additional Links
- Visit Leslie’s website
- Follow Chief Evangelist Consulting on LinkedIn
Guest: Tessa Kriesel, Head of Developer Relations at Snap
In the episode, Tessa discusses:
- Developer Relations (DevRel) role across developers’ journey from acquisition to adoption
- Strategy for connecting with developers, building goodwill, delivering support
- Similarities between developer experience and member experience
- “Measuring what matters” including developer feedback, use of resources, successful launch and sentiment, and adoption rationale
- Trends in DevRel, including the hope that DevRel/Community gains a seat at the executive table
Additional Links
- Visit Tessa’s website
- Follow Snap on LinkedIn
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Nisha Baxi, Head of Community at Gong.
Nisha opens the episode by sharing a bit about her background before diving into all things community at Gong. When building their community, she went through the process of selecting important member engagement activities and their values to inform the health of the community.
In any role, it’s key to show ROI of your community to ensure you have a seat at the table to positively impact the business outcomes you’re setting out to achieve through the program.
Next, Nisha discusses some learnings from building the community program and strategy at Gong for the last year or so. To close out the episode, she shares the 4 B2B SaaS community trends that she’s watching out for in 2022 and beyond.
Follow Nisha on Twitter.
Follow Gong on LinkedIn and Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Molly Kipnis, Community Manager at Gong.
Molly kicks off the episode by sharing a bit about her background and role at Gong. From her experience in social and community, she shared traits that she believes make a good community professional.
Digging into her response, Molly shares engagement strategies that she’s tried that haven’t gone well, as well as one that has. Document processes to create playbooks, so anyone can pick up where you left off is extremely important in making things scalable within your community.
Next, she discusses what her day-to-day looks like as the community manager at Gong, even with each day being different there are a few consistent things daily. Molly touches on the types of programming they’re building out and testing to create a world-class community and one that lasts the test of time. Diving into their virtual meetup program that launched in Q1 2022, she tested a few different things to better understand engagement within the community and rolled out the formal program following experiments.
In order to grow and show the value of a program one must have KPIs, Molly shares how they show the ROI of both communities at Gong. To wrap up the episode, she shares her top 3 B2B SaaS community trends for 2022 and beyond.
Follow Molly on Twitter
Follow Gong on LinkedIn and Twitter
Nick Mehta opens up the episode by sharing a bit about himself and Gainsight. Diving into the conversation, he explains why Gainsight leaned into community as a lever for growth from the very beginning to help expand and grow their Total Addressable Market (TAM). Community at Gainsight has grown geographically and both by the ones owned by Gainsight and those outside of Gainsight serving the greater customer success profession.
Next, Nick shares how he and the leadership team at Gainsight get buy-in and show ROI of their community efforts to the board and Vista Equity Partners. Zooming out, he discusses the insights and opportunities that he and the leadership team saw that gave them the confidence to proceed with acquiring inSided.
Earlier in the conversation, Nick mentioned Peloton and now it’s time to hear what he’s learned about building community from Peloton and what they’ve done well from his perspective.
To close out the episode, he shares the 3 community trends he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond.
Follow Nick on Twitter.
Follow Gainsight on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Sam Richard begins the episode by sharing a bit about her background. In her role on the Growth Team at OpenView, she’s hearing more of their portfolio companies - Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led - begin to focus on developing community strategy for their organization.
For companies that are Sales-Led and building a community, they’re looking to empower their evangelists and customers, raising them up in the market to be thought leaders in the space.
Sam is a believer in the “crawl, walk, run” approach for anything, and that includes community, and to hire someone to specifically own and manage the community efforts at the company. She discusses how companies can build a developer community and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)-specific one from her experience.
Next, Sam explains her top 2 points lessons from working with and watching companies launch communities to help others succeed. Circling back to an earlier point, she breaks down the process for showing the ROI of a location-based community program that a company is executing.
To close out the episode, Sam shares 3 community trends she’s seeing and watching for in 2022 and beyond.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Caroline Salis, Community Manager at ZoomInfo.
