The What, Why, and How of Customer Communities with Venafi Head of Community Holly Firestone
Holly Firestone, who built communities at Atlassian and Salesforce, shares what moves the needle: one community she managed cut support costs by $24M a year, doubled pipeline, and got 83% of forum questions answered by peers. She breaks down incentives that work, where to place community in your org, and why you need a dedicated person running it.
Questions this video answers
2× more pipeline and 2× larger deals.
33% higher product adoption and 3× lower attrition.
4,000 questions answered; 83% answered by other community members.
$2 million per month (≈ $24 million per year).
93% discovered new products/solutions; 81% increased productivity; 82% increased ROI.
Chapters
Little bit about me so you know that I'm not making all of this up as we go along. I've built communities for about a decade now, you know, focused on B2B communities at a couple really large companies with really large communities like Atlassian and Salesforce. And now I'm at Benefi, building community from scratch. So what is community? A group of individuals connected through a network of platforms, programs and resources. Platforms, programs and resources give customers the power to build together, support one another, contribute to business goals and find their paths to success alongside other customers. So again, this is really focused on B2B communities. It's about customers connecting to each other over a shared set of interests and values. And your business is the glue that sticks them together. So you think about an audience and that's you out to your audience of customers. And a community is your customers talking and speaking to each other versus just, you know, the one way channel from you out to them. Community really impacts everything in a business. So you can see I'm not going to read all of these off to you, but different areas of the business are touched by community in different ways. You can kind of look at community as the hub and then it spokes out to all of these different organizations within your company. And it's more than just this. I mean, everybody can benefit from community in one way or another. When I was at Atlassian, even the person that was working at the front desk, we'd encourage them to go to user groups just to see what they were a part of and to meet the customers a little bit more, you know, get to know them a little bit more. So there's impact for everybody when you think about building out a customer community. So I borrowed these numbers from a community that I used to manage, a very large one. And so just so you can get a little sample of some of the things that community can do in terms of ROI for your business. The people that were in the community, there was two times more pipe, two times bigger deals, 33% higher product adoption and three times lower attrition. Then in support we had a forum and there were 4,000 questions that were answered in there. 83% were answered by other people in the community. So we had one support person whose part time job it was to kind of rove the forums and answer any questions that went unanswered. And then we kind of came up with an algorithm that helped us figure out exactly how to measure support deflection. And it was $2 million a year. Sorry, $2 million a month, $24 million a year. And then looking at customer success, we actually surveyed a bunch of people in the community. We got a few thousand responses. 93% said they discovered new products and solutions from the community and that includes from the ecosystem. 81% said it increased their productivity and 82% said it increased their ROI. So we saw lots of amazing feedback from the customers about what the community was doing for them as well. Thinking about how you incentivize people to participate in community once you get them there, which is no easy feat. It's not if you build it, they will come situation, you really have to work at recruiting and marketing people into your community. Once you get them there and they start doing some light engagement, then you have to think about what will incentivize them to engage at an even higher level. So I came up with this framework about all of the things that you can look at when trying to do this. The first is ownership. So making them feel like they're partners with you in the community and they own a piece of the community. And then kind of around these, I've got examples of how. And then public recognition is a status. So badging titles, things like that they can be really proud of and put on their Resume or their LinkedIn networking. So taking all of these top contributors and putting them in a group together is really valuable for them. Access is another one. So thinking about how you can get the people in your community access to the decision makers at your company product managers is like