With a decade in the game and an extremely sharp and strategic approach, Suzi Nelson is one of the best in the community industry. The main topic of conversation is something that not all community professionals love to talk about but can dramatically increase the resources your community program gets and help everyone at your company realize the value of your community, tying community back to sales. The first step if you are starting a community from scratch and to help people realize the value is to find what part of the funnel needs the most help. What does that mean? Since the basic components of any sales funnel are awareness, consideration, closed/sale and retention/renewal those are the places you want to focus on. Once you have identified which part of the funnel figure out the metric that matters for that, you can talk with the sales and marketing department to find a better idea of that. For example, your company might want to keep customers longer so you can pick renewal rate and lifetime customer value as two metrics to affect. While tying back to metrics directly is always tricky you can tie into your companies CRM or at a minimum make sure you have those metrics before the community started so you can show a before and after. Another key point she touched on was how to get community members to become your biggest advocates. The vast majority of people in your community are passive so the key is to help guide them on a journey to get them active. Suzi references the “Commitment Curve” famously created by Douglas Atkins which, put simply, says you need a series of tasks that get them more engaged until they are ready to help
With a decade in the game and an extremely sharp and strategic approach, Suzi Nelson is one of the best in the community industry. The main topic of conversation is something that not all community professionals love to talk about but can dramatically increase the resources your community program gets and help everyone at your company realize the value of your community, tying community back to sales.
The first step if you are starting a community from scratch and to help people realize the value is to find what part of the funnel needs the most help. What does that mean? Since the basic components of any sales funnel are awareness, consideration, closed/sale and retention/renewal those are the places you want to focus on. Once you have identified which part of the funnel figure out the metric that matters for that, you can talk with the sales and marketing department to find a better idea of that. For example, your company might want to keep customers longer so you can pick renewal rate and lifetime customer value as two metrics to affect. While tying back to metrics directly is always tricky you can tie into your companies CRM or at a minimum make sure you have those metrics before the community started so you can show a before and after.
Another key point she touched on was how to get community members to become your biggest advocates. The vast majority of people in your community are passive so the key is to help guide them on a journey to get them active. Suzi references the “Commitment Curve” famously created by Douglas Atkins which, put simply, says you need a series of tasks that get them more engaged until they are ready to help