#36: Community is so hot right now in B2B marketing, what defines a successful community, & more with Common Room COO Jake Randall

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1, 2, 3, 4.

Exit.

Exit.

Exit.

My guest on this episode of the Exit 5 podcast is Jake Randall. He is the COO at. Com. Common Room. All right, Jake Randall is here. Jake, good to see you. We met Early Days Adrift at a dinner in San Francisco. Just set some context for people, give your your background, your story and a little bit of context on on why we're chatting today so they can get familiar with you.

Yeah, absolutely. It was good to see you again. First of all, it's always fun when, when those small world stories come around. Right? I remember that dinner well. So let's see. I grew up in Boston which is relevant because that's where you're from in your time at Drift. I like to say that actually interesting Boston fact about me, I worked on the, on the Big Dig. So if there's any Boston listeners out there. I was in Local 22, the Laborers Union, but then worked in Boston after school, started my career in investment banking, did a healthcare startup because at least at the time Boston did more healthcare than tech and then that went okay, I'll say. But then joined Okta 11 years ago maybe and when Okta was about 30 people and no revenue then was at Okta for 10 plus years as we grew. So plenty of fun stories in there but one of the things I guess I always owned or I'll say co owned with our CMO and CRO. A lot of our go to market strategy and operations and so that's how Dave and I met because I was like you know what, people don't want to just get cold emails. Like maybe I just want to talk to someone. There's this cool company Drift out there. So we met through there and then I ended up running one of our two main product lines by the end of my time at Okta, which was a very developer focused product line and so got really into Devrel and similar to the Drift story, the idea of like there's different ways to interact with your users and they don't want always that traditional email marketing or they're not going to come to trade shows always or all those traditional kind of things you might think about. And so started looking at that and eventually found a company Common Room where I'm now the coo of it where we work with a lot of the top community led companies. So our customers are dbt. You had a great session with their marketing, right? So DBT is a big customer. Figma, you may have seen them in the news recently. They had a great exit or I guess they're like close to having the exit as it may be. There's a whole process there. I did the off zero acquisition at Okta for six and a half billion dollars. So I'm aware of all the legal hurdles that you've got to go through after the announcement. But so you know, Figma, dbt, Asana, Atlassian webflow. Think of all these companies that have really thought about a different way to go to market. I thought your session with DBT was amazing and that's really what Common Room tries to do. So we're community growth platform and we work with companies to understand those users and basically meet those users where they are and in turn hopefully have better, more authentic conversations to drive your growth.

Can you just give me like a quick overview of how do they use your product? Is it a community? Like is it intelligence? Is it like where people actually are? I'm not familiar. Also I have a bunch of follow ups I was trying to.

Yeah, I have tons of questions.

I have a bunch of follow ups to that we can talk about before we even talk about community. I have a bunch of things I want to.

I know, I mean we could probably do an hour just on going from 30 people and no revenue to you know, 5,000 people and whatever. It was 1.3 billion in revenue when I left Okta.

Right.

So common room, intelligent community growth platform. What we do is we connect into anywhere community is, is happening. And so I think one of the important things that we really try to focus on is often when you hear community, you, you think forum, right? So you think, oh, like you've got a discord or a discourse or a slack or maybe, you know, you've got one of the more, you know, if you, you know, use insighted.

Right.

I'm a big fan of Gainsight and you know, everything Nick's doing over there and they spot in insighted really for us, Community is, it's not just that community is there's, you know, I'll use DBT as an example. Just since you had them on, they've got GitHub repos, right. And there's people talking about what they do in subreddits and people tweet at folks, right. If, if you look at Figma, the number of times people are tweeting at them with product questions is unbelievable. So, like they have all these forums, but the reality is you can't really dictate where your users are going to come ask their questions.

Right.

Or where they're going to go find out more information. So we connect in to all those different platforms.

Right.

So Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, go through the list.

Right.

Your actual forums, discourse, discord.

If you use chorus, like, it's like a take on, like it's like a CRM. Social listening.

Yeah, yeah. So like it often comes up that way. Our whole thing is we really focused in on you understanding who that person is, where they work and what they're actually saying. So, like, you could call it social engagement.

Right.

Versus listening. Like, we don't want you to listen, we want you to actually understand that this is Dave and he tweeted this at you and then he asked this question in a subreddit and then he came into your discourse and talked about that. And then we use GPT3. So we work, I guess, both ways. There's great partnership with OpenAI, they're a great open source solution. Then we're layering on intelligence so we can tell you, is someone reporting a bug, are they asking for product support? Are they, you know, asking about a demo or a poc? And then we connect in with your CRM, your traditional CRM.

All right.

Jake Randall is take all that engagement and actually act upon it.

Right.

And understand who they are, what they care about so you can meet them where they are.

Yeah. Or like a common thing now is like, I, you know, at least the companies that I, that I talk to, I push the founders to be active on social media. And LinkedIn is, especially in B2B. LinkedIn is the place for that.

Yep.

And sometimes, like, I'll. I'll send them a slack message and be like, look at this. Like, this is a huge account that just commented on your. Someone at a huge account, billion dollar company commented on your post.

And it's like, so we track that.

Never really know what to do with. There's no way to track that. Right. There's no way to. Or like. Or you don't like, get points for that in the marketing score. Yeah.