a really popular one. And one of the first ones that comes to mind is giving them access to the product roadmap early, letting them have some feedback on that roadmap. And then you're getting really great insight from what the people in your customer base want or in your community want. And they usually are talking to a bunch of people in the community so they can really represent the voice of your customers. The only thing I'll add here is that if you ask for feedback, use it. And if you can't use it, go back and explain why. And they will be your fiercest advocates when you make really big changes to your products out to the rest of the community. And then last is perks, probably the least important. But thinking about things like swag, but also things that benefit that are mutually beneficial. So if you have paid training and certification program, then giving them access to that for free helps them elevate themselves professionally. But then it also they'll take it and they'll bring it back into the community. Everything they've learned. So again, this is for thinking about how people contribute at really high levels in the community. Community. There's a lot more to it, but kind of blowing through it because I want to make sure that everybody has time to have some questions and discussion. The bottom layer of all of this is intrinsic motivation. So people have to want to give back as a start for all of this. You can't just throw badges and swag at people and expect that they're going to give back in an authentic way. So I'll go back to the forums example. You can have someone that's just rapidly answering questions just to get some kind of status, but it's not necessarily adding value to the community as much as someone who will go to your forum and, you know, really thoughtfully answer questions. Probably a lot less than the other person, but it offers a lot more value. So intrinsic motivation is a really important piece of this. It's not something that you can give to them or that you can create, but you can definitely influence it by bringing your company's values into the community and having people connect to your community in a really authentic way. The next thing that I'll just add is if you haven't started a community yet, building from scratch is a bit tricky. And you know, hiring a community professional is really, really important. Somebody that has some experience, that knows a lot of the ins and outs of it. I've definitely seen where someone gets. Someone in marketing will get community added onto their plate and it's not as successful. So for me, being a community professional, you know, it's really important, you know, to get this word out because we want everybody's communities to be successful. We want people to see what the value is that building a community can bring. So I just, I can't stress this one enough, is that finding somebody that's got community experience, especially if you're building from scratch, is really important and kind of goes back to. You wouldn't hire someone without technical experience to be a software engineer at your company. And same thing goes for community. And the reason I say that is because the way that a lot of us look at community is it's just like building a product. And you want an expert building your product. So thinking about research, development, feedback loops, testing bugs, feature development, documentation and marketing, the community are all different pieces, just like a product. And that's online community, offline community. I mean, just everything that has to do with the community that you're building. And then the last thing is just kind of thinking about building your community. Team. Again, I will not read all of these to you, but there's a lot of different roles that you think about as your community is maturing. Obviously you start with a community strategist or community manager, but then it kind of expands out. When I was at Salesforce, I was managing a team of seven and we had people in different roles. So, you know, a couple people that really focused on operations, community managers that focused on product engagement and content. So it really depends on your needs, how you want to structure your team. But these are some roles that live in the community world and that's it. So I don't have any questions in the Q and A and I went through that very fast. So I'd love if y' all have questions if anybody wants to kick off with those, either asking them in the zoom or in the chat.
Yeah.
No question.
I have a question. Hi Holly. Thanks for this. This was jam packed in a short amount of time and appreciate it. So in terms of getting off the ground and you know, you mentioned bringing in a, you know, a strategist, but which part? And you mentioned all the different organizations that play in the community space. Which part of the organization should lead this?