Caroline Salis begins the episode by sharing a bit about her background and what ZoomInfo does. To dive into the conversation around community at ZoomInfo, she shares the behind-the-scenes knowledge of what started the conversation about building a community - both internal employee advocacy and customer ones.
As a multi-product company serving different audiences, Caroline discussed the research conducted to inform the strategy behind building a single community for their customers. Proceeding with their plans to launch a customer community, ZoomInfo decided to launch it as a LinkedIn Group, so Caroline shares the why behind that choice.
As their community continues to grow, she’ll develop new ways for members to engage with each other by listening to them. With the community being live for approximately 6 months now, Caroline focuses on qualitative metrics versus quantitative ones.
Next, she shares the lessons she’s learned while building the 2 communities at ZoomInfo, along with learnings from connecting with other community professionals.
To close out the episode, Caroline shares her 3 Community trends in the B2B SaaS space that she’s watching for in 2022.
Follow Caroline on Twitter.
Follow ZoomInfo on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Alex Su opens the episode by sharing more about his background and why he got recruited to join the Ironclad team. He shares why he started becoming more active across social media platforms and learning more about social selling.
He shared his expectations for his content at the beginning and how they’ve evolved over time, as he’s built a thriving community across four social media platforms. He’s been successful by learning directly from his audience to inform his content topics.
Alex explains how he develops new content and that he creates different content for the different platforms he’s active on. Next, he what metrics he watches to ensure that his content is continuously resonating with his target audience. A small segway from metrics, he shares his insights and predictions on the balance between creators and viewers on social media platforms.
He’s always been posting on social media, since posting on a personal blog when he was 18 years old. While it’s certainly easy for people to be worried about posting on social media and experiencing feelings of self-doubt, he believes many people don’t focus on the potential positive outcomes of doing so too.
He shares 2 creators in the legal space that inspire him and the Ironclad approach to how they build community through different members of their team.
Lastly, he shares the 3 community trends in B2B SaaS that he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond.
Nigeria Talley begins the show by sharing her background. At Carta, community is all about creating true partnerships and being helpful to those in their target audience however and wherever they can be. Carta’s community efforts currently are de-centralized, spanning different platforms and channels, yet focus on showing up authentically and focusing on being inclusive. Their partnerships focus on developing mutually beneficial ones, so Carta can support them in whatever way the organization needs.
The two tenants of their community are inclusivity, generosity, and partnership, helping everyone by making resources available and supporting them. She focuses on creating positive experiences wherever they’re engaging with members, since that’s what people will remember. Next, Nigeria shares how the Carta team decides which markets to do activations in for their audience.
She shares how they measure the ROI of community at Carta across the channels of their de-centralized community program. Closing out the episode, she shares the 3 community trends she’s watching for in 2022 and beyond in B2B SaaS.
- Follow Nigeria on Twitter.
- Follow Carta on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Sandy Mangat opens the episode by sharing a bit about herself, including the main pillars of her role today.
To set the stage for the conversation, she discusses why they launched the Product-Led Sales (PLS) Community and their goals for it. Next, she shares how the PLS Community supports people and companies building their Product-Led Sales motion from 0 to 1 with tactical information, frameworks, and foundational knowledge.
However, not every PLS Go-To-Market (GTM) motion will be the same at every company, given how closely intertwined it is to the product(s). Stepping back for a moment, our conversation goes into what is Product-Led Sales and how people support users in that GTM motion.
Approximately eight months into their community-building journey, Sandy discusses the growth of their community, focusing on quality over quantity, in relation to the metrics that they will focus on as they approach 1,000 members.
Lastly, she opens up about the lessons they’ve learned through building the PLS Community and the most exciting trends in community she’s looking out for in 2022.
Follow Sandy on Twitter.
Follow Pocus on LinkedIn and Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews James Kaikis, Co-Founder at PreSales Collective.