Unless you use common room. So like, literally, in that case, we have, we tell you again, like, what people and what organizations are interacting with you. So like, one of the common workflows that might be a helpful way to think about it is we give alerts to your SDR team. Hey, this new organization just interacted with you, right? And here's what they're asking about. And if you want to extend that out, what we see is much higher conversion rates for that, to use the example of these SDR teams, higher conversion rates. Because rather than sending an email sequence at them, which we all get and we don't always open, I'll just say appreciate all the hard work of the SDRs out there. It's a thankless job. Instead of when you go and let's say it's on LinkedIn or they post something in like a subreddit and you go and respond to them there, well, they're looking for an answer. Like, they already kind of raised their hand and said, hey, I'm looking for help. I'm. I want to engage in a conversation. So when you go engage them where they are, the likelihood of getting a response and getting to that next that you're looking for is much higher. So how do we alert you that someone's out there talking about things?

Right.

So, you know, sometimes use like Sixth Sense as an example to like, look for intent. Our whole thing is like, no, no, people are out there talking about things. You just got to go meet them where they are.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I see this in a different, in a different way. So, like through. Well, similar way, but like, I'm not a vendor, I'm not a SaaS company, but through my community, through the Exit 5 community, it's. There's so many startups that like, are not in there that I'm like, man, if you were in there, like, literally some. Someone will post like, hey, we're comparing. Hey, my, my boss has asked me to look about, look at this tool versus this tool. What do you think? And then like 15 people comment, hop in. And it's like, that's. The value of the community is like, in general, right? Like, you and me work. Let's say we work in similar fields. We want to get answers from our peers. That makes no sense. That's how people actually buy.

Exactly.

The problem is though, like, that stuff is not. Like, then if you, you look at like all the marketing tactics, the things that we do in marketing are just. They don't match that because they're not things that, because that thing is harder to measure. We like to like, create some ads or do a campaign or, you know, whatever we do and be like, yep, we got X people to open that. But I think it's. You're one of the companies and there's, there's A lot of conversation around this space for sure. But like, yeah, this is what the future of marketing is going to be, which is like, build a great product, build a brand that people know about, get to know like, and trust. And then like, those conversations are going to happen everywhere online. It's not about trying to force them onto like, well, you got to go convert on this landing page.

Yeah, no, 100%. Think about it. As you know, we have all, as you can imagine, we do have marketing. We've got great marketing, but, you know, like, we have all sorts of fun visuals around. There is this whole other top of funnel that you're not listening to.

Right.

And if you, you know, and if you believe that the analyst firms, which we could also have a whole conversation about, know what they're talking about, but like, you know, Gartner will tell you you have 5% of your buyer's time during their eval, or that, you know, 85% of decisions already made before they ever hit that landing page that you're talking about. Like, where is that happening? Well, it's happening in these conversations.

I like, I like to use this. Somebody shared with me a while back, this quote from Seth Godin. And he was talking about somebody, it was some AMA that he did and somebody, they asked him the difference between B2B and B2C in his mind and he said that the difference is with B2C, it's like, that's your own money. With B2B, you're spending the money of your company. And so when you're spending the money of your company, you have a different perception about like, or different expectations. And so like, when it's a bigger purchase, when there's much more money and decisions and career stuff online, you're going to either buy the product that you used before. Oh, I was at Okta and we used X, we used HubSpot. We're going to buy that again because I already know that. Right. Or you're going to use like the cheapest one or like, less expensive because you're not. So you don't blow the budget where like the opportunity is to be the company that creates a story for them. Like, we did this in the early days at Drift. I know HubSpot did this really well. It was like, hey, look, here's this company that you may not know yet. But like, I love them. I've been reading their blog, you know, for three months. Or I listen to their podcasts and like, yeah, I don't know, maybe they don't have all the features yet. But, like, I just, I just feel like I believe in their, their philosophy and how they're doing things. I think that's the opportunity and it's just hard for marketers to, like, harness that in some way.

No, I, I think that's all the time. I, I think, you know, things have also become more and more digital. But I think your point around the difference between B2B and B2C is a really good one. And there's still this element of, like, trust, right. That comes down to some of these decisions. There's a reason why you have sales teams and customer success teams is ultimately for a big purchase or just, you know, in my opinion, you still want somebody to say, hey, like, I trust you.

Right?

And I know you're going to take care of me and you're going to make me successful. I'm putting my career on the line buying this tool or whatever it may be. To your point, I think. I'm not suggesting that by any means that sales or those traditional teams will go away, but I do think more and more of that trust is being built through these conversations happening in these digital channels with your peers. To your point in Exit 5 community, where, okay, I'm looking at X versus Y, what do people think? And that is actually how you get comfortable. That's how you build trust with that decision you're going to make and how now as a company, because to your point, when I appreciate you saying this, this is the future of marketing. I certainly think so, but I'm biased. How do you engage in those conversations or understand what's happening in an authentic way is what I'll say.

Right.

Let's talk about defining community, because it's come up a lot on this podcast in the Exit 5 community. It sounds like your take is not. It's not just one place. But I'm curious to hear how you, how you think about that.

I will certainly. I don't think of it as one place, given what I've already said. I really think about it as any place folks are coming together to talk about shared interest to some extent.

Right.

And that community, you know, like, visually, I often think about as these, like, Venn diagrams almost.

Right.

So people might be talking about things on Twitter.

Right.

Or they might be talking about something on LinkedIn or other places. And also. But there's going to be multiple people that are in both places. And that broader Venn diagram of all those conversations is your community, where this discourse, not the actual tool but the conversations are happening and what becomes really interesting then so let me know. That's kind of how I think about it. But then what I think is really interesting if you know it's happening in all these different places. Because you can't always force someone to come somewhere to talk about it. How do you understand these common threads so different, you know, like similar topics or often you have people that are super passionate about it that are talking about it in different places.

