B2B Powered Community as a Modern Day Strategy

Why are we seeing so much buzz around a more defined B2B community strategy nowadays?

Private communities powered by larger B2B organizations are cropping up as an arm of modern day GTM and customer engagement strategy.

But community isn't "new".

Community in the B2B space is evolving, and more companies are starting to see the positive impact of developing their own.

There are plenty of landmark examples.

Webflow has had a thriving company-powered design community (grown to 85K+ members), Figma has a design and development community that offers resources to help you create workflows, and better use the tool.

Hubspot has a community that offers product AMAs, spiffs for 1:1 consultations with experts, connection opportunities, and the ability to maximize Hubspot knowledge to better use the platform.

Oracle has a community landing page that differentiates their four communities: developer, customer, partners, and learning/university.

Calendly has a community page where information is available and un-gated, and there's a tab for their developer-specific community that has a wealth of information for those looking to use Calendly's API, or build integrations.

Slack has its own community, with a landing page where you're prompted to "join a chapter" to be a part of the meet-up style groups run by volunteers.

Developer-specific communities have been active for years, and open-source has thrived and shaped much of the collaborative tech space.

"University" style education programs have long since facilitated community learnings both specific to product knowledge, and third-party relevant information for enrolled members.

There are also giants in the tech community space that aren't powered by larger B2B organizations, and stand independently to bring sellers, revops, marketing leaders, and more - together. RevGenius, Women in Sales, Sales Assembly - many more to name, not enough space to type - offer free resources, valuable networking opportunities, accredited certifications, and the chance to belong somewhere with fellow sellers and marketers - and, in some cases, somewhere exclusive. There are also application-based communities like Pavilion, a community that offers programs, courses and certifications.

Most of these communities are "housed" somewhere like Slack, WhatsApp, or other online platforms, offering members the ability to exchange messages and keep a record of their community connections all in one place.

But community isn't just slack groups and threads with discussions - it can be dinners, small group sessions, retreats, coaching and mentorship groups, pages on social media, whispers of brand awareness at conferences - "community" has no one definition in this space.

Current Community Takes in Tech

Alex Kremer is building a unique community as the CEO at Alluviance, offering sellers retreat-style immersions, weekly calls, and a wealth of mental health and selling resources to level up their games through the Alluviant Method.

"A community is a group of people who are working towards something bigger and stronger together, there's a shared mission/vision. Sure, when someone is struggling you help each other out, but what I think is more important is there's a level of accountability and a standard that occurs in one. They push each other and call each other forward to step more into their own truth and strive towards the mission." - Alex Kremer

Community can happen in a place that you can see and measure, and community can also happen on a zoom call, in a coffee shop, at a bar, on a beach.

Or in a city that is positively booming with tech, and the droves of tech professionals brought in by the migration of tech HQs from San Fransisco to other cities in the states.

My friend Gabrielle "GB" Blackwell has cultivated a community for herself in Austin, TX, as well as through her newsletter subscribers. When asked what community means to her, she says:

"There's an African proverb that says, 'if you want to go fast, go it alone. If you want to go far, go together', and embodying this quote has been a complete game changer for me personally and professionally. When it comes to community, I have access to so much more connection, more opportunities, and more wisdom. Whether it's feeling less alone in the work I'm doing through communities like BDR Leader Coffee Talk, or being inspired by the commitment to growth through the Alluviance community, I just feel so much better and more equipped to take on and overcome any challenge that comes my way along my career journey." - GB Blackwell

Max Pete, community leader at Square, recently launched Stellar Sellers, a monthly recognition series for community members.

Square has a community space dedicated to celebrating and connecting business owners to each other.

"Community connects one another, no matter the size or industry. Running a small business can be a lonely journey and having The Seller Community to connect business owners with one another helps the journey feel a little less daunting." - Max Pete

Community has obvious benefits to individuals. Career-focused community channels have helped countless people secure new jobs, sales channels have helped people connect with thousands of their global peers to gain new perspectives and skills, peer-mentorship efforts in these communities have no doubt helped secure many people promotions -

So, how does a company measure the ROI of a community?

And why are more companies investing in community resources?