James begins the episode by sharing a bit about his background and how he and his co-founder got the idea to build PreSales Collective. Next, he shares how they’ve grown PreSales Collective to over 18,500 members globally, dominantly through inbound efforts and letting their members shine.
In hopes of having a “free forever” community, the PreSales Collective team needed to develop corporate partnerships to continue to serve their members well. However, they don’t work with every company. The PreSales Collective team firmly believes that any partner must be able to show value to their members and not splash their logo or place an advertisement.
They’re currently restructuring their member experience after a year of going wide and being everything PreSales. After learning more about PreSales Collective, James shares why they launched PreSales Academy and the stability it adds to their business from a revenue perspective.
He shares how they measure the success of their community, focusing on member growth and community engagement and lessons he’s learned along the way of building this thriving community.
Lastly, James shares 3 community trends he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond.
- Follow James on Twitter.
- Follow PreSales Collective on LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Follow PreSales Academy on LinkedIn and Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Aaron Leeder, VP of Partnerships & Alliances at Pavilion.
Aaron begins the episode by sharing a brief introduction about himself. Getting into the meat of the conversation, he shares how he’s built the partnerships strategy at Pavilion. In order to support the strategy, a team is needed to support partners throughout their lifecycle with Pavilion. Aaron shares how the team builds mutually beneficial partnerships with companies, as well as the opportunities that their partners have to engage with the members of Pavilion.
He talks about the balance between partners gaining value by working with Pavilion and the partnerships supporting a positive member experience. Next, the conversation turns to discuss how the partnerships team shows partner companies the ROI from their work with Pavilion. Companies are experimenting with how to leverage communities as a growth lever for their business and their goals attached to their involvement in the communities they select.
Aaron is seeing speaking engagements at events or conferences, not only a table or area, to share insights with the audience and have the attention of the room is important many of their partners. Zooming out a bit, he notes that the partnerships team is a profit center for Pavilion and shares a bit about how the revenue is used within Pavilion.
Lastly, Aaron discusses 3 learnings he’d share with a community that’s looking to build a partnerships team to drive revenue for the organization and value to members.
Follow Pavilion on Twitter
Catch Pavilion in a city near you during Elevate, their roadshow, throughout the Spring and Summer of 2022.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Erin O’Neill, Head of Community at RevOps Co-op powered by Funnel IQ.
Erin O’Neill opened the episode with a brief background on herself. We dove into the background on why Funnel IQ launched a community, RevOps Co-op, as part of their Community-Led Growth Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy.
After learning about the why behind the community, she shared how RevOps Co-op engages with members across content, tools, and community. As a community grows, one must prioritize the development of new member benefits, so Erin shared how she goes about building the community roadmap for RevOps Co-op.
She discussed the metrics that she uses to show ROI of having the RevOps Co-op community to the Funnel IQ business.
To wrap up the episode, Erin shares the B2B SaaS community trends she’s looking out for in 2022 and beyond.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Will Machin, Team Lead, Community Management at Alteryx.
Will shares a bit about his background - personal and professional. Alteryx’s community of 300,000 members is supported by the community team, comprised of 18 employees.
The four functional areas of the team are platform, operations, content, and community engagement. When building out a community team, he shares the two must-have traits for successful community professionals. Remember to focus on the person and how they interact with others, not what looks good on paper, as they’re two different things and community is all about engaging with people.
He discusses how the community team at Alteryx evaluates and makes community roadmap decisions, not just based on can we do something. His favorite benefit launched for the Alteryx Community is the Gallery, showcasing members helping members through their ideas and creations. His team, community engagement, owns the events for the community, moderation, and ways to facilitate value-add connections among members.
Will shares the community engagement tech stack, but he calls out the importance of communication and building relationships with team members to have productive conversations.
Next, the conversation turns to discuss the key metrics of the community team, such as time to first response, ticket deflection, and connecting community engagement to revenue.
With respect to his team, the number of replies on a thread, traffic, logins, and monthly engaged users. His mindset is really focused on adding value rather than preventing the loss of value.