Right.

And how do you know that Dave is an influencer essentially in that community is engaging across these different channels and spaces and helping to drive that conversation? And I think I'll just a quick story. There's a great blog article that Claire Butler, if you want to learn about community and the growth. So Claire was the first marketing hire at Figma. I think she's the 10th hire. She's still there. She's our champion at Figma. She talks about how they built Figma by basically going out.

She's also a multi millionaire. She's now a multimillionaire also.

Yeah, like at least.

Right.

Good for her. Because when she joined, they weren't even selling their product. They're trying to figure it out and the way they figured it all out. And again, there's this great article out there that everyone should go search for, if you're interested was they went out and they found who were the people that were influencing the design conversations. And I think that's a really interesting point when it comes to community, where it's also community isn't necessarily the community around Common Room or Okta or Exit 5. There's also this broader conversation, like there's a community around, in this case design.

Right.

And if you're thinking about how to influence and like bring people into your funnel, Right. Because you're a marketer, there's people out there talking about what you do. And if you can go find those people and find those conversations, like that is actually a really powerful motion to create. So you've mentioned HubSpot has a great community around. HubSpot. HubSpot, right. HubSpot's also a customer of Common Room, but they also have a community around like inbound marketing.

Right.

Like what they started doing early on was saying, hey, there's a different way to market. So let's create a lot of content out there around inbound marketing. And so there's almost like these two levels of community. There's this like ecosystem kind of community of practice, it's often called. And then eventually you can bring them into a community of Like a product that's more specific to what you do. I think DBT talked about it that also.

Right.

In your podcast a couple months ago around first let's go find people that care about this and then we start to bring them closer to us.

Yeah, I mean like just using that HubSpot example, right.

You.

You talk about HubSpot has a. HubSpot has a community, but there isn't one. It's not like they don't mean a Slack group that all of their people are in. And I think this is one of the biggest. I don't know if it's a myth, but I think community is one of the, I would say like top two or three trends in B2B marketing that people are talking about now with, along with like, you know, product led growth and other stuff.

Yep.

I think this is the approach that like we did this at Drift. We didn't have a specific community like a Facebook group, but the community was. We created this movement of people that were kind of doing marketing in different way and gave them multiple channels. The hard part is people don't like to take that approach because it becomes hard to measure. So I think that one challenge I see right now with everybody talking about community is I think everybody is going to. I'm a SaaS company. I'm going to create a community. That means that I am SaaS vendor and my community is at this branded domain or this Slack group. And I'm not saying that that can't company. I just think that, yeah, the reason that we do that is because it's easier to track and easier to manage and easier to measure. But I think that ultimately it's that type of thinking that you, that you talked about there, which is like, how do you become a resource? How do you become an expert? How do you become a resource for the people in your industry? And how do you be positioned at. How can you be positioned as be that brand? So one example of a company that I, that I just happen to be working with, but they're doing this now is a company called Goldcast. They're in the digital events, virtual event space. And their approach to community is not one place. They are, they, they, they like have a community. They have a place where you could go and chat. Right. But it's more like they're trying to become the number one resource for event marketers. I love that approach, which is like we're going to, if you sell to hr, if you sell to finance, if you sell whatever, like be the expert for Those people have multiple channels. And I get, I see what you're doing now, which is like, okay, you can be the tool to measure all that. But I just want people listening to not take like any of the community stuff is like, it doesn't just mean like, go do a Facebook group, go do a Slack group. It can be, what do you want to be known for? And how can you create a place where like people are going to have those conversations across all different platforms?

I totally agree with that. And I'd say that it's funny just to act or like a point on that number of companies that come inbound into our website and they're like, hey, we've heard about you.

We're early.

We're just starting to spin up our community. We're trying to look, you know, we're debating between Slack or Discord or just whatever it may be. And I'm like, no, like you don't get it. It's like one of the like people is like, you have a community, you're just not listening.

Right?

Like there's probably like, you know, you could be because you lived in Boston. I'll joke about it. There's Boston sand and Gravel. If you're coming, you know, southbound on 93 right into the city. I bet there's people out there talking about like sand and gravel somewhere.

Right?

Like, just use a really random example. There's a community out there that cares about that.

Right?

You're just not engaging in it. You're just not listening. And I think that like, that's one of the big misconceptions, right? Just echo that. And I think so. I just encourage everyone listening if you're thinking about community, because it is kind of a buzzword to your point right now. Yeah, just think about that. There's a community. You're just not listening. Go find it. Go find the subreddit.

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Let's go find the Discord server. About it. Go find whatever it may be and if you start there, that's often a really powerful place.

Yeah, I like to use like I think from a content, from a brand and content strategy standpoint, I think I like to think about like so if we were creating, if you and I were creating a new company in the sand and gravel space. Right. I think I would think that our best marketing sounds hot.

Right?

Our best marketing strategy.

I won't make as much money as Claire. Sadly.

I don't know. You don't know?

Sorry, I over, I talked over you there.

Yeah, it's okay. We could bring it to the cloud. We'll bring sand and gravel to the cloud.

Perfect.

But I think to me, like, let's say that was the company the strategy would be, huh? Okay, we're a company in this space. There's a lot of people talking about sand and gravel. Our marketing strategy is going to be to like push that narrative further or to create content around that or to educate people about that. And so like you want to create something that is so good and so interesting or entertaining or valuable that people are not like, I've never heard of this company before. They're like, oh, interesting. Here is a two day event focused on this category of sand and gravel happens to be put on by Dave and Jake's company. Right. And so I think like that to me, especially in B2B when, when we go back to that Seth, quote unquote, go before where like you want to be the, the guy, the tour guide, the expert. I think that's, that's where this is such an important thing to figure out how to harness.