The emergence of newer social media platforms (TikTok, Threads) being so widely adopted has added a new and complex layer to the "dark social" conversation in this space. Many B2B companies are now feeling the pressure to keep up at a B2C pace on social media, personifying their brand voice and driving brand awareness, while also establishing a community "vibe" and a reputation for being a beloved choice by their customers.

Executives also have a vested interest in customer retention given the economic times we've seen throughout the last few years.

So, I think companies who haven't entered the "community chat" are realizing how important it is to put concerted efforts into building one. Not just for the sake of the online and socials piece for their brand, reputation, and potential inbound opportunities -

But to facilitate retention for their current and future customers, alike.

I've seen several B2B powered communities open their gates to everyone who has a relevant title within their ICP, and I've seen B2B powered community offered exclusively to a company's customers.

And then there's the interesting blend, where a company might start with a base layer of their customers in the community, and open up the gates to other people within their ICP.

This method creates potential for prospective buyers to engage and interact with current users, and there's an inherent informal "demo" of the product within this approach - a demo not by the sellers, but by the users, with unfiltered anecdotes of success and best practices leveraging the platform.

All of this while providing valuable opportunities and programs to members, making strong and intentional communities in this space a win-win experiment of strategy.

What are the goals of these kinds of communities?

Potential inbound interest from referred members isn't the only benefit to approaching community in a customer-centric way.

Imagine a space in which you, a customer, can get a quicker response to a product question, or access to exclusive product updates/training sessions. Imagine a space dedicated to putting you and your GTM team in the same channel as other revenue leaders and ICs, and you get daily updates on what's working, what's not, and different ways to leverage the product or platform that you all use.

Retention seems to be a goal for many community managers with a customer-centric model.

Approaching your community with customers at the forefront of your initial strategy creates unique value for them, extends as a branch of your CS department, and offers arm to your Product and Research teams to glean insights.

Quicker resolution to issues that arise, regular scheduled programming for product training, launches, and peeks into roadmaps? Customers love these opportunities to be brought into the fold, and provide feedback that is heard.

Your relationships with customers will strengthen when communities aim to serve, and help bridge important product knowledge gaps while making them feel like their role in the community is valued.

What else is happening in these communities?

• Conversations about buying decisions - dark social in action.
• Real time reviews of products and features.
• Q&A about product/roadmaps for companies.
• Product-specific training sessions.
• Programs tailored to members.
• Deals closing at a higher velocity when impacted by positive community benefits and programs.

Depending on your community strategy, your programmatic efforts to keep members engaged will vary. I've seen success with structured "always on" campaigns for engagement, like weekly live sessions, product-specific trainings, or newsletters for community shout outs and updates.

There's also a myriad of ways in which internal teams can get involved in these B2B powered communities.

Here are some ways that I've tried to engage internal teams, and some ideas other community managers have sourced:

???? Product: run product launch teaser sessions with community for early feedback, create test groups for product betas - Max Pete had a great product AMA idea on my post yesterday, I've also seen regular product training sessions gain traction with all kinds of community members - prospective or customers

???? Research: source groups of relevant people and incentivize them to hop on a call to answer questions/walk you through their workflows, listen in on any channel discussions for insights

???? Sales: get to know your buyers and potential buyers, take a research cap and observe, run weekly sessions on platform demos/sales skills/thought leadership for members to engage with you in

???? Marketing: get bites of content from the community to leverage in promo, create content WITH community members (more on this in a subsequent post!) and give them opportunities to activate across socials, create 1-1 matching programs for references, do a series on customers in your community

??????CS: create an easy and more informal path to getting common questions answered, use slackbots to identify common questions and create an FAQ sheet that's easily accessible, create regular content for customers within community

There are ways to activate community members and keep the space lively, without inundating people with insignificant channels and messages. Your community members want to be met where its most convenient for them, and that won't always be a set of slack channels. Your internal team wants to leverage your company powered community for insights and relationship development, so working cross-functionally with other teams to bring community strategy to life is key.

And, of course, some communities are lacking in strategy, and jumping on popular bandwagons without understanding what their community members really want. Not everyone likes to engage in slack threads, and sometimes your MVPs are lurking in channels, waiting to be activated in different ways.

A community comprised of C-suite executives will desire different things than a community comprised of your daily product users. Ask yourself: who do we serve in this community? What kind of engagement is convenient for them?

