We usually talk with community managers on the show, the boots on the ground that sadly usually aren’t the decision makers on budgets and what programs get greenlit and which don’t. Luckily for us we’ll hear from Sydney Sloan who has not only built community programs from scratch but she is also now the CMO of SalesLoft giving her the unique vantage point of seeing knowing how to build these programs and knowing what is needed to get approval from the C Suite (which we talk about in the episode). Too Long; Didn't Listen Being a CMO, Sydney knows what it takes to get buy-in from the C-Suite to get funding. She shared how when she was at Adobe an executive wanted to take their Java Developer community from 1500 to 1 million developers. The audacious goal was helpful and she backed it up with strategy, she aggressively tackled both online and offline community. She found local ambassadors and made sure the company equipped them with what they needed to run events and spread the word. When it comes to building your in-person community try to go deep with the small handful of your most passionate ambassadors. If you have 2 amabadours in Japan and London meet with them, understand the differences in their culture and their needs. If you get a large group of ambassadors it’s actually good to focus on your top 5 or 10 before scaling up, better to serve a small group deeply then a large group poorly. When it comes to metrics Sydney suggest first looking at users as a good starting point and then going finding metrics around engagement that are meaningful to the company. She referenced a study from EMC that found direct correlation of community engagement and revenue growth, tying revenue to community engagement is crucial to proving the worth of the program.
Episode Summary
We usually talk with community managers on the show, the boots on the ground that sadly usually aren’t the decision makers on budgets and what programs get greenlit and which don’t. Luckily for us we’ll hear from Sydney Sloan who has not only built community programs from scratch but she is also now the CMO of SalesLoft giving her the unique vantage point of seeing knowing how to build these programs and knowing what is needed to get approval from the C Suite (which we talk about in the episode).
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 The 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 customer before your competitor does.
Derek Andersen:
Our next guest is Sydney Sloan, who is the CMO at SalesLoft. Before joining SalesLoft, she built a strong resume of working for amazing brands like Adobe, Jive, and Alfresco. SalesLoft has already built a really strong online community, and now they're going into the offline world. We're going to talk to Sydney about how SalesLoft is approaching this, as well as how CMOs view community and how to talk to them about getting approvals and buy-in for what you're trying to build. Take a listen.
Derek Andersen:
Sydney, it's great to have you on. In your own words, can you just describe for us what SalesLoft does? What problems it solves?
Sydney Sloan:
Sure. SalesLoft is a sales engagement platform, and what that means is we help sales teams in the way that they plan, track, measure, and optimize all the interactions between buyers and sellers. Best way to describe it is my previous life before I knew sales engagement and where we trying to... we read all of the reports. We were supposed to have 15 touches in order to engage a prospect and we were setting up task reminders and manually-automated processes in Salesforce and absolutely failing at it and finally realized that there's probably a better way. That's how I came to know SalesLoft.
Sydney Sloan:
I first bought sales engagement before becoming the CMO of SalesLoft and really as a salesperson, I do not know how you would do your job without a sales engagement platform today. The way that you communicate to your customers, manage your day, manage all the interactions, have the visibility into what your customers are doing, and so it's just the modern way that salespeople work.
Derek Andersen:
It's a great product. We love using. That's an unpaid endorsement. I wonder, you've had this incredible career in community building. We're going to get into that and I know that you've been at SalesLoft for just a little over a year, but I wonder, as you all are sort of rolling out this new community for SalesLoft, I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about it? What your sort of vision is for it? Where you hope it goes over the next couple of years and how that will ultimately impact or where you see community impacting SalesLoft's sort of core business?
Sydney Sloan:
Sure. Like I said, there is a new way, there is a modern way that salespeople are working and I love that we see the industry changing from going that hero mentality or team mentality and working together to serve customers versus just manage a deal. There's so much that salespeople need to learn and that they can share with each other, and so our community, the Rev Community, is really a place for sales and revenue professionals to come to learn, share, and grow, which I think is the purpose for a lot of communities.
Sydney Sloan:
What's unique and what we're doing and we can talk a little bit about my history, I built many communities over my time, is that there's a lot of micro communities that currently exist, just sort of different types of revenue professionals. Women in sales, sales coming out of school, modern sales pros, all these groups that are doing incredible work that we partner with. Our goal is to build a global community over a million sales and revenue professionals over the next three years and we want to do it in partnership, so we're doing it a little bit differently. This is not just a customer community. It's something bigger than that.
Derek Andersen:
We mostly on the show interview people who have community in their title. You're the Chief Marketing Officer at SalesLoft. What do you think CMOs need to be doing to build community today? Particularly in-person communities? Why have you helped champion this? Why do you think other CMOs should do the same?
