Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!
Our next guest Scott Dodds is a Customer Enablement Leader and Community Strategist! He’s had a historic career in the community industry, starting off launching Khoros’ first community, the Lithosphere and then went on to build community and engagement at Zenefits, LivePerson and Box. In today’s episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI and so much more!
Too Long; Didn’t Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C podcast. I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over a hundred countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time, your customers. Yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customers before your competitor does.
Derek Andersen:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Scott Dodds, who is a community enablement leader and strategist. He's had an incredible career in the community industry, starting off launching courses for this community and going on to build community engagement at Zenefits LivePerson and Box. On today's episode, we will cover why SaaS is driving community growth, getting early adopters, measuring ROI, and so much more. Take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Scott. We talk a lot about customer to customer marketing and community on this podcast, but not as much about customer enablement. Could you share what your definition of customer enablement is and how you've done it at companies that you work for?
Scott Dodds:
Sure. It's definitely one of those overloaded terms, like community or engagement. For me, customer enablement is about empowering your customers to get the most value out of your products, whether that's by incorporating communities to foster encouragement and support content to grow customer knowledge, expand skillsets and identifying key touch points on the journey to engage. But simply put, it's about how can we help customers use more of our offerings and how can we do it at scale?
Derek Andersen:
You actually, as much as I live in this whole world, I had never made this correlation until speaking with you a few months ago, and that is that the community industry has seen huge growth because SaaS companies need to keep customers coming back. Can you explain sort of how you think about that and why that is?
Scott Dodds:
Yeah, it's funny. It's also very, very much aligned with the growth of customer success as an org. But yeah, I basically spent my career with tech companies as they've shifted away from enterprise software to manage service providers and then to software as a service and now cloud services. The transformation has been so successful that these tech enabled subscription service models are penetrating into non tech industries like entertainment, transportation, et cetera. And anywhere that there's a focus on recurring revenue over and beyond the first sale, that puts importance on that growth in product and service consumption over time. And then those companies who are focused on that will naturally look for ways to keep their customers engaged, to build those deeper connections, to enable them to use most of their offerings, or more of their offerings. And communities are, of course, one of the most effective in scale will means to accomplish this. So it's no surprise that they're kind of growing together as one.
Derek Andersen:
At Box, You were able to get a four X ROI on your case deflection program. Can you give an overview of how you're able to achieve that?
Scott Dodds:
Yeah. First and foremost, it was by, I think, dropping our preconceptions and listening to our community. So one of the first things we did was invite a range of currently active folks in the site and ask them what they liked, what they wanted more of, what they would change. And the biggest thing we learned was that customers didn't really see us as a community site or a support site. We weren't the sales team or the customer success team or the product team. We were all Box to them, I was one brand. But we weren't engaging like that. We were engaging separately as a support, as product, as customer success.
Scott Dodds:
So the first thing that we did was re-imagine it as a single experience that customers could engage with. And then by giving customers that one place to go as part of the Box community, it also became easier to start integrating this one place into other parts of the experience, like our customer marketing campaigns or our product contextual help or product news and updates. And this drove greater awareness of the site across all of our customers. We were able as an organization to speak about this resource very consistently across the org and we were to drive greater awareness of our customers, greater traffic to the site and greater engagement overall with the community. To be honest, deflection was almost a byproduct at that point when we saw the larger potential around you'd beyond support.
Derek Andersen:
And at this point I want to just be very transparent with the listeners that not only am I a customer of Box, I'm also a shareholder and anything positive that I say is in part aimed at getting people to buy more Box shares so the price goes up, ultimately creating better outcome for myself. But at Box, you also partnered with the go to market and product teams to engage customers and user groups. How did you convince those teams to do that?
Scott Dodds:
Well, it absolutely didn't happen overnight. But I would say our success was around two things. Leveraging our data, first and foremost, to show that those teams, that the customers that they wanted to engage with were there already and they were there in the community. They were there at our functions, our events, our user groups. And then being opportunistic to help with their initiatives when they were ready to engage. I think the first challenge that came to us was a beta program that the product team was trying to set up, and we showed them that we can meet their needs in this area in days, not months. We can find a way for them to engage online in the community with their beta teams.
Scott Dodds:
From there we helped the marketing team get a version of their ROI calculator up on the site, but little things like that. And we showed that we can execute those in ways that other teams just weren't set up to do because, and again, we weren't a large team by any means, a very small, scrappy little group. But because communities are by their nature are always sort of evolving and changing, we were much better prepared, I think, to execute in that way. And that built a foundation of trust and confidence that they needed when they set their sights on larger, more expensive initiatives.
Derek Andersen:
Now you've built some great processes for getting user feedback to the developers to build into the product. How would you suggest a listener who's either, let's say, not experienced with it or not having success with it to do the same?
