Turning Connections into Conversions - Creating B2B Communities that Drive Millions in Revenue

Eric Eden:
0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Danny Howe. She is the founder of Spark, marketing and Creative. She has led community and demand generation efforts for some great B2B SaaS brands, including Mutiny, lumen5, purify and Rippling. Welcome to the show.

Dani Hao:
1:21

Thanks, Eric, Great to be here. First off, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Eric. I would say I am a B2B marketer who has worn many different hats, specifically in PR communications, all the way now to being a community builder for a lot of fast-growing startups. I think early in my career I've noticed that the traditional type of media owned media has been starting to die off a little bit and when it comes to traditional PR, I realized that a lot of people are now very untrusting of brands. They trust people. They don't really trust brands. That's how I got myself into this new career path of community building. I've built communities for a lot of fast-growing startups. I've noticed more and more folks are starting to also build communities of their own as well.

Eric Eden:
2:08

What does it mean to build a community for a company?

Dani Hao:
2:14

I think there's two ways to think about it. Community I think the fact is that a lot of people are already building communities. They just don't already know it yet. There's the own community, and then there's community in general how you are really reaching out to your prospects on social, how you are engaging with your prospects when it comes to your newsletter. That's technically part of your community already. I'm sure a lot of your listeners are already doing these tactics, but they're not actually building an own community yet. When it comes to an own community, it's having the space for your prospects, your customers, your potential prospects, to connect and figure out what are the common challenges that I might have and then being able to surface why can your brand or your product solve for those challenges and being able to provide for those resources. That's what the own community is. I've noticed people have been building these communities either on Slack or using some other tool, or sometimes they've built their own communities on LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups. I've seen all these different examples.

Eric Eden:
3:14

Okay, with that context, tell us a story about some of the marketing you've done that you're most proud of, the best marketing you've ever done.

Dani Hao:
3:24

Yes, I think this was pretty recent. We built a community for modern marketers back at Mutiny called M2. The M2 stood for modern marketers. What we found is that there was a lot of communities out there for the CMOs in the world, or VP Marketing in the world, where they were very exclusive. It was very hard to get in unless you're already at that career path. There was also a lot of communities out there for the general practitioners where, even if you were just starting off in your career, you can really get into a lot of these communities where they built it based on volume so as many people as they could.

Dani Hao:
3:57

But we found that there wasn't a lot of communities where resources are out there for the mid-career marketers. That's something that we wanted to build. But we didn't want to build it just based on volume. We wanted to build it based on the quality of conversations and the quality of content. This was a little bit controversial at the time, but we decided to make this community invite-where-referral-only where if you were part of the community and you were giving back to the community, that's when we issued you a referral code to bring in other marketers like yourself. So this way we were able to really grow it that had higher quality conversations, and also the marketers who came into community. They trusted the brand a lot more because they realized these are the folks that I can really trust to really solve the problems together and to have these open conversations in my career.

Eric Eden:
4:44

That's interesting. So how well did it go? How did it work?

Dani Hao:
4:47

Yeah. So I think there's a few. There's a few programs that we built within M2. So one was the roundtables, which were a little bit more tactical. So this is where we got very tactical about building out campaigns. How do you really build, for example, your first ABM list and then how can you target that list with your sales team? So that was something that was a little bit more on the practitioner level. But then we also had more thought leadership sessions, where we brought some of our sessions in person.

Dani Hao:
5:12

So one event that we did was called the second lover, and this was back in like early 2022, when shit started to go haywire excuse my language there in the startup world, and so we decided to bring in a few VCs from Sequoia Capital and also a few other CMOs that were leading the game on what to do.

Dani Hao:
5:30

Now that budgets are cut, now that marketers are starting to lose their jobs, now that CMOs are starting to get a lot more pressure from the board, how can you really amplify your marketing while also being able to be a little bit more cost effective? So we decided to run this event with the community being. We had a few community members actually lead the tactical sessions, and then we had a few CMOs from Salesforce, from Box, to lead some of the more leadership focus sessions and we brought all the folks together in person as well, and I think there was twofold. So one, this helped drive some of the members' engagement in person, while also doing the event at Saster in partnership with Saster. That also helped us drive new members for the community as well. So it was a nice little flywheel there. Plus, we had a few other folks that came in at that event where they were able to really capture the event and really build these bite-sized pieces of video content that was shared on social and amplified that with the partners too.

Eric Eden:
6:30

It's interesting because when you think about community, a lot of people in marketing they want to measure by numbers of connections or followers what the success of things are, and the counter debate to that always is it's not just about the number, it's about the quality of the connections and it's about the level of engagement. Right, so you really can look at it and say that person is a super networker. They're connected to 10,000 people, because maybe they don't even really have a good connection with the majority of those people. So when I think about community, I think it's a similar analogy of I want to ask how many people were in the community, but I also want to ask those other dimensions of what was the level of engagement, what was the quality of it when I think about did it work?

Dani Hao:
7:22

So I think you can think about community like a funnel, similar to the overall marketing funnel. So there's the people outside of your community. So that could be like your newsletter followers, your news that are subscribers, your followers on social, and then your community, which is your own piece of members that are already in, whether it's Slack or whatever platform that you use, and then out of that, how many are engaged. So the engagement metric is usually one thing I measure is weekly active users. Someone who just logs in but they don't do anything, I don't count that as active. But someone who actually posts something or replies to a comment, I would say that's definitely an active user of the community and from that I would say the one piece down is how many of those actually become a conversion or an opportunity.