It's really tricky. If I and probably most community professionals had our choice, we would hire chief community officers everywhere. We're starting to see that pick up in a lot of different places because it really does need to serve the whole company. Right now I report to our cmo. So a lot of times it will sit in marketing. At Salesforce, we were in the training and education org. At Atlassian, it was also marketing. So I think you'll see a lot of times it'll sit in marketing, but then you look at the $24 million a year in support deflection. And so we have to be working also with the support team or you think about attrition, we have to be working with the customer success team. So I think we'll see a lot of the leadership and community start to uplevel a lot more. We definitely have already been seeing VPs of community and senior directors of community. Ideally though, if I could pick, it would be a chief community officer and it would have everything to do with what the customer's experience is like, what they're touching and how we bring them together to support each other. All right, so we've got some stuff going on in the chat. If you're just started off and can't hire a professional, where do you start? That's a tricky question. So if you are just getting Started. It depends if you have an audience already or not. So if you have an audience that you're already engaging with, they're coming to your events, then that makes things a little bit easier and you can start asking them, the people that you have really good relationships with, go to them and say, hey, we're thinking about building a community. What's the most important to you? And also ask some things around that because they may not really know what a community is. So figure out what their pain points are in their everyday day to day jobs and then you can kind of build the community. Think about building the community around that and then that'll kind of help inform where you start too. So if they just need tons of support during the day, then maybe a Q and A forum is the best way to go. But if they're trying to learn new and innovative ways to do things, then maybe you go in the direction of user groups because that's a little bit more kind of like this in a discussion format. So I would start talking to your customers and really understanding what their pain points are and what their needs are and that will move you in the right direction. The next question is what type of newer community platforms have you seen lately? So many. So because everybody is now distributed and working from home, community is the big buzzword. I feel like of 2020, we're seeing VCs talking about it way more than we ever have. We're seeing companies rushing to build communities because it was not a priority necessarily in the past. So it's become really big and there are platforms popping up everywhere. I mean, I can't even keep track of all of the things that are coming out. So in terms of platforms, there's tons and it just kind of depends on what you want to do. So if you're thinking about user groups and distributed control, then it's bevy. If you're thinking about events, then you've got something like splash. If you're thinking about an actual, you know, community platform with forums and all of those things, there's so many. And there's a new product that just came out that aggregates all the data from all of these different platforms, which is another amazing piece because community continuously, you have to prove your ROI because it is so new to so many companies. So I don't have a great answer for you on that one because there's so, so many. But comsor that company that I just mentioned, they did put out an infographic that has every single community platform listed on it for every single Use case so highly recommend looking that up. It's a great resource if you want to see kind of the scope of everything. All right, next question. Can you highlight the delineation between marketing growth teams and community teams? Where do you draw the line between those functions? So community, like I said, is the hub, and it spokes out to all of these different teams. So your community goals aren't going to align perfectly with your marketing goals, because marketing goals, you're thinking about top of the funnel. How are you bringing in new prospects? Community is thinking about, well, to start, community is thinking about your current customers. It doesn't mean that community can't play a role with your prospects as well. It's really amazing to say, hey, you buy our product, you get this. This amazing resource that comes with it, and thinking about, like, warm prospects and, you know, how you can get them into your community. But anyway, the community serves a lot of goals for the marketing team, but it also serves goals for the product team. It also serves goals, the support team. So they're just different in terms of the goals and outcomes that you're looking for and the, you know, the roi. All right, Are there certain industries using the community model more than others? To be completely honest, I'm seeing it pop up everywhere. I spoke at a different conference a few days ago. We're talking about mental health communities. And so I think there's community for almost everything you can think of from, you know, different nonprofits, political communities. But, you know, from my experience, I've been pretty focused on B2B in tech. I did start my community career at a nonprofit, and there's a ton of different concepts that overlap in terms of building community. But, yeah, I mean, I think it's. It's everywhere right now, and it's just going to keep growing, especially again with this distributed model that everybody is in right now looking for authentic human connection. It's definitely interesting for that to be virtual, but community can bring some of that together. All right, is there a way to start a community in a lean way? If yes, what would you start with? Definitely get this question a