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.