Building Community with Drift's Mark Kilens | S01 E11

You. Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of acquisition and strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, Newbreed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. And we do this by following the inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. So the goal of this podcast is to bring you stories of how people add value to their customers, their company, and the individuals around them. Today, I'm excited to have Mark Killens join the podcast. You are the founder of the HubSpot Academy, and now as the VP of Content and Community at Drift, you lead the blogging, editorial, social Drift insider, and hypergrowth teams. So, Mark, I really appreciate you taking the time to join today, and welcome to the podcast.

Hey, it's my pleasure, Guido. Really, thank you for having me. And I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I'm really excited to dive into this, and I know you're at Drift now, and I want to spend as much time as possible asking about some of the incredible things that you and the rest of the team are doing there. But first, if it's okay with you, I want to Briefly talk about HubSpot Academy. Can you explain what HubSpot Academy is for those who don't know, and what led you to start that experiment back in 2012?

Sure, yeah. HubSpot Academy is the place to go to get education and inspiration around how to grow your business, mostly with inbound marketing, inbound sales, just using the inbound methodology. And it teaches people how to do that with HubSpot. And HubSpot has a plethora of free tools. The reason I started it is similar to what I'm doing at Drift now, where I believe one of the most important things a business, no matter if you're B2B, B2C SaaS, no matter your vertical, could be big or small, should be doing is educating people. And education is, I would say it's like almost a macro view of like content marketing and community building because it provides people with real tangible value, knowledge, ideas, insights that they can use for so many different purposes and that you can use to help build your brand, help people understand why they should pay more attention to your business. Right. That's kind of the whole point around content marketing and inbound marketing. It helps you build trust with people. So for me, we started HubSpot Academy as a way to help our customers be more successful with inbound and HubSpot. And it's all rooted in the notion of to help people, you need to provide them with value. And what's again, the best way to provide someone with value in a scalable, low cost, yet high quality way? It's education.

Yeah, I love that. That's basically the way that we do our marketing today. So we think about how can we educate the people that we want to be working with around how to do the types of marketing activities that they want to do to grow their business. If we can help them with that, that's great. If they become customers, that's better. But either way, we're helping that person become better at what they're doing today. And that leads me into my next question, which is one of the ways that people talk about to learn something is to teach it. So building the academy for you is like one of the best ways, I would imagine, to learn all of the types of concepts that the academy was building and the coursework and material that's provided there. So what were some of the things that you learned over your time while you were building and managing the academy?

Yeah, that's pretty. It's a pretty meta way to think about it. Right. But yeah, the two best ways to learn something are either to do it or to teach it. Yep, that's like the vast majority. Right. That's baked in science and a lot of study of human behavior and knowledge acquisition. So for us, it was all about how could we practice what we were teaching. So, you know, HubSpot Academy was built using the HubSpot platform. We were doing, like, to your point, all the things we were asking our customers to do. And now we're doing the same things at Drift. Right. We're building Drift Insider. We're teaching people about conversational marketing. We're teaching people how to do that using the conversation marketing blueprint and whatnot. And really, I think you have to figure out how you can take what you're doing as a business and you probably hopefully have a lot of credibility in doing that thing and use that as a platform to teach people. And I would also add really quickly that you should really include your customers in that content and teaching effort. We figured out how to build a marketing machine using content and community at HubSpot Academy. And now we're taking a similar, yet slightly different approach at Drift because of all the lessons we learned and using that now to help people start conversations, which is even more powerful because people who learn together, I believe, will learn more effectively and grow faster and so for us, one of the best ways to learn is by having a conversation. So we're now in the business of trying to help people. Yes, learn using content, using education, but then connect with those people, help businesses connect with people. So the person at that business could be a bdr, could be an sdr, could be an account executive, could be a bot, can teach that person through a conversation how they should be thinking about this a little bit differently, sharing some ideas, how they could get to their outcome faster if they understood this thing better. So I think now with the power of conversations, it's going to take content and education to a whole new level.

