In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews community leader Christina Garnett about how to measure and realize the return on investment (ROI) of a business community. Garnett explains a reverse‑engineering approach: start with the business KPI you want to move, identify the member behaviors that will drive that KPI, then design the community experience to make those behaviors frictionless. She introduces the CMX Spaces model, which breaks community value into five pillars—support, product insight, acquisition, contribution, and engagement—and shows how each pillar can lift support costs, inform product roadmaps, generate referrals, create user‑generated content, and boost overall engagement. Using HubSpot’s community as a case study, she illustrates how loyalty and leverage emerge when members feel heard, can influence the product roadmap, and share successes, leading to organic reach and brand advocacy. Garnett also walks through practical tools such as the Community Canvas and the concept of a Minimum Viable Community to surface core questions about purpose, audience, and experience. She stresses the importance of a holistic member journey—from onboarding and discovery to ongoing participation—and advises auditing existing communities, reducing friction, and fostering an inclusive, garden‑like environment where members can plant seeds, grow, and innovate together. Throughout, she offers actionable steps for building, launching, and measuring community programs, emphasizing that the true power of community lies in aligning member experience with business outcomes.
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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 Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring 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.
You have set goals for your business and say, look, this is a business community and you have set goals. Then think about what desired behaviors you would need to have community members do in order to see changes in those KPIs. So you're going to reverse engineer it. So, okay, this is my KPI. This is what I'm looking at to deem for success. Great. What behaviors do I need to encourage in the community in order to see us change in that KPI? Great. Now that I know what that desired behavior is, how can I make that desired behavior as easy as possible? How can I remove friction so that not only do they know how to behave and behave in that way, but I make it as easy as possible? They could know exactly what to do, but it's just tedious. And that's gonna cut people off just in that action. Make it as easy as possible, remove friction, and work that way back. That's gonna give you that alignment, but at the end of the day, by doing reverse engineering, you're putting that community member at the heart of what you're doing. So you're not chasing KPIs, you're chasing improvement for the community member experience that's gonna drive those behaviors you want so you can hit those KPI metric changes that you want. And when we're thinking about that, if you're unsure of what even to do, what goals should I even align with this? Then I want you to look at the CMX Spaces model. And what it does is it shows you the different parts of business value that community can actually provide. And so we're looking at support. Communities can answer questions and really kind of take a large lift off of your support team. They can help your product. They can tell you exactly what kind of product features they want. They can tell you what product features they need, if there's any bugs, if there's anything that needs to be different. Acquisition. They're going to be those ambassadors for you. They are going to champion you and they're going to drive referral traffic for you. They are going to get you new business so that you can acquire that new revenue. They're going to contribute. They're going to give UGC. They're going to help you write blogs. They're going to help you create. They're going to have a space for others to learn from them. Engagement. If you're doing all those other parts right, you're going to see that engagement. They're going to have this give and take in the community. People are going to ask questions. People are going to share. People are going to elevate others. They're going to learn together. They're going to grow together. And when you do all of that, that community that you facilitated helps them succeed. And by extension, it helps you succeed because now you are a strong core piece of their success. And that's going to help drive even more behavior because now they're invested in you. Now they believe in what you're doing. Now they see the opportunities they have, and that's going to drive revenue for you. That's going to drive traffic for you. That's going to build you up and really kind of harness the power of this community. And so when we look at that, that's the ROI. When we're thinking about how do we, how do we, how do we quantify the value of this? How do we quantify what this means for people? And so for me, when I think about the HubSpot community and I think about the value that it holds for us, it gives us that loyalty and leverage. There's people who, with their honest— their honesty, are going to tell you exactly what they think about us. They're going to tell you not only that they love HubSpot, they're going to tell you why. They're going to share successes with you. They're going to talk about what's important, and that is going to create leverage so that other people then want to learn more. Well, if you did this, And this— you were able to see this kind of positive change. Maybe I can too. And it's going to give us opinions. It's going to tell us more about how we can improve our product. It's going to tell us more about how we can make the experience better. Are there needs that we didn't realize? And that's also going to help our organic reach. Anytime someone