How are people measuring community success and impact?

Your approach to success measurements will depend on your community type. Is your community:

1. powered by a B2B organization
2. independent of any organization

Communities powered by larger organizations will need a strategy that drives value to the company, and aligns with company OKRs (be it revenue, retention, product, research, etc).

When asked about community goals as they pertain to larger organizations, Joel Primack, former social and community team member at Lattice, says:

"Your community has to align with whatever business outcomes you want it to support. Tying your community goals to larger business initiatives is imperative for long term success. If you focus on having 2-5 benchmarks of clear KPIs that support business outcomes, you’ll build a solid foundation.”

It can feel nearly impossible to measure community impact in the same way that other functions design their success metrics.

Depending on where your community lives, and what kind of larger goals it is aiming to support, you might find yourself looking at a series of executive dinners and wondering "how can I attribute revenue to these?" in a non-standard way - assuming you're not purely measuring the impact of events like these through lead generation, or opportunities created in your CRM.

Creating a deal velocity model for the impact of community throughout your pipeline is one way to attempt to point to specific revenue value. You can also create tags for community members in your CRM, measure the success of specific community-led campaigns, measure the number of social impressions or account followers

... but even then, attribution can be challenging.

Community vanity metrics will kill your momentum.

I can certainly speak to a few ways that you don’t want to approach measuring the success and impact of these types of communities.

There are vanity metrics in community, just as in sales and marketing.?

You know, like how some marketers might hyper-focus on site visits, and some sellers might hyper-focus on email opens/click-through rates. Those things can be indicators of intent, but are rarely good as a driving focus.

Similarly, purely approaching community KPIs with membership numbers, or things like number of messages sent in slack channels weekly, are ways that community leaders can go wrong, in my opinion.?

These KPIs amount to nothing, independently.

You can grow a community to thousands of members overnight with catchy marketing copy, and by plugging the sign up link in the right places.

But once members join, if there is no value add to them, there's no chance they're going to meaningfully engage. And if the community slack is cluttered with irrelevant channels, "noise", and pitches from sellers in the DMs, you'll see significant attrition - fast.

Similarly, happy hours and dinners and retreats are great - but value from a community is a two-way street.

Goals around the number of qualified meetings booked from a community happy hour, sponsorship money and partnerships - things you can specifically measure - are some ways that community events and programs can see a more immediate ROI.

Community Events and Field Marketing Collaborations

We've all been to the company-sponsored happy hour.

Should you sell at said company event?

No. Not directly, anyway.

Though it's inevitable that, if you are a qualified prospect or "decision maker" and you're invited to a community happy hour powered by a company that is targeting you... you'll likely be soft-pitched at some point in the evening.

Most field marketing programs involve sellers in their collaborative community events for a reason - and it's not just to staff the welcome booth and sign people in.

My hot take on all of that? It is a bit of an outdated approach.

Are the goals of these events to put a number on leads generated, or meetings booked? Probably, or at least partially. Can goals around events like these focus more on qualified meetings booked and customer-centric community building? Definitely.

Instead of having sellers wander around a community happy hour solely targeting conversations with people they're keen on selling to, I'd be interested in seeing a company have a dedicated room for "screenings" with sandbox instances set up, and demo's running. Sellers can hang out in there and engage with prospects who walk in to see what the chatter is about. From there, information can be shared if there is any interest, and demos scheduled with people who are most likely to show up, and don't just feel pressured to schedule a meeting because they have an Old Fashioned in hand, and a night of free food ahead of them.

What would community managers do at these kind of events? Get to know their members, perhaps have goals around connecting customers to other customers or partners, create a QR code for community membership so that anyone who shows up who hasn't yet joined, can join... and, of course, direct anyone with product or sales questions to the dedicated space or room at the venue.

Aside from in-person events, it is my belief that members should be warned and then banned if they are pitching people in community Slack DMs, or taking advantage of personal information being shared in a community to pitch there.

Community deteriorates when ulterior motives infiltrate.

Community isn't new, and it's not going anywhere.

While modern community strategy is evolving, at the heart of these efforts are community managers giving back, building strong relationships with customers and partners, and establishing a positive dark social impact on the organization powering the community.