Will wraps up the conversation by sharing his 3 community trends in B2B SaaS that he’s excited for looking at 2022 and beyond.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Max Rothery, VP of Community at Finimize.
Max opens the episode by sharing a bit about his role at Finimize, engaging their members and sharing those insights across the business.
In 5 years, the Finimize community grew to over 1 million members, so he explains that the Growth team is responsible for getting new members and the Community team owns the experience once they’ve joined. The onboarding process has changed significantly, as the company has evolved from being a newsletter.
The consistency in everything they roll out for their members is ensuring that this “Finimize feeling” is still present. He explains how they’ve prioritized items for the community roadmap, as the community and team has grown over the years.
Their first true experience with Community-Led Growth (CLG) was when they planned to have community members lead the community events. Max explains their global Host program for the Finimize community, including the 3 key traits used to identify successful hosts.
He discusses how they measure the health of it, using a weekly system and quarterly interviews and surveys of members. Building out a Community team can be challenging, so Max shares how he’s building it at Finimize, starting general and transitioning team members into specialists.
Concluding the episode, he shares his top community trends that he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond.
Follow Max on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Allison Able, Senior Manager, Community at Sisense.
Allison’s non-traditional background took her on a unique path, ultimately joining Higher Logic’s community team.
As a result of Allison’s success, Higher Logic hired additional team members from the education sector, seeing strong results with their transferable skills too. During her time at Higher Logic, she was fortunate to work on many community projects, along with doing day-to-day community management activities for their clients. When asked about why Sisense decided to build a customer community over a broader, audience-specific one, she explained the importance of ensuring the goals of the community to align with business goals and member goals.
To Allison, community building is like a tree, you need a strong foundation to eventually have it branch out. In 3 months, she shares how the Sisense community grew from 0 to 500 members and the ways they engage with their members.
They launched their community publicly as a Beta, with limited promotion to invite people into it to help in the community building effort too. Much of their member growth has been organic and customers, informing them that this is something that’s needed and serves a purpose for them in their daily work lives. They’ll be launching an exciting, gamification element into the community in Q2.
She goes in-depth on her process for building a community roadmap, with strategy and careful thought, ensuring it’s aligned to business goals and shared with stakeholders. Allison sets up a QBR for the community, including key metrics, SWOT analysis for that quarter, updates on projects, and a slide for “What I’d like to See Developed in the Future.”
Before diving into leading indicators of success for their community, she notes that by having a thorough process and being clear with leaders about what she can do as a team of one vs. if there were additional team members. Thus, helping her add to the community team at Sisense, and she shares the three buckets of metrics that they focus on to better understand their community.
The community roadmap is public internally, so it helps have conversations around priorities and ensure it’s equitable for each team involved in it. Wrapping up the episode, Allison shares the 3 community trends she's watching in 2022.
Follow Allison on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Joe Huber, Customer Community Strategist at Sprout Social.
Joe opens the episode by sharing more about his background - professional and personal. At Sprout Social, community is all about connecting social media professionals together and adding value to their members. He shares how the values of Sprout Social are brought to life in their customer community.
They engage their members through a Facebook group and live events, allowing members to ask questions to experts and share their own opinions too, as well as new channels.
Next, Joe discusses both qualitative and quantitative metrics to show the success of their customer community. He shares what he means by a “gatekeeper mentality” that he feels some community professionals have, and why he’s on a mission to change this mindset.
Closing out the episode, Joe shares the 3 community trends he’s watching in 2022.
Follow Joe on Twitter.
Check out Joe’s voiceover work here.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Remco de Vries, VP of Marketing at inSided; now a part of Gainsight.
Remco shares a bit about his background, including that he originally wanted to be a pastry chef. He explains why community is a “must-have” for a company to have a “true” Product-Led Growth (PLG) motion, per a recent LinkedIn post, providing users a voice on the product roadmap and much more.