puts an idea on the Ideas Forum and they wanted something and the product team brings that to fruition and it's announced, Those people are always sharing that and creating that organic reach for us, talking about how that was their idea and how it empowered them, made them feel like they got to have a role in the roadmap. That voice of the customer is incredibly priceless because when we say that we're customer-centric, if we're not having the voice of the customer at the heart of everything that we're doing, then we're really not. That voice of the customer is incredibly powerful so that when you are a part of the HubSpot community, you're not only getting the help that you need, you're able to ask questions. But you're not only going to hear from the HubSpot team. You're going to hear from fellow users who want to help you. If you spend any time in the HubSpot community, what you'll find is a sense of community over competition. There'll be partners who will tell you how to solve something. They won't pitch you. They won't say, well, like I can't help you if you don't sign a contract with me. They'll help you. They'll ask you questions. They'll want to learn more about the challenges that you're facing, and that gives them that opportunity to share their expertise. Some of the most powerful and brilliant people I work with are our customers and partners. They know the product up, down, left, right, and they know how to handle a lot of the bigger challenges. So why not let them be the star? Why not let them be subject matter experts? Because that's what they are. When I created the inbound correspondence program last year, it was an opportunity for our top advocates to be able to be a voice for us at inbound, to be able to share their viewpoint on the sessions that they were participating in. When we're thinking about community, how are we building that? How are we offering that opportunity for people to feel like, I'm not only seen and I'm heard, but I'm appreciated for that, that they are recognized for the value that they in turn are giving to the community. And if you want to create that love, if you want to create that building of that, you need to think about what steps it's going to take to be able to really define What's important? And I use a lot of metaphors normally. Gardens are usually the best thing for me when I think about when I think about community because you really are planting seeds and it's going to take time. You got to get the soil right. You need to make sure that it's the right type of ingredients and soil and food, excuse me, for the type of plants you want to grow. So I would advise you, sorry. I'm choked up. I would advise you to complete the Community Canvas, the minimum viable community, and it creates an opportunity for you to get down to these basic questions so that you can understand what's at the heart of the work. What questions do you need to ask? The community experience— what can they do there? How can they experience things? How can they feel empowered? How can they feel involved? And how can they innovate? This specific diagram is actually for public libraries for kids, and it showcases these individual centers where you have these desired behaviors for the kids who are participating in. By having this in a community setup, it's incredibly powerful because you have the opportunity to treat them like kids, and I mean that in the best possible way. You get to let them explore. You get to let them innovate. You get to let them participate. You get to let them connect in this really intellectually curious space. So you don't have to just have community frameworks that are traditional to build your community. You can really focus on what community experience looks like in other ways and how people can work together. So when you're thinking about planning, you're going to go back to those core questions about why you're doing it, who is involved, and what does this look like for people. If they already have a current community, you need to audit that community. What value are they getting out of it? How do they self-identify? Why do they, do they call themselves something? And why do they call themselves that? How do they align themselves together? And what are the needs of those people? And is there a way for you to be able to uplift them, for you to be able to provide an experience that's better than what they currently have? And thinking about how inclusive or exclusive that community needs to be. And then when we think about the member experience, we're going to focus on what that really looks like. Remember, we want to be very holistic. We want to be very thoughtful in how we're really offering up this journey. It is a community member member journey all the way from onboarding. How do they enter? How do they even know it exists? How do they introduce themselves all the way up to why do they return? What's in it for them? What's the power of the community that makes it worth it to them? And then how do you engage them and keep it going? Are you going to use specific tools for it? Is there a specific community platform you're going to use? How are you going to determine success? What KPIs are you going to look like? Are you going to look at for this? Are you gonna do a soft launch or hard launch? And how are you going to keep track of those? Are you gonna use a calendar? Are you gonna use project management software? How are you gonna manage? And then remember, community is an incredibly powerful thing, and there is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. So I thank you so much for your time. I'm sorry, I'm a little bit sick, so I've been coughing. But thank you so much for your time. It was lovely chatting with all of you, and I hope that you enjoy community as much as I do. I hope you have a great day.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot 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. Thank you.