Yeah, I love that. And it's really interesting to hear you talking about the content and community piece. That was one of the questions that I wanted to ask because what you're doing by starting those conversations, having Driven Drift, Insider and all of the other pieces that you're building to create that community is really fascinating. But to me, like the VP of content aspect of your title, that makes a ton of sense. I understand content, I understand building that, but building a community is a lot more. It's a lot harder concept to grasp in my eyes. Like, I get pieces of it. But can you explain how you actually go about building that community where people can go and learn from?

It's a great question. A lot of people don't build a community correctly because they don't think about what outcome are they trying to get to, but even more importantly, what outcome are they trying to help the members of that community get to.

Mm.

You know, I think outcomes are a really interesting way to look at things today, along with experiences. And, you know, with your content you have to think about, you know, how does that experience or that person consuming that content, you know, no matter what the format is, how is that piece of content helping them get to some type of outcome? It could be a small or a large outcome, and I can give examples of those. But going back to community, it's like, why you as a business, are you trying to build a community? You have to start with that question, because community building isn't a thing you can do for 3, 6, 12 months and then say it's done and complete and you have huge success. It's gonna take a multi year effort, if not longer to build a community that the members really find value in and that the business is getting a payback on. So I think it's really that why? And then it's, well, what are you doing for the members of the community? I think of it as like a value or a unit of value, like what thing are you doing? And it's something that isn't gonna be just like, oh, I'm gonna set up a community discussion forum and people will just naturally start talking and it's gonna be great. Like that's how a lot of people try to start these communities. I think one of the best ways to start a community is through using one of two approaches. One is a more brand centered approach and Drift has definitely done that. From the gate we have a community. Is it fully organized? Is it in the best possible place? No. That's why we're working on making it more organized and better and more valuable. But it's a very strong community because there is brand affinity, there is trust that has been built because of this brand work that has been going on for many, many years now. And there is a community. The other way you could do it is more of a content approach. And this is more of the way we did it at my past job at HubSpot and with HubSpot Academy, where you use content to again give people this knowledge and you start to generate a lot of interest, a lot of people's attention because you're giving away all this free knowledge and, and content and information education and then they're going to start doing something using that. And you folks have seen this as being a HubSpot partner and now Drift partner, where partners are getting this knowledge and now they want to talk to other partners about it and now they want to share the knowledge they're getting because they're doing the things and learning more things and they want to share that knowledge because that's one of the best ways to learn. So it's like, it's almost like a flywheel if you want to think about it like that. Right. It's a self perpetuating thing that starts to happen and the same thing happens on the brand side. I think long term you need both. You need to have a strong brand and you need to have great content, but you can take either approach.

That's such an interesting way to think about it. I actually hadn't thought about the way that Drift built their community based on the brand first. They did such a good job and they're still doing such a good job building their brand and creating such a strong brand that people can connect with. And that's really how they've driven that community and that engagement. And it's interesting thinking about how you are helping to translate that brand and organize it around Drift Insider And a few other places where people can congregate to form that community a little bit more strongly. But one of the things I want to dig into about what you were just talking about is related to the outcomes piece of that. So you mentioned the business outcomes and obviously that's important. But what do you think people or businesses should start with? Should it be we're building this community for these business outcomes or should they be thinking about the outcomes for the people within the community first?

So if you do it right, it's going to help both at the same time. So for example, you're either going to build a community for more like demand gen customer acquisition type motions, which depending on your go to market model, it's going to be either more online community building things or in person through in person events. And for some businesses like Drift, it's definitely both. We're doing a mix of both of those things because we have inbound and outbound motions to generate demand and to monetize that demand. For other businesses you might start and this is more like on the HubSpot Academy side, HubSpot side, it was more about retaining customers and creating customer value and creating even like in some ways, customer advocacy. But the retention piece is really important. So, you know, for the business that's definitely, obviously, you know, keeping those dollars. But really if you have a model again, goes back to your business model and what you sell, if you have a way to expand or sell more to people, sell more products or services to people, then it's very advantageous. Of course, if you retain them and then teach them more things, make them more successful, make them desire more of what you're doing in terms of helping them get to those outcomes and they want more of those outcomes, like, oh man, this is great, I want more of those. So for that it's like, all right, great. You have to pick one of those things over time. What I've seen happen is they converge. They will converge because you want your customers talking to your potential buyers at the time or your potential customers, but at a very high level. That's the way I would think about it to start.