And all those in the point of chant, like one of the integrations that we have is we integrate with like Bevy or meetup, right? So it's also not just digital, but it's like you do meetups, right? And you get those people together in those cities to talk about things, right? And then they bring their friends next time, right? Or you, you know, or like you have, you know, user conferences, right? Like Figma manages their, their speakers that are at their conference and be inviting their conferences via Common room, right? So like you're finding those different ways of all those different channels to create something, right? And then yes, you track them and then, you know, often part of it is how do you have a place to continue that conversation, right? And that can be your Slack channel or that can be whatever it may be.

When you talk about the figma using, are they using it to like source speakers? Like, hey, you're interesting people. Yeah, I love that, I love that as another like the amount of content ideas that I've gotten from hosting my own community. And this is different than we're talking about is the ROI on this is like if you just look at a straight up like sales roi, then it's. Yeah, that's one slice of it. But I love that example like hey, here's where the, here's, here's who's interesting talking about this space.

Here's someone who we see across, you know, five different channels, right? And you know, whenever they post they get massive Engagement.

Right.

And there's, you know, back and forth and everyone, you know, Right. There's great conversation happening in those. Okay, well, like, let's not just go grab the person at our, you know, at our highest paying customer that you do that a little bit at conferences too. Let's go find the people that our community loves hearing from.

Right?

And now we know that. And like, you know, tons of cool stories like that or like, we'll help you find. One of the things we do with our NLP is give you original content that people are posting.

Right.

And that becomes hugely valuable. So when you think about that, like that brand, I'll call it aspect that you are so good at, or are good at, I should say. But certainly it's a big part of Drift success.

Right?

But like, it's not just you putting out content, it's like your communities creating things.

Right?

And so like, hey, people like often, you know, hey, I created this blog about how to use figma to keep using that.

Right? Okay, great.

Well, like, how do we know about that immediately? Which Common Room can help you with or do for you? Then how do we amplify it and how do we leverage that? And so there's a million use cases there and there's also hard ROI that we're starting to be able to uncover which we can talk about also or like more I'll say traditional roi.

I love that approach because I think especially in the B2B context, so many of the people that you're selling to, like, just as humans, you become passionate about a product. So if you're a designer and you use Figma every day, you end up having this idea like, hey, I have like five, like hacks that I use and like, here's five ways I use figma. The problem is you're a designer and you work at a company who you're not gonna like, write a blog post for your company and share that. And so what you do is you go to Reddit and you go to other forums. But I've always thought like an amazing content strategy for B2B is to basically be the publisher of your, like, ICP, of your dream customers, like, of their thoughts. And so like at Drift, we sell to marketers. Let's write our own content. But what if our blog becomes like this, this amazing place? Like, how do we make it like First Round Review, you know, First Round Capital, their blog, amazing. Best content right out there for a while. How do we make it feel like holy, like they reached out and they want to like, run my article on their blog. And that's actually meaningful for me because that means, like, you know, I'll be seen as a star and I'll grow my. My brand and people will like other. You know, I'll connect with other. Other designers. I think that's a very underrated thing that I see with B2B SaaS. Companies. They typically have a customer in a niche that you could basically help be the one to, like, amplify that voice. Hey, you have interesting stuff to say, but you don't have a platform to say it. Like, we'll. We'll help you amplify that.

Yeah, well, and I think. And the other thing I'd say on that, so I 100% agree. And it's also like, I think often what people do is they do, like, customer case studies, which have a place. I'm not saying you shouldn't do customer case studies. They're helpful. But that's like, a very different type of asset than what I'd say, what you're referencing and which I'm passionate about, which is like, this more organic version essentially, of, like, it's not a case study. It's not me working. It's just like, here's what I care about, here's how I think about doing my job.

Right.

That has kind of like an empathy and authenticity to it that often will resonate a lot more with your. With your buyers.

Let's go back to what you said about the hard roi. How do you measure the hard ROI of this?

Yeah, so we integrate not only with all these different sources, but into your CRM or your data warehouse, your snowflake instance, whatever.

Right.

And so not only are we telling you that this is Dave and he works at Exit 5, but we're also telling you, do you have an open opportunity with Dave? Are they a customer? That kind of.

Right.

Are they spending this much with you? Are they up for renewal? What kind. You know, how often are you in your API, think about all that data you would want to think about. And so in doing that, what we can do is tell you, okay, like, what amount of your pipeline is in your community first.

Right?

So, like, what you're actually seeing is kind of what we've already talked about. Like, you can actually see it play out in the data. So everyone has this kind of, like, gut instinct that, yeah, maybe people are learning from their friends and they're going to hit our website.

Right.

But now we can say no. We saw Dave go back and forth on this LinkedIn post right. And then he came and he jumped into maybe our slack to ask a more specific question, and then he started his process with our team. So we're able to start saying, like, there's actually, like, community first or community qualified, or however you want to think about, you know, various acronyms. Like, some people in that.

In that example, like, when you're setting up, do I have, like, to tell common room, like, hey, here are the pages. Or it's like, that could be anywhere. On LinkedIn, this person talked about your product.

I mean, I think, you know, you. You mentioned the idea of, like, social listening. It's probably like, you know, we are very. We want to be very clear that we're not, like, a social listening tool. But there's a lot of similarities, obviously. And so, yeah, I can see you smirking. Like, it kind of sounds like social listening. And like.

