Enterprise Communities: The What, Who, Why, When & How | @VenafiCo Head of Community Holly Firestone

A little bit about me. I've been a community builder for about 10 years now. I've dedicated my whole career to being a community professional and done a lot with SaaS companies as well. I was at Atlassian and built the Atlassian User Group program, moved to Salesforce and I was running the Trailblazer community there, which is MVP programs, user group, program, online community, and then now I'm at Venify. We are a secur company that focuses on machine identity management, building a community there from scratch, which is really exciting to get back to my roots. And then also I've hired and led community teams focused on community management and community ops. I'll talk about that a tiny bit. So really experience, experience runs the gamut there and I'm really excited to share some of that knowledge with you today. Start with the what? You're here probably because you've heard something about community or you know community, or maybe you know nothing about community. So what? What the hell is it? A lot of people define community in a completely different way. This is how I define it, especially for an enterprise company, a SaaS company, and that's a group of individuals connected through a network of platforms, programs, resources and a shared set of values. These give your audience the power to build together, support one another, contribute to business goals, and find their paths to success alongside other members. Your community. Don't say I didn't warn you that I got completely carried away with the GIFs, but this actually has a purpose because I think this is very representative of a buzzing, thriving community. You've got lots of different characters and audiences and they're all getting what they want to out of the community. Some are getting help from each other, some are networking, some are making connections. Everybody kind of does their own thing and gets the value out of it and finds their purpose in the community. And you won't get everybody to do the same thing, and you definitely won't get everyone to do same thing at the same time. But that's okay. That's what this is all about. Community is your people connecting to each other over a shared set of interests and values. And your company is the glue that sticks them together. I cannot stress how important this is. Community is not an opportunity for you to build your connection or your channel with your customers or audiences. It's really about them connecting to one another. That's where they're going to see the value and that's where you'll get the most value out of it, too. It would just be another marketing channel otherwise so really, really important to make sure that this is what you're focused on. All right, the who anybody can really be a part of your community. Think about all of your audiences. In the previous slides, I kept using words like people and audiences and not customers because obviously a lot of people gravitate to customers first. But you have a lot of options when it comes to audiences in your community. Think about partners or developers that are building on your platform. Thought leaders in your kind of runs the gamut there. It's really anybody who cares about the work that you're doing, they're invested in the work you're doing and the problems that you're trying to solve. Now, would I say build for every single one of your audiences right off the bat? Absolutely not. That's a terrible idea. You need to prioritize the audiences that you want to work with. But it can really include everybody. And it's a good idea to include everybody because bringing your audiences together brings a lot of value to everybody in those audiences. You can definitely create different experiences, very specific experiences for those different audiences. But it's really great to also have a space where everybody can connect partners, talking to customers or talking to developers because they're all connected around your business. I'm going to try not to spend a ton of time on the why, even though obviously I'm very passionate about why community is important. I'm going to stick to the facts here. Actually have a sip of water. So you can see there's ROI across your whole business. It touches every part of your business. You can see all of the different teams here in your organization and ways that they see value from community. Because of that, you have to be very thoughtful about where you put community in your organization. For me at Venify, I report directly to our CEO and that gives me the flexibility to to build our community focus and our community goals tied to our top level business goals. I think about the things we're trying to achieve as a business, the pain points that we're trying to solve, and being able to leverage the community for those different pieces is extremely important. And so if you put community in something like support or marketing, of course your goals are gonna be more focused on those different teams because you're in the support team, so you're focused on the things related to that or the marketing team. But if you're top level goals, you really can bring the power of community up to what your company is focused on. And that doesn't mean you don't see value across the board. For all of these things. But you get to prioritize your time and resources on the things that are going to matter most to the business. I want to dig into some numbers for a little bit. I've shared these before, different saster event, but I don't think I can share them enough because they're pretty incredible. This is from a community that I used to lead. So driving growth in ROI, we saw for members of the community two times more pipeline, two times bigger deals, 33% higher product adoption, and three times lower attrition. Then when it comes to support costs, there were 4,000 questions that were answered in the community, like in a community forum. 