lot. I think that it's a bit tricky because you'll see a lot of resources invested in something like marketing. But when it really comes down to it and you invest in community, you're going to see huge, huge roi, especially if you're looking at it at the cost per member of the community. And then you saw the numbers that I just shared. It's very effective in terms of doing things at scale. So I Struggle a little bit with doing it in a lean way because the ROI is so great. But I think in just trying to get people together, a lot of people start with Slack and it becomes very unruly the larger your community is, because you can't really search the way that you want to and find, you know, historical data. You can't pull the analytics, you know, on topics or things that your community is discussing. So it's very lightweight for the very beginning of a very small community. Or if you're trying to build an audience from scratch, then I would suggest something like that. But then once you start really building and once it starts growing, it's time to really, really make the case for investment in a platform and somebody to lead the community. Okay, take a sip. All right. Hello, Chris. Perfect. From concept and perspective, I'd be keen to hear how venafi's leadership think about community, how central is growth and development. So Venify. I left Salesforce to go to Venafi, and one of the things I talk about a lot is authentic community intentions. So going to a new company, there's a lot of questions that I ask to make sure that they're building community in an authentic way. It's really interesting when you go to a company and you're like, I want community and I want it now, and I expect it to be thriving in three months. That's pretty impossible, actually. You're not going to see a huge return for community for at least the first four to six months, if not longer, depending on your community, because it takes a while just to build it, to get conversations started. And so really, you're focused on all of the health of the community and the growth of the community for a while. And then you can start. As soon as you're in a good, healthy place and a mature place with your community, you can start thinking about ROI and business metrics. So it doesn't totally answer my question about leadership Eventify, but they're very thoughtful about that. You know, there's not. We really kicked off the community in May, and it's not like every day I'm like, getting, you know, why aren't there 100 people actively talking to each other? 200 people. It's really. They're really thoughtful about that. A great example I'll use is that we were figuring out budget tied to goals with our cfo, and, you know, I'm in the marketing Org, so everything kind of fits into this perfect marketing package except for community. And I wasn't necessarily included or tied to any of those goals. And so I asked, you know what, where I need to get some more resources. So where, how do you want to define my goals? And said, well, you define your goals and we'll just go with that. And that is a perfect situation because if you don't really understand community or how fast it should be growing or what you can be looking at in the beginning, it's very tough to create goals around that. So that's a dream situation. My manager is incredible. She just gets it. There are a lot of concepts that people have a hard time kind of grasping onto. And she definitely understands that it does take a while to build community and the conversations that are happening there are really valuable, even if it's not a million people right off the bat. So a lot of support from leadership and that makes a huge difference because that hasn't always been the case for me in places that I've worked. So it's, you know, it makes a huge difference. And they hired me without a community, really, really wanting one. So I think that that's another piece of it is that they knew they wanted community from the start. It didn't just kind of get added onto someone's plate, you know, as part of their role. All right, what's more important to different communities in different verticals? I think with that one it really, there's, like I said, so many principles of community that completely overlap with each other. You know, an analogy that I've used before is that if you're making cookies, you put your base is the same, but then you can cover them in sprinkles or you can cover them in M&MS. Or, you know, it's kind of like that concept. So you really have the same base across everything. People engage, engagement patterns are really the same. But then you can add stuff like really valuable content or segmentation of different audiences that makes it, you know, the sprinkles on top and really valuable for those different verticals. Okay, can you elaborate more on goals for the community? What kind of goals make sense at the very beginning? So I had a bunch of goals around the things that I just shared with you in terms of the stats. But at the very beginning is thinking about growth in the beginning, engagement. So looking at how you're recruiting people into the community. So community marketing and what's working. So, you know, we do a campaign that we're sending an email or we do a pop up in the product. So looking at what is driving people into the community is a big metric to start looking at, because then you're going to really put a lot of resources towards what you know is working, which will drive people in the community. So increase in membership, increase in engagement. You can think about different types of engagement. So are they sending messages to each other? Are they actively answering each other's questions? What kind of posts are they engaging with most? So the content, you have to have a content strategy pretty much right from the beginning as well. And so what kind of content are they engaging with the most? And then satisfaction scores too. So satisfaction scores for the community and then tying it back to NPS as