No, no, I'm just smirking because, like, I don't work at a SaaS company anymore, and I'm literally just asking. And I'm not familiar with your company, and I'm just asking you, like, as I try to, like, triangulate this in my head.

Yeah, no, totally.

But there's enough like, oh, what is this thing? And it's just so funny because you do work at a SaaS company. You. You guys. That you all clearly had con conversations internally. You're like, no, we don't want to be positioned as social listening. So I'm smirking because I know where that come. That's come from.

I've been there.

Yeah, it's like being adrift and, like, you know, the podcast. Like, I'm on a podcast and someone's like, so it's basically like, live chat. And I'm like, no, it's.

It's conversational marketing, you idiot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, I'm just having one of those, like, moments.

Yeah. So. So now I have to, like, gather myself after, like, yelling at you.

You know that.

So.

All right.

Question you're asking, how do you. Oh, so we. Basically, what we'll do is you'll say, hey, on LinkedIn, in your example, show me anytime someone mentions at my company or they have this hashtag or this set of keywords. So you basically define what you would deem as community engagement across any of those specific channels.

Right.

And each channel is different, so all of our integrations are native and give you that, like, kind of context.

Right.

So like, GitHub to use a much more technical channel that people care a lot about.

Right.

It's like huge for dbt or like we work with a bunch of open source companies, cribble, Grafana, et cetera. That's like what repos. And then we're telling you, are they starring your repos? Are they forking, Are they booming pull requests? Right?

So like in my case it might be like so and so, like didn't even tag exit 5. But so and so like wrote a LinkedIn post that was like, is it, is it worth joining Exit 5?

Correct.

And if I had everything connected and that was in my universe, I could be like, oh, interesting, this person is already on my email list and now they're on LinkedIn asking about if they should join Exit 5.

Correct, exactly. So you define in that regard what is community across the different channels. And there's a bunch of different ways to do that. And as I've kind of talked about just quickly, as an aside, like some of it is very, you want to be very, I'll say like prescriptive and like very in like conservative almost. And then there's other companies where like I just want to know anyone who's talking about machine learning, right? And then there's some noise and so you have to do some, you know, or statements in your search, if you will, or. And statements, I guess would be the way to think about that. Once you've defined all that, then we're bringing people in and then through various ways of enriching them and understanding who they are, we're going to match them up with your CRM data and doing that. We can tell you, okay, well people, you know, so like some of our customers that I've mentioned, I won't give like probably can't give like all the hard, hard facts here on them. But I'll say some of the customers that I've mentioned, literally like 40% of their bookings they're seeing in their community before they're seeing engagement in their traditional marketing and CRM tools.

Right?

So like that's an amazing stat, right? And then another one because it kind of can traverse the entire customer journey is we saw, you know, for one of our companies, we saw that if they're engaged in their community even like post sale, right? So post sale engagement in there, they see and it's about like, you know, it's not, it's probably like 40 in community, 60% not. But the 40% that is in their community, they have 3x higher feature adoption and over 2x higher ARR. And there's probably some correlation causation conversations there. But what it actually gets down to is by, to your point, creating or where we started this conversation, creating that place where you can learn and talk to your peers is actually driving higher adoption.

Right.

And so there's a lot of synergies then with like a PLG motion where you have to be one to many. Often in that conversation, it's not selling at okta where it's like we're gonna roll eight dudes in like, you know, a blazer and we're gonna like spend all day with you and then we're picking up the dinner.

Right?

It's like, no, no, no. There is much more a self serve, end user kind of conversation. And so how do you do that at scale? Well, you create a community where people are answering each other's questions and helping you understand what to do here, what to do there. And if you can drive people into that as part of your tactic of onboarding, you see higher usage, higher adoption, better conversion, all those things.

Right.

And so I think what like maybe in summary, on the hard roi we see all these different things, whether it be pipeline sourced, ARR sourced adoption targets, but there's actual plays that you can run. And so I think that's what's exciting about it. And as you think about again where you started, hey, this is the future of marketing, which I appreciate you saying. It's not just, it's this fuzzy thing that's out there. Oh, community, Yay.

Right?

It's like, no, no, there's actual plays you run, whether it be how your SDR go and engage in that.

Right?

So you got it.

Yeah, well, it's like, it's like, you know, five, 10 years ago it was like social selling was the thing, right? Like, like there are other touch points outside of like when somebody's in your funnel. And I think this is more the future. And like, I guess what I would see your company doing is like, basically like if you, if, if the play, if you're, if you're on board with like the playbook of like, there's not a just very linear funnel. Lots of conversations are happening outside. And so as, as a result you need to like create a brand and build content and create all these magnets to draw people in. Well, you're missing that like kind of intelligence layer, right? You're only able, you're only able to like get those insights from people who have like filled out a form or like requested a demo.

And so this is how can you help bring them in closer or like engage that.

Right?

Because it's like, oh, like, you're talking about things. Sometimes they see like a little bit of like.

And it doesn't just mean, like, I don't think it's interesting just because it means like, oh, so and so like, wrote about you on LinkedIn. I think that there's still like, a shitty version. Like, this can still enable shitty selling, which is like, oh, so and so wrote, like, posted about you on, on LinkedIn. Like, go message them and try to book a demo where it's like, no, there's. I think there's, there's multiple layers here, which is like, you're getting, you're getting insights for content strategy and product strategy and you're seeing, like, what objections or false beliefs people might have about your company. So I think it's, it's fueling all those things. If you can be a brand who's creating content to be a place for people to have those conversations online, I think this is 100% the way forward.