A community is a place where you get a feeling of belonging, in his personal life and that’s also how inSided has viewed community but in the sense of a professional community around a product or company. He shares how inSpired, inSided’s community, has positively impacted the trajectory of growth for their company and that they actually used to have two communities. inSided has benefited grown by building a community for their customers, as well as customers of customers.
Remco shares the three key business metrics that measure the success of inSpired. He explains how inSided measures the adoption of new features that were co-created with their community members, as well as one of the most common questions the inSided team gets from prospects - “How do I show value to my Executive team?”
Typically, it’s most helpful when community professionals are able to tie the community back to Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Net Retention Revenue (NRR), or another core business metric that’s tied to revenue.
Lastly, Remco shares his top 3 community trends that he’s most excited about in 2022 and beyond.
Follow inSided & Gainsight on Twitter
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Zoë Hartsfield, Community Manager at Spekit.
Zoë kicked off the episode by sharing a bit about her background, actually starting her career in tech as a salesperson. Next, we dive into her current role at Spekit and what community means there. She’s building community around shared interests, problems, and experiences for the audience they serve.
Currently, she’s the only person devoted to community, yet she works closely with other peers, including her manager who oversees events and peers in customer success and sales, as she’s building community at Spekit.
Their approach to building community today is to have their team members be involved in third-party communities where their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is already spending their time and be a value-add to those conversations. When selecting the best team members to be in the identified communities, there are basic “community etiquette” items that are shared to help Spekit team members best resources to those in the community and truly help them solve the problems that are most pressing for them.
Zoë shares her learnings on using technology to help identify conversations that team members should be participating in to add value to the conversations happening in the communities they are active in.
Closing out the episode, we discuss the trends she’s watching for in 2022 and beyond and dive deeper into them.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Jacob Gross, Community Marketing Manager at Slack.
Jacob shares a brief background on his career before we dive into community at Slack.
Community at Slack means that there is a space for you no matter where you are in your Slack journey, even if you’re Slack-curious right now. In order to build a thriving community, there are 3 core areas: 1) global customer chapter user group program, 2) Slack community forum, and 3) Slack community workspace.
Jacob manages the forum, so he shared more about how they measure the ROI of it and their other core programs. Slack, traditionally built for business, has become a platform of choice for many to build their community on, so he shared some of his favorite ways communities take advantage of being built on Slack.
To close out the episode, Jacob shares his trends for community in the B2B SaaS space in 2022 and beyond.
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In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Anna Venketaraman, Head of Customer Advocacy & Community at Freshworks.
Anna leads the team responsible for building out the global community at Freshworks, a Nasdaq-listed company as of September 2021. The conversation began with learning how Freshworks developed their community strategy, given that they offer different solutions to different audiences. "Keeping it simple" should be a primary focus when building community.
Anna shares about the Refresh community, an open to all community, where there are discussions around various topics and additional ways members can connect with each other and show their "fandom" for Freshworks. Her team owns the leaderboard to reward members of their community for their positive contributions both - inside and outside - of the Refresh community.
She shares how the Freshworks team is centrally located within the organization, in order to easily connect with every other function, and that the leadership team invested in community through hiring a strong team and devoting resources to it.
To help similar companies that are multi-product building community, Anna shares that it's important to build community around your brand and create personalized experiences based on their product usage. Additionally, she highlights the importance of connecting your platforms together to show the ROI on community for the business, including product usage, cross-sell, expansions, etc.
Closing out the episode, we learn her 3 predictions for community within the B2B SaaS space in 2022 and beyond.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Scott Britton, Co-Founder at Troops.ai.
Scott is a Co-Founder at Troops that leads their growth organization. He defines what community means at Troops and is hyper-focused on ensuring that Troops can add value to the conversation.
For Troops, they’ve tried various ways of building community and are continuously working on it, yet enjoy 3x and 4x time customers. If Scott were going to start Troops over again, he’d select a single conversation they’d own and build ways, such as a Slack community, to have people who wish to be part of that conversation join in.