83% of those were answered by other members of the community. And we calculated that that was $2 million a month in support savings. And, you know, obviously for a community just starting or community, this is not going to be what you see. This is for a huge community, but it is something to strive towards. And so you can really see the impact here that the community had on our business. And then, of course, amplifying success for your audiences, whoever your audiences are. So we surveyed the members of our community and 93% said they discovered new products and solutions in the community. 81% said they saw higher productivity in themselves because they were part of the community. And then 82% saw an increase in their ROI. They bought our product, and the community helped increase that return for them. Community is an integral part of your business strategy. It's no longer a nice to have. It is a must have. I'll leave it at that. I just need an explanation. All right. The win. I think you knew that I was probably going to go in this direction for the win. But it is time to do this now. It's table sticks at this point, even if you are a small business, you're just starting out, you don't have to launch this huge community. You can start small. And that is actually the way I would recommend that you start. So think about ways and opportunities that you can connect your audiences to each other in a meaningful way, even if it's just a few people to start. And then you can start building with them. Get their feedback on what you're building into the community because they. Because it's for them. Right? So they'll be able to, you know, participate in that. And when they do that, they will feel such a sense of ownership over that community that they will be your fiercest advocates in the community. And they will be the people that are engaging and recruiting people into the community. Because of that sense of ownership. So start building right now, even if it's small, even if you're, you know, not even launched yet, There's a lot of opportunity there. Community is not going anywhere, y'. All. It's been around for a long time, but now that we have proven quantifiable long term success with community, tons of companies are just so excited about it. Can't get it fast enough. Because you can see the examples out in the world of where community has been really impactful for business. When I started 10 years ago, those success metrics didn't really exist and now they do. Everybody sees the value, A lot of people see the value. So they're pushing forward with community. And then the pandemic came along also. And so all of these events that weren't happening, what were you going to do? There still need to be a way for your customers or your audiences to connect with each other. And that's where community came in, in a big way. Also, the community industry is booming now. We're seeing way more community products being built than I've ever seen and way more opportunities, job opportunities for people in the community field. With that being said, community hiring is extremely competitive right now. I probably get five to 10 recruiters that reach out to me every month and I don't see any. I don't think it's going to slow down the how. So I can't totally dig into the how because there's a lot that goes into building a community. I've been doing it for 10 years and I still learn something new every day. But I will give you some tips for building a successful community. The first one is to hire an experienced community professional. I've seen so many businesses that make the mistake of just kind of adding community to somebody's already full plate or hiring or promoting an executive that has zero community experience. That is, it's very tricky because it will slow you down, but also puts you at risk because there are a lot of parts of community that people need to know how to react to. And without expertise, it's just a bit of a more tricky situation. Thinking about that, if you are going to hire a head of engineering, would you hire someone that didn't have any technical expertise? No. Same goes for community. That expertise is extremely, extremely valuable. Now, I'm saying this right after I just went through a slide of saying it's very hard to hire for community right now. One of the things that makes it very hard to hire for community is that a lot of recruiters and hiring managers really know how to form the roles or write the job descriptions. And so it's become a little bit tricky. I always see some really interesting job descriptions for community roles. And because I'm me, I always write back to the recruiter and I'm like, yeah, you know why this is wrong. So anyway, they love me, I'm sure, but, you know, there's some options there. One thing that I would recommend doing is bringing in a community consultant. There are some amazing community strategists that have their own consultancies now because the business is booming. So bringing in someone like that and with that expertise can help you better mold what the role is going to look like. Craft the job description, brief your recruiters, or you can even have them sit in on your interview panel. I actually did that. I volunteered for Pledge 1% foundation when they were building out their community and hiring someone to lead it. Since they didn't have community expertise on their team, I was able to help with the job description and join for their interview panel. And it was great for me and I think that it was really helpful for them as well. The other piece of this is that it's very hard to hire for senior community managers. There aren't senior community professionals. There aren't a ton of people that