Yeah. And a couple of things, I mean, like, I'll just highlight there's a shitty version of it, which is where you see someone do something in your community and you go and, you know, you hammer them with a sequence.

Right.

And so this becomes the art of it all. But what we're seeing is, you know, SDR teams using Common Rooms say, okay, someone just asked a question about XYZ in one of these places. Well, let's go answer the question.

Right.

Like, I think that's like, that's the big thing. There's like an authenticity to it versus saying, someone asked a question. Let's go ask them if they, you know, want to engage. Like, if they have 45 minutes for a demo, they're gonna be like, no, I don't.

Or today, you might not even know.

Right.

In today's world, you might even know that question was asked.

Yeah. So like, okay, that's totally. So like, first, maybe you don't even know that question is being asked. Let's assume you do because you're using Common Room. Hopefully it's a.

We're.

We're a startup I gotta push.

Right.

That's my job. But then you, but then, you know, it's like, well, like, how do you engage them in a way that adds value? And maybe that's a different way to think that too, is like, and what I love about Community, as I've, you know, gone deeper and deeper, both in my time at okt, end of my time at Okta, I should say, and then the eight months I'VE been at Common Room is like, it's all value oriented, if that makes sense.

Right?

It's like you don't just ask your answer like, hey, saw you signed up for a free trial. Do you have a half hour to jump on a call? Or I was at the inbound conference a couple weeks ago and in their keynote they were saying, you know, email open rates are like way, way down. And it's like, because all these people are saying notes, hey, you have a business. Do you want to talk about business? Do you have a half hour this week? And you're like, no, I don't. But if you see they asked a question, like, and then you go answer it, they're like, okay, that was helpful. And then you can be like, great.

I mean that's how it should work. That puts like the onus on you to give an answer. So like I also think like, I see it, I see it all the time where someone will write something, what about this product versus this product? And like someone will chime in and, and they'll be like, happy to chat with you. Shoot me a note. And it's like, no, no, no. They're asking in a public forum because they want to see the answer. And so like this is to me, this is great marketing. And this comes back to having a great product. And a strong point of view is like, answer it. If someone's asking you why you're more expensive than X and you have to answer that privately, then to me, you don't have a good answer versus like, yeah, hey, great, thanks. I'm the founder of so and so. I saw your comment. Here's a reason why we have it priced like this. You know, it's like you want those opportunities to answer those questions publicly if you have your together 100.

Agreed. And I'd also just add and like quickly, no one's gonna like or I shouldn't say no one, but you have a pretty low conversion rate on someone being like, yeah, let me take you up on that like calendly link and book time with you, right? Nope. Just tell me what I need to know.

Let's talk about product led growth for a second because it seems like that is the funnel or that is the model for Common Room. That's my question. Pause.

Yeah. So is your question, is that the funnel for Common Room right now my.

Question is what does Jake Randall think about product led growth? And you come from Okta, which is, as you said, just a very sale. Yeah, I just was on the website. You can do free trial at Common Room. You can request a demo. There's a free version. Yeah, there's free forever. But on your website the logos that I see are enterprise y type of companies. Asana, Atlassian, Confluent, DBT Labs, Figma. I'm just curious how you see the world and how you see kind of the funnel today.

So I would say yes, we are much more PLG than Okta. I think anything is. I used to joke like people would pay us just because they're like stop harassing me, here's money. Just like stop calling me. So we do have a, we have a free trial. We have a free forever. We have plenty of people that are on our free forever tier. And so we do want to I guess, you know, be the best version of ourselves to some extent.

Right.

And so like we have customers that we never talk to. They just went that were just in. We have a Slack community that joined our Slack community to talk to their peers and all of a sudden like we get the email, hey, this is awesome. I want upgrade to the 15k per year tier. So we do all those things and PLG is a big part of our motion. What I will say, and I think this is a really interesting realization, honestly that I had. So when I started at the company I was like, okay, more plg. And that's definitely part of it. But also this is a somewhat new thing for a lot of companies and as we get going there is an element of needing like sales assist and we try to make sure that our sellers are much more consultative than like selling, selling. But we need, but like people are often like, hey this sounds really cool, like how do I do this right? And I think that's where we're finding that we can get them into the funnel with a product led growth strategy. But that conversion right now, even with the content we're trying to generate, you still need someone to come in and say, hey, like let's talk through this. Let's help you really understand how to set up your SDR workflows so that they're meeting people where they are versus sending emails and like you know that whole aspect to it.

Right.

So I don't know if that answers your question. I guess it's like kind of hybrid, right? PLG with like a sales assist is what I'd say. But one of the things we did actually just quickly, I think it's actually a really interesting story in terms of like building a company and I can't take credit for this. This was the Founding team right before I joined. But rather than just throw something out and like, hey, here's like a, you know, free product plg, whatever, they went around and found what they thought were some of the best communities out there. So Atlassian Figma Sauna, the ones that we've already talked about and worked really closely with them as design partners and only once they were willing to pay us money did we actually go GA and launch our PLG free serve, self serve product. And you know, and that comes with challenges.

Right.

Like there's a competitor in the space that was out there sooner and so they've, they probably got like more mindshare more quickly than us because of that. But I feel very confident that we have a better product because we really worked with our customers and built what they would want and made sure they would pay us for that. And only then did we go out to market with it.

Right.

And so I think that's an interesting aspect too of common rooms growth and how we get these logos. Our number one core value, as every company will say, is customer centricity or customer success.