He shared some lessons the Troops team has learned on their journey to building community, as well as why, he believes, some companies can build communities around their product. Scott discusses the “Halo Effect” that community can create for your business.
Lastly, he shares his predictions for community within the B2B tech space.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Will Hirsch, Business Intelligence Analyst at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Master's candidate in Human Capital Analytics & Technology at NYU.
Will Hirsch begins the episode by sharing the overall value of People Analytics to companies, organizations, and communities.
We explore a few key areas where People Analytics can have a tremendous impact in an organization or community: 1) Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, 2) Engagement & Efficiencies, 3) Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), and 4) Hiring Process.
Lastly, Will shares his advice for a company or community starting their People Analytics journey - Just Start.
The Community-Led Growth Show - Episode 10 w/ Christina Garnett, Senior Marketing Manager, Offline Community & Advocacy at Hubspot.
Christina Garnett shares her non-traditional background, leading her to community marketing. She shares why she wanted to be a community builder at a company she loves, HubSpot. HubFans, their newly launched community and advocacy program, was built by Christina to allow people to "choose their own adventure" with regards to how they interact with HubSpot. They have a tiered member structure, providing unique opportunities to each group.
HubSpot has people who already talk about them regularly, so a core tenant of the HubFans program is to make everyone feel special. She breaks down their challenges gamified experience within the HubFans program, allowing members to earn points for completing specific activities.
Christina discusses how she measures the success of HubFans, as well as touching on some of the challenges of measuring the full impact of community on a business. Advocacy creates a feedback loop, especially when those people feel a strong sense of ownership and connection to the platform.
Lastly, Christina shares 3 pieces of advice for a SaaS company beginning to build their community.
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In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Lloyed Lobo, Co-Founder & President at Boast.AI and Co-Founder and Co-Chair at TractionConf.io.
Lloyed kicks off the show by sharing the strategic value to companies that have a Community-Led Growth Go-To-Market (GTM) motion, through his previous experiences in startups. Boast.AI built a community for innovators and those who support them through events and other engagement strategies. He shares the differences between building a community around a product vs. building a community of practice.
Focus on the passion for building community, not strictly the ROI of it. By serving one audience specifically, then it'll give you clarity for how to build a sphere of influencer around that ideal customer profile (ICP).
LLoyed shares best practices for measuring the ROI of community, and it's not all about the revenue attributed to community.
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In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Grace Cheung, Social Media & Community Manager at Lattice.
Grace Cheung has been a community professional for about 8 years, the last 2 of which have been at Lattice. Resources for Humans (RfH) is Lattice's global HR community serving all professionals within the HR function, growing to 14,000+ members.
When joining Lattice, she listened to members of the community to better understand their goals and had strong guidelines for their community. RfH has an active ambassador program, since she cannot speak and help every member of the community and help them all. They have regular community rituals, keeping members continuously engaged and creating something that members look forward to.
Grace built community engagement channels to meet members where they are and have a strong sense of community.
She shares how they're measuring ROI and influencing revenue growth at Lattice. Ending the episode, she shares her tips for companies just starting out on their community-building journey.
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In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Pierce John Ramirez, Community at ProductLed.com.
Pierce begins the episode by sharing what characteristics he feels makes him and others a strong community manager.
He shares some examples of how he and the ProductLed team are “keeping it human” within the community, especially to make members feel special.
Pierce explains how he prioritizes tasks as a community manager, identifying the most urgent and important ones, as well as based on channel. Understanding the health of a community is critical, so he shares a bit about which metrics are key and weighing them to hit your goals.
He shares what he believes to the future of community, specifically the close connection between your organization and your members and that community is a long term decision.
Lastly, Pierce shares a few key learnings from his first few months as a community manager.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Scott Barker, Director of Strategic Engagement at Outreach, Venture Partner at GTMfund.
Scott began the conversation by sharing learnings from growing the community at Sales Hacker, and now as a part of Outreach, and it has since evolved more during it's acquisition by Outreach.