Dani Hao:
8:05

So that's something that we actually tied back to the community as well is just community source pipeline. So from the community, how many of those deals actually close? Or, for example, if we have customers in the community, is there a correlation between the people who are able to have a higher NPS score or have a better relationship with our CSMs because they're in the community? And we did see that for the folks who are in the community, who are also customers. They were actually less likely to turn. So that was also a metric that we were able to really see just from like an AB view of the community members versus people that are on our customer list. And I would say, from an engagement point of view, it really depends on what you're looking at in terms of the engagement that you care about, but for us it was like weekly active posters and then also how many people are coming back into the community. They didn't log in for just once.

Eric Eden:
8:59

So that's great that you're able to generate pipeline from the community and track that. That's the most important thing. That's the demand gen aspect of what you do, and I like the weekly engagement number of people who do something meaningful every week. How should people think about what a success looks like with those two metrics across the multiple communities you've built? How did you think about when I get to this point, I'm successful.

Dani Hao:
9:27

Yeah. So I think, when it comes to weekly active users you want to think about, there's the volume of folks that you're bringing into the community and then there's the volume of people that are currently in the community that you need to activate. So I think you should be doing both, because you're always going to have a little bit of attrition. But the people that are in the community maybe they feel like, hey, this week I'm not really in it, or perhaps they switch roles and they realize this community is no longer relevant for them. So I think you should have a number to measure when it comes to hey, this is the goal.

Dani Hao:
9:56

By the end of the year we want to get to X amount of total members, and then the percentage of active members should be relative to that. So I would say, definitely set goals for both and then from there, once you start launching the community, it might be hard for you to get that baseline. So I would say, when you launch the community, be very clear with who your ICP is for your community and also who you're targeting, and then test that. Test different programs, see what the average active rate is looking like for the first two months or so, and then be able to send a bunchmark to say let's try to get that number up to X percent by end of year.

Eric Eden:
10:32

Okay, and how about the pipeline? How do you think about pipeline generation? Is it a percentage of the overall pipeline? If you get over some percentage of the total pipeline being generated, people think, hey, this is a good channel.

Dani Hao:
10:47

Yeah.

Dani Hao:
10:48

So I would say, if you wanted to build pipeline from the community, I think you also need to set some goals on how many active prospects you want in the community and also what percentage of that is tier one, tier two, tier three, and then looking at how much percentage of that could you possibly win from the community.

Dani Hao:
11:05

So how we did it at Mutiny was that we looked at our list of ABM prospects list so we had tier one, tier two and tier three. So we had a goal of getting all of our tier one customers in the community and tier one prospects in the community just because the halo logo goes out and attract others. So that was one piece. But the other piece too is that these are the customers and prospects we really wanted to form really close relationships with. So then at the end of the year we also looked at okay, now that these tier one prospects and customers are in the community, how many of them actually did convert, and then that kind of set the benchmark for the year after and the quarter after. For example, do we have a measurable increase of those folks from the first cohort?

Eric Eden:
11:49

I like that, using the account-based marketing model of saying target accounts, let's get all of them into the community, break them into tiers, like you were saying. Broadly speaking, did you have success in getting a significant amount of the target accounts into the community?

Dani Hao:
12:07

Yeah, so we had a big portion of our target accounts in the community. I don't remember the exact number, but I would say if we're looking at total pipeline generated from the community, we generated 3.1 million in pipeline. So this includes the entire community but also all the other activities we're driving in the community. So how we thought about community is that it's not just living on Slack where some of the conversations are happening. It also is the partnerships that we built. So through the community, we built partnerships with other communities as well, where we were able to run online events together. We were able to do referral programs together. We brought in other speakers from those other communities and then also in person as well for our field events. For example, we would go to events like Saster or events like Forester and we would have a community members only component where it's like a happy hour, and so there that was another conversion point where we met community members in person and then afterwards, during the follow-up process. That was another point where we can convert them into a prospect.

Eric Eden:
13:07

That's great. What advice would you give to marketers who might be thinking about creating a community for their company, for their brand? If they want to get started and they want to do this, what's the best advice you could give them?

Dani Hao:
13:25

I would say understand if there is an appetite for it first, before committing to it own community, because the community is almost like a product in itself. You have to really build that awareness, you have to build that demand and you have to build that volume. I would say a few things. To test whether you're ready for building an own community is to look at, first off, if you have a newsletter list of subscribers, does that newsletter list of subscribers often reply all to that email and start adding in some of their own insights? If you have a considerable amount of that, it might mean your subscribers actually have a lot of things they want to voice out to other folks similar to them. That's a signal that you can look at. Another signal I would recommend looking at is on social. When you're sharing something from your LinkedIn account, how many comments do you actually get from those LinkedIn posts? If people are replying to each other, that's already naturally. Conversations are happening and maybe it's time for you to bring it all together.

Dani Hao:
14:23

I think the third signal you can start looking at is if you've launched either online events or in-person events in the past, or if this is something that you're thinking about. It's a really great way to test whether an own community playbook works for you, for example, in your next owned event, whether it's online or in-person, start having a lot more interaction with your audience instead of having it based on a presentation, maybe seed a few questions and they're asking them hey, what's up of mine for you? What do you think, eric, what do you think Jesse? Being able to call out some of the folks that are participating in these events and also looking at who are the people actually coming back to these events? Because if people are returning for a lot of the activities that your brand is presenting, it probably means you're building advocates. You're probably meaning you're building a community already. It's just a matter of putting them all in one place and then giving them the value that they want.

Eric Eden:
15:16

Awesome. Thank you so much for everything you've shared here today. I encourage everyone to share this episode with your friends. People should know about the benefits of building a great community. It may not be for everybody, but if it is for you, it could be really good, like Danny has shared. Thanks so much for sharing these insights. We're going to link to her website for Spark Marketing and Creative in the show notes. If you want to learn more, you can reach out to her directly. Thanks so much for being with us today. We appreciate it.

Dani Hao:
15:47

Thanks, Eric. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well. We're ping me if you have any other questions too.