That makes a ton of sense. And it's really interesting to think about the way that those communities can grow and evolve. Imagine that there might be something that kind of comes out of the way that you build the community that you might not have even expected. Have you noticed that being the case at all as you've been growing the community at Drift?

Yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely. There's definitely a lot of things that you just don't expect right away. I think you really need to be. And this is part of the Drift brand ethos now, which I love. You really have to be authentic and real and very customer and human centric to build a community that has a foundation of trust, a strong foundation of trust. I was actually Dave Gearhart, and some of us were just talking about how important Authenticity. Authenticity is. Excuse me, today. And I think that's extremely important when it comes to community building. Yeah, yeah. It's like you can't be fake. Like, someone's gonna see right through that. And that goes for your content. But when you're trying to create relationships with people through giving them a way to have conversations with each other. Cause that's obviously one way a community works. But giving them an opportunity to have conversations with you people at the business, you have to have a sense of belonging within that. That's when you have to start to foster. I feel like I belong in this thing, and I want to belong even more, and I want to pull people into this community with me. The community members start to feel like, oh, I want to bring more people into this because I'm enjoying it so much. I'm seeing so much value. And when you start to have that happen, that starts to happen. You really cracked the nut.

Yeah. When I was evaluating Drift, and when I first found out about Drift, everyone at New Breed was talking about how I was becoming like a Drift fanboy almost. And it was because I saw all of this interesting, incredible, valuable content and information that Drift was providing through the podcast, through the social posts that I saw, through the blog posts that they were writing. And I just enjoyed it so much and connected with it so much that I started talking about it amongst my peers, amongst other people at New Breed and I. We ended up becoming partners as a result of it. But it was because Drift has always had such a really authentic way of doing things that's really stood out to me. The first thing that I can honestly remember hearing about Drift and how they grew their business was about how it was about the day that Drift decided to drop forms from their website and go all in on conversational marketing. It was like they decided. Decided to prove the value of their product by building their own case study around it and growing Drift's own business through the use of the tool. And that alone just created that authenticity. So that you went. When Drift went to tell the story of how they did was their own story. It wasn't like they were trying to fabricate Something or talk about how it could be a great tool to use. They were proving it and showing you what it did for them. And now they've also been able to do that with all of their customers as well and every other company that's seen value from it. It's really, really interesting to be able to see that actually play out in that way.

I think that's important. I think it's a really important thing. I think I haven't talked about this as much as I used to. I probably should start talking about it more. Like, would you buy something from someone that doesn't use the product that they're selling?

It'd be so hard to. I can't imagine doing that. No.

Right. I mean, look at Amazon. Amazon is selling AWS because that's how they built Amazon.com you know.

Yeah.

I don't know. There's a lot of company examples around this. Right. Obviously. But like, I don't know, it's you. You have to question then what is that business or person really selling if they're not using it? I don't know.

And that brings me to my next point or my next question about you and Sarah that I've seen all over LinkedIn. When you guys are sharing the tips and tricks that you've learned from using Drift yourselves on social media. When did you guys decide to start doing that and what have you seen from starting that process?

