The Fundamentals of Developing an Engaged Customer Community with Erica Kuhl
An event summary from our December 2022 event with Erica Kuhl
In yesterday's event we learned from Erica Kuhl, who, as VP of Community for Salesforce, saw the company grow from 176 to 49,000 employees. During that time she had to build everything from scratch including the strategy, programs, and ROI metrics. In short, she knows her stuff!
During the event, Erica taught us all about the fundamentals of developing an engaged customer community, so check out our summary below for a great summary playbook 🌟
Quick summary
If your community strategy is not aligning to the business goals, you won't survive.
So as you're starting to plan the community strategy, you need to be thinking about the business goals that the community is aligned to. As the community builder, you may need to coach and guide them, but be aware that your questions to them must be specific. For example, ask: are they looking to focus on customer acquisition or retention? what are their OKRs across each function like sales, support, success, product etc.? Once you have these answers, everything you build into your strategy should then ladder up to those biggest business goals. That's the way executives speak, so that's the way you should speak
If you are a startup thinking about building community, don't wait. Start nurturing your potential community right now by bringing them into some of those early-stage conversations and supporting and them, because then your community strategy is just gonna be a lot easier as you go.
When it comes to segmenting personas and creating a community curve, don't take on too much too early. Pick the one or two segments and focus on making those initial personas wildly successful. There's so much that goes into building community when it comes to rallying your company, creating content, creating programming, picking the right tool. If you're having to build that across a giant matrix of different personas then it's very hard to get momentum
When planning a soft launch, keep it to tight (15-100 people max) and keep it to friendlies (e.g. customer with high NPS scores). Give them a pre-kickoff to show them what soft launch means to you, what you need from them, and then you give them a prompt literally every single week, as well as some incentives where possible.
In terms of nurturing asynchronous community energy, try and give any synchronous community activity (e.g. live events) a call-to-action to the asynchronous community. For example, during an event if interviewee is not gonna get all the questions answered, you say "she's gonna be in the community for the next two days, responding to your questions”. So you hook everything together so it feels like a cohesive strategy both offline and online.
As your community grows, ensure you continually talk to the different parts of the business (e.g. customer support, product, marketing, sales or success) and explain/review why community is important to their function. This means that whenever you need to prove your value, or ask for budget for a new initiative, you will have supporters.
During a downturn, the middle of the funnel becomes the most important thing to a company. Budgets are tight for all companies, so you have to keep customers/members super happy. So, if there is one particular objective you should be focusing on to prove the value of community, it's customer retention.
Meet a Community Hacked member 👋
Joel Primack (He/Him/His)
Social & Community Specialist at Lattice
Purpose of your community: Resources for Humans (RfH) is Lattice’s global HR community and was created to help HR/People Ops professionals connect, share advice, and ask questions in a safe space.
Favourite engagement tactic: Create a code of conduct, enforce your code of conduct, thank members for reporting violations of it, & remind the community of your code of conduct to create that safe space where members truly feel comfortable sharing with their peers.
Open to connecting with: Community professionals who have built and scaled community meetup/user groups (15+ in their program) and those who excel in showing ROI for their community programs. Always fun to see how peers do these 2 things!
Check out Joel’s podcast, The Community-Led Growth Show featuring rockstar community builders, wicked marketers, & dynamic growth leaders for 1:1 chats on community. Find it on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or YouTube
This was a re-posting of a past Community Hacked newsletter from a different platform. As of March 2023, Community Hacked has been set up as a learning institution for community-builders, by community-builders.
If you would like to join our Community Hacked Membership, and gain access to all event recordings and full transcripts, not to mention a community of vetted peers, content, courses and much more, please apply to join below 🙃