have been doing this a really long time. So what I would recommend, if you can't find someone super senior, look for someone that has, you know, four or five years of experience, bring in a community consultant. And the community consultant can really build and, you know, build and drive the strategy and work with your hire who's going to execute on that strategy and they can work on milestones together. It's a great opportunity for whoever you hire because they're getting, you know, this built in career growth and this built in learning. And then, you know, community consultant can really, you know, make sure that they're checking all the boxes along the way. So I think that's a really good option right now since it's a little bit hard to come by and there's some great community consultants out there. Community is an investment. And I know, you know, if you are leading a team or leading a business, everybody is always asking for headcount and money. But here I am saying you need headcount money for a successful community. You know, I'm not saying that when you first start community, you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars because that is absolutely not true and a waste. But, you know, as your community grows, you're going to have to keep Adding to that investment. And you have to think about time and you have to think about headcount and you have to think about budget. You know, it's not free. It certainly seems like it may be expensive. But once you start seeing the success metrics come back from the community, you realize that it's actually very inexpensive for what you're getting in return. So a great example is like the $2 million in support tickets. That's amazing. A month or when I was at Salesforce, I ran the user group program and we had 500 meetups that were happening every month all around the world. Think for a second about how much money it would cost you or what you would have to do as a business to be able to have 500 events all around the world every single month. So it does seem expensive. Community platforms are expensive. You know, hiring community professionals. You know, you need to do all of this, but you are investing in the future success of your community. The other thing is something that I touched on, which is aligning your community goals with your top level goals. I think that's very important for you to see the best and most diverse success from community. Before you can even get there though, I look at goals in like two different buckets. First bucket is community health and that is growth, engagement, community sentiment, all of these things around. Is your community healthy? Is your community growing and thriving? And then the other bucket is the business goals. You can't even start to focus on the business goals until you've really focused in this area on the health goals. And it takes some time. You know, you really have to build this foundation before you can look at business goals. And now as your community is building and growing, you might see some business, you know, roi, but that's not really where you want to focus. It's got to be over here or you're not really setting yourself up for success. Before you can get people to engage in the ways that bring you value, you have to get them to want to engage and get there in the first place. So very important. And then the next one is getting everybody on board. Your exec team needs to understand what community is and they need to be able to speak about community. Because building a community and running a community, it requires participation and it requires support from everybody at your company. And so making sure that they really understand it and that they're prioritizing it. Every team should have a goal that's shared with community across the board on the exec team, because there's other teams that you don't Even think about that. You really need to work with to build a community like accounting or legal. And they have to be putting that in their top level goals so they're resourced appropriately for it. They know it's coming and they're planning for it too. Because what I've seen in the past is when those goals aren't prioritized or there's not exec level leadership support, all the community stuff always gets pushed to the back burner. Because if I'm on a marketing team and I've got these six things I have to do and then, oh, I help out with the community, I've got to focus on what my goals are set for. So it's very important that everybody's on the same page with that so you can get the support that you need across the business. Trust is really everything in a community and building that trust is hard. And then if you lose that trust, it is very hard to earn that trust back. So really be thoughtful about that as you're building your community. Part of that is your tone with the community. Have a more casual tone than you do in all of your business communications. These are your people. You can be authentic with them. You can admit when you all make a mistake or you need to fix something. As long as you are open and honest and authentic with them, they will always advocate for you. They will hear you out and they will be your cheerleaders on the side too. Definitely keep this in mind because it's one of the most important things that you can do. When I say that you could lose trust from your community. I think an example is that it's not like you're running a marketing campaign. It doesn't work. So you pull back. You can't really just throw stuff out in the community and then pull it back because people either invest their time and whatever you've thrown out there or they run into issues with it. You have to be really, really thoughtful about that. It takes planning and being careful and time. Once again, in the beginning you have to expect to give a lot more than you