In 2017, Sales Hacker made a conscious effort to build a digital-first community beyond their in-person events. Community can live across multiple channels, but there does have to be a central connector.
In the case of Sales Hacker, they celebrate Revenue Innovators - people who use data and technology to make decisions and drive pipeline leading to revenue. Community became a red thread through all activities that Outreach did post-acquisition of Sales Hacker, leading to the successful growth of their Total Addressable Market (TAM).
For community builders starting out at a SaaS company, Scott believes that you can build out media and community simultaneously and place your most active, raving fan users on a pedestal to launch the community.
The conversation ends with discussing the strategy behind GTMfund, and the value it provides to the companies in their portfolio, Limited Partners (LPs) in the fund, and other firms that bring them into deals.
Also, follow Scott on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Vasil Azarov, Founder at Growth Blazers.
Vasil Azarov has always been passionate about bringing people together via events. From his experiences, he shares some traits and characteristics that he believes make someone an exceptional community builder, including being curious and enjoy interacting with people.
Growth Blazers has executed over 500 in-person and virtual events, so he shared the value they see for their community (and, it's all about the collective experience for their members and their goals).
For communities just starting out, Vasil discusses strategies for organizations to build lasting, goal-oriented partnerships with sponsoring companies. Community builders should create an onboarding process for new partners and check-ins consistently throughout the agreement period to ensure, they're continuously seeing value and discuss improvement opportunities for the remainder of the current term.
Lastly, Vasil shares some advice for community builders that are launching today.
Also, follow Vasil on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Sharath Kuruganty, Community Programs Manager at Product Hunt at Co-founder at Shout Out.
Sharath speaks about the value of community that he's experienced as a builder/founder, and why he strongly believes it's a must-have for anyone building anything from today forward.
While launching Shoutout on Product Hunt, he got to experience his community supporting him for their launch, through their upvotes and sharing it on social media to drive engagement for its launch.
We shift to discussing community at Product Hunt, it's an owned one - meaning that Product Hunt owns it. He shares how they have built and continue to build a global, thriving community, spanning different personas.
Sharath explains why being a great listener is critical for success when building a community.
Lastly, Sharath shares a few must-do items for any company starting to build community.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Evan Patterson, Head of Content & Community at trender.ai
Evan fell in love with community through his time watching YouTube shows in high school and noticed that the best influencer campaigns were with brands that the person actually liked and/or used.
Once people got to know him via social channels, his thought process was that “once people get to know me, they’d like me, and eventually want to work and buy from me.” B2B vs. B2C is all the same, so he implemented similar strategies from past roles in his roles within B2B to develop his community and utilized it for Social Selling strategies.
Evan was being where his audience was, so he felt it was appropriate for him to spend time there vs. doing activities for the sake of doing them in his past sales-focused roles. A key health check on your community, use social listening and see how many times in a timeframe is your organization being talked about.
Also, follow Evan on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Nisha Baxi, Head of Community @ Gong.
Over the last 8 months, Nisha has built a community from scratch and is now scaling up the community team. This seasoned community builder has led developer community initiatives at companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com.
During the early days of community building, Nisha leveraged gathering people in-person to have shared experiences and get to know each other. Even now going on 2022, we look forward to in-person activities. That said, you need to meet your community members where they are.
Watch the full episode to learn about what Nisha uses to gauge effectiveness, what community means at Gong, and more community-led growth tips!
Also, follow Nisha on Twitter.
In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Nick Bennett, Director of Field, Community, & Partner Marketing @ Alyce.
Nick discusses the value for companies to be active and involved with sponsoring other communities. He shares tactics on how to evaluate if a community is the right one for your organization.
When setting up a sponsorship agreement for a community, companies can customize their agreements to increase exposure through channels, programs, and more options to ensure it equates to the price.
The key to seeing a strong ROI from sponsoring communities is to ensure that the community is active and that your ICP is participating in it too.
Lastly, he shared why community is so important - to run with your crew.
Also, follow Nick on Twitter.