Right.

I think we really lived that in the initial building of the product.

Yeah. I mean if you can do it, it's a huge advantage. You're like, tell us the things. You know, obviously you can't listen to all of it verbatim on the, on the funnel. That doesn't seem to be the entirety of your business strategy. It seems like you're, you're going to do other things, enterprise selling, outbound, you know, kind of marketing stuff. But, but you have basically an option where if you want to come in through the, through the free channel, you can.

So you know, we have thousands of thousands and thousands of communities that we're now managing for people.

Right.

We don't have thousands and thousands of customers yet, to be clear.

Right.

So there's people that are on our free trial and they're like, yeah. And like we're like, if you're starting out and you're just kind of getting your feet under you around this new motion that we've been talking about. Yeah. Use the free version. For a bit.

Right.

You know, like we want to be really clear that like our free version has more value than like some of our competitors paid tiers.

Right.

Then at some point you want to upgrade what we try to do on those. And again, this is not rocket science, is like a standard PLG motion is you have a community team or devrel team that's using it initially and they're seeing A lot of value to do, kind of like their job. And then what the sales team can be really helpful in is helping broker that conversation with your CMO or with your CRO or with these other kind of GTM leaders around. Here's the value of this, of this content and this data. Because I think what every company is looking for right now when it comes to their go to market motions is context. They want to understand what does someone care about?

Right.

Why am I just throwing generic email nurture at them?

Right.

What if I could tell you that these people are asking about these things? And so then like, if you do want to do a traditional email nurture campaign, have, you know, five different ones where you've said, here's what I'm seeing you talking about in our community. So you're going to get this, you're going to get that, those kinds of ideas, right? And everyone's, it seems like everyone's investing a lot in like enrichment providers.

Right.

Every, like CMO I talked to is like, oh, I'm doing a lot with, you know, the clear bits, the zoom infos, et cetera. I'm like, what if I could tell you not only who they are, but like what they're actually talking about? Wouldn't that be more interesting? So, you know, there's also a context.

Yeah, I mean, to me, a lot of that stuff is just basically like, it's a, it's a, it's just contact info acquisition and it doesn't, you know, like, I'm not, I'm not knocking those tools specifically. There's a lot of value and you, you honestly need them to do effective digital marketing today. But it's no different than like if 10 years ago you're like, here's, here's a list of 5,000 names in this space. I think what you have is, is a layer deeper in the funnel which is like, you know, these are people that are actually talking about you just to tie up the plg.

Here's what they're like saying. I think that's what.

Right.

It's like, not just like, are they like talking about you? It's like, here's what they're actually saying. Here's what they care about.

Yeah, right.

Yeah. It's like, I think the marketing, the whole thing is like you're trying to match up these ingredients. You're like, well, these are the reasons people are not buying on that we're hearing on sales calls or churning or whatever. Here's the chatter in the market about us. Like this is not just marketing's job to like do this. This is a company strategy level. Like, hey, their perception is that we don't stand up against X company. Clearly that's what people are saying online or they don't believe that we're in this space. I think you can get a lot of insight as to like how you should be talking in the company story, which impacts every department. I just want to put a bow on the PLG thing. I think another aspect of this is we've shifted to now the whole narrative in B2B SaaS is PLG, but people forget where this came from is freemium. And freemium can also be an incredible marketing and advertising channel in some ways where maybe it's not where all of your revenue is going to come from, but it can be a damn good marketing and awareness channel. And so all of a sudden more people know about Common Room because you have a free version that a lot of people can use and get value from that's going to spread goodwill and word of mouth among others. And like those people are going to tell others. I think that's just an underrated piece of this. It doesn't have to just be the entire funnel.

Yeah. Oh, I agree. And I think part of it's like, I also think of it maybe a different as like time to value. Maybe it's like a huge part of the PLG aspect of things. So like just again to maybe juxtapose it against my time at Okta.

Right?

Like you couldn't really implement Okta without talking. I mean like to be like you just couldn't like you had to go talk to us. You had to have like an SE in there right now with something like Common Room or most tools you can go set it up, connect all your sources and just in doing that again think like go back to context. I think I'm like a huge proponent of context now. You know, like what channels do they care about how many people are in their community, right? Like what's it doing to their pipeline? Those kinds of things. And it just gives you everything you need to then go have an actual valuable conversation with them, should you choose to right around how you can help their business. So I think that's the thing too. It's like it doesn't always, to my mind, it doesn't always mean that like you're just going to self serve your way up through these tiers and go from their bronze that are silver to their gold package. It's also a great way to get them in low friction and figure out is there value here where we can have a pertinent conversation.

I want to wrap up and just kind of pick your brain on a different thing. Just so obviously okta incredibly successful company, you know, $8 billion market cap, you had a great run there. You're a COO of a well funded, gonna be successful SaaS company. You've made big acquisitions, you've been in a lot of finance related, CEO level, cmo, CRO discussions. Just talk to people about what advice do you have for those who are in revenue generating positions right now? Because it's tough out there right now there, there are a lot of people, there are a lot of people that are not buying. There's very few tools that are in like the must have bucket and if you're in like the perceptions, reality, if you're in the nice to have bucket, it's going to be a tough, tough six months to a year for you. Like what are you seeing inside of your company? What conversations do you have? Like what can you keep doing? It's not, you know, people aren't just printing money in SaaS like they were two years ago. What's going on inside of companies right now? Give me something positive, what can do?