get. The beginning stages of building a community are very high touch. Not everything is scalable in the beginning, but that's really important because that's where you build your trust with your community. So you have to expect that you are going to give a lot and it is going to take a while, but it will be worth it. You have to prove that there is value for the members of your community to be there and so give their time to your community before you'll really start seeing them, you know, ramp up what they're doing in your community and giving back. Real quick on these. Build with authentic intentions. Please do not build a community so you can sell or market at the people in your community. Like I said, you need to offer real value or people are just, they're gonna bow out. They have no interest in that. Next is folding your company values and culture into your community. Community is really important. The foundation of any successful community is going to be intrinsic motivation. People that care about connecting, people that care about giving back. And the best way to influence that. Obviously you can't create that, but you can influence it by bringing your company's values and culture into your community. Because that's what's going to bring people together, is a shared set of values. When people are exemplifying those values in the community, call them out, reward them somehow. And it doesn't have to be swag. I have a whole other, I won't go off on this tangent, but I have a whole other framework around community incentivization. And there's a lot that you can do and most importantly, there's a lot you can do without buying them stuff that's least important to them. And then of course, the last thing is, have fun. Don't take yourself too seriously. These people are spending their, you know, their personal time in your community, helping each other out, connecting with other people and make it an enjoyable experience for them. You know, again, like, don't have to be so serious all the time. You can have a more casual tone. That's what people want. You know, they want to have fun in this space. Then make sure that the space is welcoming too. And be very purposeful about how you think about diversity and inclusion in your community. Because if you want it to be a welcoming space, then you have to be very intentional about how you build your community and how you're thinking about making it a very welcoming and inclusive community for everyone. And gifts are pretty cool. If you want to do that, that's cool too. I cannot get into this completely because we just don't have time. We definitely don't have time for that. But I just want you to have a high level view of some of the things that it takes to get a community started. It is a crazy amount of work. This goes back to resourcing it. This goes back to knowing that it's going to take some time to build. So it's pretty clear when you look at this that you need time to build it and that you need the right resources and need the right headcount. So I recommend if you really want to build a community, then you need to start with at least two people. It's really a good way to go. I mean, unless you're very small, that's not a hard and fast rule. But if you look at all of these things that have to happen, it's a little tricky to imagine them all being done by one person. And I have tried. It's tricky because if you look at the community like a product product, then you've got the same person that is the product manager, that is, that is fixing the bugs, that is supporting the product, hr, team marketing, you know, building out the content. I could go on and on and on. So really thinking about bringing in at least two people to start. One person's really focused on strategy and success metrics and then the other person is focused on executing on that strategy. There'll be crossover, of course, because when you're just building a community, everybody has to roll up their sleeves and really get in there and moderate and all of that good stuff. But that's how you really will set yourself up for success. Is really intentional and thoughtful about that. And again, this is like tip of the iceberg for what needs to happen to launch a community. And that's it. Voila. You have your community, right? No community is like planting a new garden. You need expertise, the right tools, thoughtful planning, and time for the seeds to grow before your garden will bear fruit. I'd like to say this is pretty self explanatory, but what I've heard as feedback often is that execs will say, well, if we could just, you know, can we pay more to get it out faster? You know, what can we do? I don't know if you've ever tried this, but I can't really throw a wad of money at a plant or send a cash app payment and expect the tulip is going to grow because I threw money at the bulb. Right. It's the exact same thing here. Sure, you maybe, you know, there's, there's some things that you can maybe do a little bit faster with more money, but you have to invest the time. It's not just going to magically appear. You can't spend more money to do it. You just have to be patient and let it grow and, you know, care for it as it's growing as well. These are my top takeaways. Hopefully I'm doing okay on time. These are my top takeaways. I covered all of them in the previous slides, but just want to make sure that you can kind of get a look at them. And I know they're going to share all of these decks after today. So yeah, quick look at those and then that's it. I wanted to save as much time as I could for questions, but really fast. Before we go to questions, you can follow me on Twitter. It's Holly Firestone or I share a ton of content on my blog, which is on Medium, and it's from Holly Firestone, but tons of community management content, hiring, leading teams, all that good stuff too.