Earn Your Customer's Time with Community-Market Fit - Christina Garnett - Revenue Today - Episode # 049

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by RevGenius, and we're on a mission to bring in Inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

We know what those kind of things look like, but how do we actually determine it? What kind of variables are we looking at? When we're thinking about product market fit, you're probably used to seeing a Venn diagram. And with community market fit, it's not any different. The difference though is what those circles represent. What does that really come down to? So the thing is, is that you're always gonna have people who are willing to spend money. They have a bucket of budget to be able to have set aside for whatever their needs are. This year I need to have, I need to spend this certain amount of money and I'd like to, I'd like to earmark it for these specific projects. With community, yes, you can have tools and yes, you can do things, but from a customer perspective, That's not what they're really paying you with. They're paying you with their time. And time is one of the most treasured things that we have. We have our time with family. We have our time with work. We have our time resting. We have our time eating. We have our time relaxing. We don't have necessarily these bucketed options. And time blocking is an option. I do time blocking all the time. But you don't have this, I have 12,000 hours that I can set aside for this specific activity. That's not how we think. And when you think about how your product, your product is having to compete with anything else that can do that for you. With community, you are competing with anything that wants their time. You're competing with advertisers. You're competing with their kids. You're competing with the sports teams they like to watch. You're competing with the emails that they're getting. You're competing with social media. You're competing with anyone who wants to, who wants to take their time and is promising them connection. And especially since COVID hit and everything that's happened since 2020, every single thing you see is people offering connection. We're in this together. We're we're all together. We're doing this. We're gonna make things. We're gonna make events hybrid, or we're gonna make events online. We're gonna make our webinars so that we can record it so you can watch it later. We're gonna have cohort education so you can connect that way. We're gonna add you to a Slack channel so you can talk to people. Everyone that will give you their time has had someone else offer the exact same opportunity, and as buzzwords go, community has been a hot one. There's been a lot of people who want to offer. You the opportunity to be able to connect with others, to be able to learn from each other, to be able to feel like you belong, to find your people, as it were. And so the thing is, is that you really need to think about what your community is truly competing with. Everything that takes time is your competitor. So for product, yeah. Is it worth the price? Do the features give me enough value that it makes up for the price I'm paying? But community, it's is it worth the time? Is it worth the investment? And usually, if you use a product, if you have one or two bad experiences, but you get support and you get the help you need, then that might be enough for you to stay, for you to come back. Community, it's not like that. If I go into a space and I don't feel comfortable, it's going to be very hard for me to shake that. It's going to be very hard for me to think. This is my place and I should keep trying. I should keep giving my time and hope it works. So when you're thinking about that community market fit, you really need to be incredibly empathetic and you need to think about your personas and the people that you want in that room, whether that room is online, whether that room is in person. You really need to have a holistic view of what that time spent looks like for them and that they're choosing you. And then you need to treat them accordingly. How do you treat someone who gives you the investment of their time? That's priceless. So not only do you need to make sure that when they're in there, they're having a good, a good conversation, they're having good connections, they're having a good member journey. You need to make sure that at all points they feel appreciated for being there because they don't have to be. They could literally be doing anything else. So when we're thinking about that and we're thinking about what questions we need to ask to consider what this needs to look like, what is a community that you would spend your time in look like? We need to ask ourselves questions. We need to think about what is the value for them to join and what does it look like for them to return? A lot of brands will do this from swag. But swag is foundational. Swag is cold. Like, we have our hoodies, we have our Yetis, we have our caps, we have our laptop stickers, and that's great. But that isn't necessarily going to make me feel special over time. I get this single hit of dopamine that makes me feel loved, that might make me put something on Twitter or on Instagram. But if you give me swag a second time and a third time and a fourth time, each one means less to me. Each one makes me feel less valued, and now it just feels like that's the pattern. My relationship with you is I do this and you give me swag instead of scaling those opportunities. So think about how you're going to go beyond swag, how you're going to go to really foster that relationship. So when we're thinking about this, you can do it from a brand perspective. So my value is my proximity to the brand, in this case HubSpot Community. What's the value that you can get from the HubSpot Community and being a part of it? Well, there's swag, obviously, but you can get behind-the-scenes access. You get opportunities to do AMAs with our product team and leadership and all of these other things. You have opportunities to be able to, to talk, to potentially be an inbound correspondent. You have all of these things that can make you feel valued Here's a hat, or it might be a country club model. It's not about the proximity of who built the community; it's based on the proximity of power, the proximity of clout, the proximity to the people who are in the room. Where it isn't a matter of who built the community, what the value is; it's interlaced with who's in the community. So if you want to be in a part of group with CROs, or you want to be in a group with other CMOs. Or you want to be with people that you probably have no other opportunity to be connected with, then we're looking at this country club model where you're in this community for proximity to the other people who would be involved. And for that, that's going to be more community-led where you're going to have peer networking and peer mentoring. You're going to have opportunities for those people to learn together, to grow together, and have a safe space where they wouldn't be able to ask other questions. If you're thinking about executive leadership and doing micro-communities for that, a lot of them are very hesitant to join communities because they don't want to be pitched to. What steps are you taking to be able to create an environment where they feel like they can ask questions openly and they're not going to be pitched to, where they're able to just connect without this immediate ask? Thinking of those concerns and thinking about what value that looks like, whether it's proximity to the people or proximity to brand, is incredibly important when you're thinking about what matters, what motivates these people, what makes them wanna have a bigger role. And when we think about the market need, that's gonna tell us. We're gonna do that deeper dive into that audience, and we're gonna have to be intellectually curious. You really, at this point, to be a part of a community and to be a community manager or director, you really need to have this obsession with understanding the needs of the community and understanding that it is a, It's an ecosystem that you are constantly having to nurture and to navigate and to weed and to water. You constantly have to figure out what's missing, what needs to be, what needs to be enhanced, what opportunities are missing. And so you're not going to know that if you aren't doing those really strong audience deep dives and do interviews, talk to people, ask them, do NPS. Do those feedback loops and set up an ecosystem of feedback. Set up a safe space where you can be a member and you feel comfortable saying what you don't like, not because you want to complain, but because you genuinely are a part of this community and you know it can be better. You know it can be optimized. And here, let me tell you how this could be a better experience. Some of the easiest ways to be able to really navigate that feedback Is to be able to come from a place of we know nothing's perfect, and if we have that mindset, it gives us the humility to know that we can be better and to grow accordingly, and to bring those community members along for the ride. So thinking about what roles those people can play, and what does the health currently look like? If you already have a current community, how are you determining health? What metrics do you look at to determine if this is successful? If people are happy, are people engaged? Is it meeting the goal? Goals that you have set, you need to have those things in place so that you really have this good gauge of what's working, what's not working, how can we be better? Excuse me. But that has a tie to your goals. You need to make sure there's alignment, and it needs to come down to why you're building things. Why are you putting things together? Why are you creating this experience to facilitate connection? So what are the desired behaviors? When someone joins a community, what do you expect them to do and how do you communicate that with them? How do you make it clear how you want them to be a part of the community? What's good and what's bad? What are the guidelines? Some of the best things that you can do for a community starting off is to have very clear guidelines. What does good look like? What does engaged look like? What does unhealthy look like? What does this person is a bad actor in the community look like? Knowing what that can, that can essentially be manifested as in the community is a really great way for you to keep the health and to be able to just be very transparent with what the opportunities are and what things look like. Those rules really set that bumper for people so that they're able to understand. How they can, how they can be a part of it.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.