well is really helpful. So now we know, we just sent out our NPS survey and we'll be able to look and see, okay, who in there is in the community, who's not in the community and better understand what they're looking for and how we can make the community better based on their pain points. So that kind of is a roundabout way to answer that question because there's a bunch of different metrics that you can look at depending on what you're trying to do. But really in the beginning you're focused on how you get people into the community and then how are they engaging in the community so that you can iterate and make it as valuable as possible, which will draw even more people in and then keep them there. Okay, how are we on time? Okay, I'm sure Tammy will let me know when I'm right at the end. See we have time for a few more questions. Okay, apart from the companies you worked for, do you have some great examples of B2B SaaS, companies who run a public community? In terms of public, I might not know, but I do know some good B2B communities. So Twilio, I gotta think about these off the top of my head. Twilio, Google has a great developer community. What else? I'll have to think about that one a little bit. I know there's a million, but just think of them off the top of my head. Slack. Slack is an amazing developer community. Yeah, I'll have to think about those a little more because I can't think of them right off the top of my head. So I'll try to come back to that. What are your thoughts on the concept of a community led product? I am not totally sure what you mean by that. So if you maybe want to give me a little bit more detail. And then the next thing says Atlassian with a question mark. So I'm not sure if that's going back. Oh, for B2B SAS communities. Yes, that's a great one but I'm a little biased because I built that one. So yes, it's really great and they've grown massively too, which is really amazing to see. Gainsight. Yep. Yeah, Gainsight Vanilla forums. But that's a community product, so they better have a good community. Comsoar and other community products, but they have a really good community. Yeah, I have to keep thinking on that one, but I'd love to go back to the question about thoughts on the concept of a community led product. So Corey, if you want to expand on that, happy to answer that one and then I think that's it for now. So I just need to sit and MULLOVER these other B2B communities that aren't coming to me. And if anybody that is in the community, professional community, it's very meta is watching this or sees it later and I forgot to mention their community, I apologize in advance because there are some really, really great ones out. Any other questions that you all have or expansion on a question before? Let's see. Mix panels. A nice one. I'm not familiar with that one, but that reminds me that Envision has a really nice community as well.
Hi Holly, can you hear me?
Yes.
Yeah. So do you prefer initiating the community on subdomain or new domain by giving the brand flavor to it?
Oh, I definitely think it should be a part of your current domain. You know, thinking about recruiting and getting people into the community. You want that to be, you know, tightly. Is tightly connected to your brand.
I think. Yeah, I think we can start with that. Yeah. And then if you want to go bigger, then we can go for the dedicated other domain. Yeah, makes sense. Thanks.
Especially you know, some, some companies will build a community strictly for them and their product, but then some companies will like Square is a great example that they are a community for all small business merchants. So they're not domain because they're open to anybody, not just their customers. So there's opportunities like that.
Yeah, yeah. In the mentioned domains which you mentioned few minutes back. So even they are mentioning they are maintaining the subdomain as well as the dedicated domain for the community.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yep, yep, thanks. Good.
Anybody else maybe even comments or if you have a community. We have three minutes left. So does anybody have a community right now?
Holly, one more query when your community becomes complaint box. How to deal with it. So is it something. Any precautions to avoid that scenario?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of things, a lot of executives, not a lot, but sometimes Executives will say, you need to delete these comments. You need to shut down any complaints that are going on in there. And the response is always, do you want them to take it to Twitter instead? It's managed very tightly when it's in your community. But going back to what I said about bringing in your top contributors and letting them give feedback and then closing the loop with them to let them know why you did or didn't do something in the product, they will be advocates for you in the community. So building out that advocacy is going to be really important, because if people start complaining, they can come in and say, actually, from my perspective as a customer, this is why they did this. And it makes a lot of sense because X, Y, and Z. And I've definitely seen that happen before. So I think that is a really important part. And I kind of go back to the ownership piece as well. As soon as they feel ownership over the community, it feels like part of something that they have contributed to in a big way and that they have a piece of, and they're a partner, they will also be really big advocates for you.
Yep. Makes sense. Thanks.
All right. Probably have time for one more question, if I can answer very quick, which is always a struggle for me, but I will. Any other questions? Okay. All right, I think that's it. We're right at time. Thank you so much, Holly. So wonderful that you joined us. These slides will be recorded and shared live as well. So thank you so much for joining us today, and have a fantastic afternoon. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you, Holly.
Thanks.
Bye.