So I think there's a couple things. One is so a lot depends on like what stage you're at maybe. And like, you know, there's like a bunch of things to think about obviously, right. Like what's your burn rate when you need to rate like, you know, so it's, it's hard to give like one generic answer because there's a lot of inputs to it. What I'd say is I think everyone has focused so much on growth at kind of any cost as it may be, and that's not the answer anymore. And so really figuring out what are the key, like what are those kind of North Star metrics that are going to be important to the success of your company. So an example might be if you are more of a PLG company or you think that, you know, whatever that you're the future of how marketing is going to work. We'll use our conversation, right? Maybe it's not always about hitting ARR targets. Maybe it's about making sure that you get customers on board and successful.

Right.

And build a plan around what can you do today that will lead to your success in two, three years.

Right.

And then talk that through with your board, with your executives and be really clear as to those trade offs and why you think that is the right Play, right? So like examples are, you know, like I'll tell you, I've done deals with customers that, you know, they're under a budget pinch, they're in a tough place and you're like, okay, well like how can we make this work? Because I actually believe that if you implement Common Room that you'll see success.

Right.

And we'll be able to positively impact your business. And so I'll give you a good price right now so we can get in the door. But just to be clear, when we show these this value and you're up for renewal or whatever it may be like it cost X. So I think just being really creative around how you structure things and how you think about the impact it can have long term is probably like the biggest thing versus just being, you know, everyone was just about like ARR and like growth and like, you know, whatever. I've got a bunch of friends. I played golf with the CMO of Wiz a couple weeks ago, right? The fastest growing company ever apparently, you know, and it was all about growth.

What is it? Wiz, the fastest growing company ever. I've never, literally never heard of it.

So they clearly need to do my friends, the cmo. So I'll tell them he's to do better marketing, which who am I?

I don't pay attention to much anymore.

But yeah, yeah, but I don't know if that's helpful. But like just like focus on what are actual indicators of long term success because the short term things that people were looking at over the last couple of years are really hard to go execute against. And you know you're going to have hard conversations around budget. So figuring out like, I know I call it like the sandbox but like what's the sandbox you're willing to play in, right? And how then do you give your sales team or whomever is in charge of like customer acquisition if you're more of a plg, room to maneuver around that with metrics that maybe aren't just dollar figures.

Well I think that's huge because I think that that to me speaks to like that just one example is like if you're not selling right now the same way you were six months ago and you're not, you haven't as a company revisited like the go to market the strategy then like, like you, you can't sell under the same like we only sell annuals, we don't do any discounts, we don't do any flex. Here's what it is. But nobody's buying right Now. Okay, well then like we got, we gotta change something. I think that that's where like mostly marketers listen to this podcast, but it's just like a reminder that like, like, yeah, it's not just on the marketing team, but you can be the one who brings this to the rest. Hey, at our next senior leadership team discussion, like, I want to talk about how like our close rate has gone down 50% in the last three months and like, what are we doing organizationally to fix that? Because it's right. The solution is not, like, we need more out of marketing for that to happen. Right. This is a company wide issue and we need to figure out company wide how we're going to try to attack this.

Yeah, I'll give you an example. Sorry, one more example if it's helpful. So I used to run pricing and packaging and deal desk at Okta also. So I'm so close with that team and so once in a while they'll like call me. And there's revrec rules now, right? Public company, et cetera. And so someone's like, all right, yeah, we need this tool, but budgets are frozen right now. We can't like, you know, we could do it in Q1. And you're like, okay, well that's like not really when I want to do it, but like just simple things. Like, okay, well like what if I sign you up now but you don't pay me till Q1. Can you get that approved?

Right?

And then finance throws a hissy fix, right, Guys throw off my REV rack, right? Because it's delayed billing and you're like, yeah, well like figure it out. That's your job.

Right?

But like at the end of the day, you have a customer that's going to pay you this much per year. So it's like just like those little things around, like creativity versus like just getting stuck in the way that you used to do it.

Right.

I think, yeah, I'll only push back on you in that I agree 100%. I just think most orgs, there's so much internal politics that. Well, well, hold on. So what does that mean? So if I close this deal though, am I going to get that my commission and then my bonus is tied to that ARR number? Is that going to be in January? Like you just like there's so much.

I think that's actually a really important point because I also think that part of it is like, things are different out there. So as an executive team, you need to have those conversations and you need to he's giving the thumbs up. I know we're on podcast, but we're on video, so everyone knows he gave me a thumbs up. You have to have those conversations.

What if I just gave you the finger, though?

Yeah. Then I would still say that he gave me a thumbs up. They don't know any better, but, like, get aligned.

Right.

And figure it out and do the right thing by your people.

Right.

And if it's hard out there, you want people to feel motivated and like and that you have their back. And yeah, our rules used to be that for the sake of it, that would be a Q1 deal. But, like, no, that's a Q3 deal, right?

Yep. I think it's great. All right. The producer is in my ear telling me that we got a wrap. So Jake Randall, he's on LinkedIn. He's a COO at Common Room. He spent a decade at Okta before that. You can go and check out Common Room Commonroom IO and if you do just happen to check if maybe, maybe just one person tells Jake that you came from Exit 5 podcast. That'd be fun. Jake, we'll have to do like a part two of this sometime because I would love to dig into, like, less about the Common Room stuff and more about just like, so many revenue and market CMO CRO lessons that I'm sure we could share coming from where you sit. Thank you, sir. Good to see you.

Good to see you too, Dave.

I'll talk to you later. All right, see you. Bye. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com. We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time. To grow your career and help grow your company, go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing. Outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do and they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast editing and on demand strategy for a low monthly cost. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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