Yeah, so one of the things that I've been doing for a long time is video. Video has been something that I've been obsessed with for a long time. David Cancel is obsessed with it. It's one of the two big mega trends that isn't going anywhere. It's video and messaging. It's huge. They're becoming massive. They're just going to keep exploding. So I was doing a lot of. And actually I just did a LinkedIn post about this. I was doing a lot of produced video. So well thought out video. Video that used really good equipment, high end equipment, equipment that I couldn't personally use that well. I would have to be trained on it. Software that I couldn't understand. I would have to actually learn it. So that's like produced video. And now when I joined Drift and I was watching this well before I joined Drift, but what Dave Gearhart was doing with, I would call it, I'm calling like homemade video. Anyone can do homemade video. Now you don't need any training. You can use your phone, whatever phone you have, they all have the cameras that will be suitable, the software is extremely easy to learn how to use. There's tons of different apps you can use. There's some cool add ons to the camera. I just started to use a gimbal the other day. That's a sweet thing that allows you to create even better video experiences with your phone, iPhone in my case. And I was like, dave Gearhart is talking about all about this brand and marketing and giving ideas out. But there wasn't someone at Drift talking about conversational marketing and Drift specifically and conversational sales. Three things. I'm like, man, I bet we can do that as well. Using this approach of homemade video, getting people's attention and adding value in their LinkedIn feed helps with the brand, helps with community building, helps with the content piece, helps with a ton of different things. Because at some point we're going to reuse all that content and we do this in some ways today, but we're going to do it in a much better way down the road. Reuse all that content for many different purposes. So for us it's like, again, long term, you as a marketer cannot think short term. Like, if you think short term, you're going to miss so many opportunities. You got to think long term. Like, what am I doing right now? How is that going to play into this thing that I could do six months from now? Or you have to think about, all right, I did all these things over the last six months. How can I reuse those things in new ways, reposition them, maybe update them a little bit, repackage them, et cetera, to do something now in the next six months. So I think for us it's all about again, the brand piece number one, being real and authentic. Those videos are just real and authentic. I mean, it is like, it takes me no time.

How much prep do you guys do before you do one?

Five minutes of just talking? It's five, maybe ten minutes of like, hey, discussing what we're going to talk about and how we're going to do it. It's nothing. It takes from end to end. It's like 20 to 30 minutes for that entire video. Because, you know, the Wistia takes a little bit time to upload. You got to get the descriptions. I sometimes have to, you know, edit the transcription. Sometimes I don't do the best job editing whatever again. But again, that makes it more real and authentic. I think it's not perfect, it's whatever. Right, exactly. So I don't know, I think it's awesome. I think anyone can do that. I think anyone, you know should be doing it. And now with Drift Video, with this amazing free Drift video product, you can now start a conversation with with someone who's watching that video. It could be a one to many video or it could be a specific video that you personally made for a person. That's like a one to one video that you share with that person and you can start a conversation with them, or they could start a conversation with you, the person who sent that video right inside of that video experience. Which is fantastic. Right? It goes back to the point we made at the beginning of this conversation. To really help someone these days, you need both great content, you need a great brand, you need to be authentic and real. I keep using those words, but they're so important. And you need to start conversations and have conversations with your buyers and customers because at the end of the day that's what matters to them. If they need help understanding why they should buy something, how it's going to help them, what outcomes they can expect. And it could be a one minute conversation with over live chat, it could be a five minute conversation, it could be a conversation over a 20, 30 minute meeting, Zoom in person, whatever. But for the most part, unless you're an E Comm business, everything you do is going to involve a conversation in terms of trying to sell something or you know, help your customers. So why not be at the ready to have those conversations?

Yeah, I love the way that you guys and other companies for that matter have been using video to help bring that authenticity to life. Because, you know, writing out a piece of content has a great effect and you can be found through search through that and that's great, but it doesn't allow you to see that person experience who they are and kind of connect with them in a deeper way and foster that relationship. Video just provides that in such a different and unique platform that I've seen that we at New Breed have seen a lot of value from and a lot of our customers have started to see value from too. One of the other things I really like about the social videos that you've started using is you don't need somebody to leave LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. They're watching it in order to get value from the video that you're producing. Right. Like the way that a lot of companies think about social media today is we're gonna publish this blog post on our website and then post it on LinkedIn and then hope that they click on that link and go back to our website and. And that's not necessarily what Those social tools are intended to do either. Like LinkedIn wants you to stay on LinkedIn, Twitter wants you to stay on Twitter. They don't want you to leave and go back to some other company's website. So what you're doing through those videos is providing something that someone can consume in its entirety and learn from without ever having to go anywhere else, while providing that authenticity and making it real and helping them, which is so cool.