Scott Dodds:
Yeah, and again, I think it comes with building trust with those teams first. But I think an important way to do that, particularly with development of product teams, is to understand what drives them. What gives them success? And equally, what keeps them away from it?
Scott Dodds:
Development teams all want feedback, but they're often measured by how quickly they can ship a quality product out the door. It's rare, in fact, that they aren't getting feedback. Frankly, they're often drowning in it from AEs, CSMs, executives, advisory boards, whatever. But we need to figure out how we can package up that feedback for them to make it easy to consume. How can we give them the data and the context around that feedback so they can make sense of it? And better yet, how can we show them how they can ask their customers for feedback when and where it will make a meaningful difference in their development cycle? So we need to put ourselves in their shoes and then figure out how to make it easy for them and give them what they need.
Derek Andersen:
Community can be really useful for getting early adopters for new products and services. How have you built early adopter programs in the past and what benefits do those programs bring to the company?
Scott Dodds:
Yeah, early adopter programs are really important. They bring, because frankly they're your point in your launch where your vision first becomes reality. [inaudible 00:07:08] Driscoll is someone that I listened to around this, and he is part of the Microsoft MVP program, once equated involving customers in product development as making them a part of the birthing process as co-parents in its delivery. And I really believe that. Your is a rich source of these passionate users around your product with crucial feedback, but they're also your potential first customer proofs, your launch stories, your customer advocates and product defenders when it first comes out of the gate. If you aren't leveraging their passion, you not only run the risk that they're going to be a focal attractor during the critical first phase of your rollout, you're missing that huge opportunity for them to actually help accelerate your launch.
Scott Dodds:
So you need to bring them in as early as feasible. Ask for their feedback, make a point in showing them how their feedbacks impacted your product, and then learn from them what it is that they're doing with it. Then, of course with gratitude, ask them to come back and share this thing that they've helped make.
Derek Andersen:
Okay, with all of your community experience and customer experience, what would you say is the most important metric to measure when it comes to building a community?
Scott Dodds:
Well, this may not be the most satisfying answer for folks, but what you need to measure, it needs to be the same metric that your organization cares about, or a proxy for that metric. So there's no magical number or silver bullet or anything here, but you need to thoroughly understand your business and what numbers that your boss, your VP, your CEO, what do they care about and why.
Scott Dodds:
For instance, deflection. It's important to support when they need to reduce costs and improve efficiency. But at a certain point, your VP may stop caring about deflection so much because they're more worried about renewals and cost savings. So you need to find out how your community is impacting customers to renew, which means you need to understand what metrics and the customer life cycle most impact renewals. Sometimes it's easy to identify that proxy metric that everybody understands and agrees on, but sometimes it's going to take a lot more time and data analysis to prove your point. But it's critical to take that time and you need to tailor it to your business because if you don't, you won't be able to delivery the community that your company needs and your organization will never understand the value that your community provides.
Derek Andersen:
Let's talk about getting buy in. You've held senior level roles and in lots of companies. How do I go about approaching a VP or a C-level executive about a community program? How do I get people on board?
Scott Dodds:
It comes down to just making it as easy as possible for them. You have to talk their language, you have to know what they care about and make sure that you're making it easy for them to visualize your proposal and the value that you're providing. You define the sense of urgency in simple but immediate terms. You package up that solution so it's easy for them to act on. And then be aware of the risks and dependencies and have plans if asked to address them. Honestly a community initiative, it should be no different than any other serious business program. So it's just important that you treat it like that, and so that they can too.
Derek Andersen:
So this is the Customer Customer podcast, and love to know why do you think getting your community together in real life is as important or is important as opposed to just doing it online?
Scott Dodds:
Yeah. It's about building relationships, isn't it? If you're only meeting your community members online or in virtual spaces, you're missing out on so many other opportunities to build greater connections and learn so much more deeply than you would otherwise. Why would you limit your personal professional context online? You wouldn't. So it's so much more valuable connection and communication that occurs in person. So why would you limit your community relationships in the same way?
Derek Andersen:
Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Yeah, why limit yourself if you can learn it, be open, have a growth mindset.
Scott Dodds:
Absolutely.
Derek Andersen:
And we all learn in different ways too, so that's a great thought.
Derek Andersen:
Okay. As we close this, I'd love to know, tell us about a community that you love and why do you love it?
Scott Dodds:
Well, I've, for many years, been a fan of the Intuit TurboTax community, with how integrated they've been within their overall product experience. Taxes are complicated there. It's a frustrating ordeal, but Intuit recognize that this is something that we all go through together. So TurboTax makes it easy for people to access the community within the flow of their product so that we can all leverage each other's experience to either get the help we need or to give back to others. And that sends communities a competitive advantage for TurboTax, and it's just a part of the overall offering and experience that they provide. It's amazing.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you'd like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.