It's very true, it's very smart. And it's about brand and community building. That's what that stuff is. But it's also content building too, because if you actually, I'm going to do a video about this today, Guido. The day we are recording this podcast, I'm going to do a video on LinkedIn saying, hey, by the way, if you can't find all the videos I've done over the last six months, guess what? We built video vaults. We have a conversational marketing video vault. You can see the 40 videos that we did about conversational marketing all in this video vault. And there it is. So, like, again, repurposing the content.

Exactly. Yeah. I love that. I can't remember exactly when this was, but maybe a month or so ago, I was looking for one of the specific videos that you and Sarah did on the three types of Playbooks that every company should be running. I can't remember what all of them were off the top of my head. I know one of them was the second Net Playbook, but I was scrolling through all of the posts that you guys had done on LinkedIn to try to find it, and I was struggling and I was like, why can't I just see this on their website? So it's great that you guys are going to have that there soon.

Exactly.

So one of the things that I want to go back to is talking about the fact that you're building all these communities and how you actually go about measuring the success of that. I mean, we talked about the outcomes that you want to see from it, but what are some of the micro and macro goals that you can look to as a company to be able to see whether or not what we're trying to do in building this community is actually proving to be successful.

So you got to capture the people participating. I call them members, and then some of those members, depending on how your marketing and sales funnel set up, will be contacts, leads, qualified leads, qualified accounts. That's number one.

Right?

That's kind of like the, you know, getting to the middle part of your funnel. The top is like total number of members, total number of traffic, all those other metrics. Then you really have to look at how are you able to monetize these community members. Again, this is the side where it's about demand gen and customer acquisition. We were able to monetize and we're doing this at Drift now too, a ton of our members into paying customers. Because again, you're adding value. You're helping your sales team educate the buyer in a very scalable yet authentic personal way. Because that's how you create your content. At least that's how you should be creating your content. And you do it in a personal way with some homemade, some highly produced, you have a mix of both. And then when they go to the sales team, some of those buyers, not everyone, because not everyone's going to engage, but some of those buyers are going to be so bought in, so excited, it's gonna be easier for your sales team. They will probably buy more. I looked at data, you know, in my past job, haven't done this quite yet at Drift, but we will around average sales price for people that are, you know, they consume. Have they participated in the community? In what ways do they participate in the community? Right. And the deal sizes were higher. So there is a ton of things you can look at on the data side. You just have to make sure you set up the right forms of measurement. And that is one of the biggest things I see. Companies and businesses fail when they think about community and content. They don't have the right way to track it through Salesforce or HubSpot or Marketo or whatever tools you're using. And that is a huge mistake.

Yeah, the tracking piece is always tricky, but if you can nail that down, that piece of information that you were just mentioning about the average deal size, being able to compare what the average deal size is within people who are members of the community versus those who have or not is huge. The other things that we've taken a look at to compare stuff like that too is our win rates and our sales cycle. For any experiments that we're running to see are we having an impact there or not. Sales cycle is always an interesting one in my opinion because there's a chance sometimes that your sales cycle being longer can actually be a good thing because people get more bought in, have a better understanding of what they're getting before they decide to purchase. But anyway, the tracking piece of that is always difficult. And one of the things that we try to do is like almost measurement over everything. If we feel like we can't track it. Sometimes we have a really hard time deciding to do it. But I love that approach and it's really cool to hear you say that. Last question that I wanted to ask you and I think I have a good sense of what the answer is going to be to this based on the conversation so far. But what's your favorite part about what you do?

People. Just helping people. I mean it comes down to that. It's that easy. Like I mean, you know, leading people, you know, at drift, helping people learn about conversational marketing, helping people understand how to use drift to grow their business, to start more conversations, to have more conversations. I'm a very, very people centric person and you know, if I can have a contribution in helping someone get to an outcome, get to a better place to, you know, you can get really deep here but like to just to grow themselves, to get a promotion, to get a foot in the door of a new job, to change careers, to grow in the job they're doing now, it's all about people for me.

That's awesome. Love it. Well, Mark, I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for joining today. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for our other great resources. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.

Sa.