Sydney Sloan:
I think that when you are a CMO, if you're reporting in to a CMO... when I was running community before, that was my core focus around customer experience and community was a large part of that. It's the way that you can reach the most potential users in I think the most meaningful way because I believe that communities are designed for learning and networking. When you think about as a marketer, our funnels, which is really about reach and awareness and then it goes to engagement, and then you go to conversion in terms of your ability to create and influence pipeline and business overall, and then guess what? That swing side in retention and growth, which communities play a huge part in, there's a role of community in all scale facets of that. If you're trying engage a new prospect, what better way to do that than put them with people who are already loyal advocates of what it is that you sell?
Sydney Sloan:
As you're trying to onboard new customers, then put that learning and best practice and the Q&A and how do you do this and you get users answering to other users on how to do that, and then building that relationship with your customers over time to drive the renewal and the growth and having them be part of it. I want to be at in-person events where not only are they doing the lick-and-stick tattoos, but they're actually wanting to put an actual tattoo of the company because they're such a fan of it. Wear the t-shirt maybe, lick-and-stick tattoo second, and then maybe there might be a few out there that get the real thing.
Derek Andersen:
Real tattoo. Do you get a discount if you actually come to the table with the SalesLoft-
Sydney Sloan:
Sure.
Derek Andersen:
SalesLoft Tattoo?
Sydney Sloan:
Totally. I'd do that.
Derek Andersen:
We have so many of our listeners I think that are trying to prove the value of community to the executives on their teams and I think a lot of people really struggle with it. You've probably seen this having built your own communities and probably sell it to different people over the course of your career. How would you suggest community builders do that? What's the best way to approach these people and to actually get done what you need to get done?
Sydney Sloan:
I think it helps if you have an executive vision, and I've picked a million sales professionals, but I had that happen to me one time. Back in 2005, I was working at Adobe. We had just acquired Macromedia and the executive in charge at that time had this vision of the Flash developer community. We had about 1500 developers at that time. It was actually Flex and then Flash Builder, and he said, "Let's build a community of a million developers." It was like, "Oh my God, how are we going to go from 1500 to a million? Are you crazy?" I might have said that. Probably a career-limiting move that you would not want to do to an executive, but having those lofty aspirational goals requires you to think differently. We had to think big and what we did was a combination of building an online community, hiring evangelists, building an online community, and going out to where those people lived.
Sydney Sloan:
Java developers and we aligned with the Java Posse and we aligned with the key influencers in the Java community, but we also paired that with global meetups. Many of our offices have never even talked to developers when Macromedia was acquired, let alone run a meetup. We had to put a lot of effort into the global meetup program, finding those local champions, establishing what the purpose was, allowing them to have their own unique capability, identifying those local champions that were going to be our owner of that community, and then facilitating.
Sydney Sloan:
I think that's the key and what I love about Bevy is that the local people, while they're passionate, still need help from the company. They need help promoting, organizing, getting the people there. They can run it in terms of maybe the content and being a local advocate, but asking them to do all of the heavy lifting becomes overwhelming, and so I do believe that the company that is sponsoring the communities or the meetups need to provide that to the local ambassadors.
Derek Andersen:
You've just sort of walked through the playbook in 30 seconds of how to build and cultivate and scale one of these communities, and there's so much in there we could unpack. As somebody who has also taken a community from the 0 to 50 kind of groups, I wonder, from your perspective, what was the biggest driver? What was the one thing you could not have lived without during that period or done or been successful without doing to sort of drive that kind of growth in adoption from the community?
Sydney Sloan:
I think I'll give two examples because I've done it twice. I did it at Jive as well. In Adobe, I think at that point the idea of meetups was relatively new and I think spending time in region with the leaders to really get them to understand what the value of the local community could be, how to set it up, allowing for differences, it wasn't a cookie cutter. The French team wanted something different than the London team versus the Korean team. Their cultures are different, the needs of the users are different, the number of users they had were different.
Sydney Sloan:
I think taking the time to go office to office and meet with the local leader and look them in the eye and say, "This is important. I'm here to help you. What is it that you need?" Understanding those difference and bringing that back and then designing the infrastructure that can support the similarities as well as the differences was really important, and then, being there to help. If they needed help, I would make it happen. Maybe you start out with five or 10. You grow over time and I have a saying, go where the energy is. While you might have gone and talked to 20 different of your top locations, if five are leaning in harder than the other 10, get the five working. Do that and then deal with the others is my advice versus spending your time trying to convince other people when you've got people right there. Just make them wildly successful and the others will follow.
Derek Andersen:
There's so many great insights in there. I love this idea of like have the big executive vision. Where is this going? How can this have a huge major impact on the business? At the same time, don't lose the human touch. You have to do the terrible work and hard work to just get the machine running, and then also you talked about how you have to be... you're working inside of a brand and you don't want to do anything negative to that brand. You have to create some guardrails but at least still have some flexibility to allow some people who want to try something here in France or try something in New York that's different from something in Atlanta or whatever where you still maintain that sort of human touch and flexibility, but also you can do it in the constraints of the brand.
Sydney Sloan:
If you don't mind, I'll share my other story about Jive, too, because it was actually a different scenario. When I got to Jive, which actually sold community platforms to community leaders and that was great, you actually get to learn from people who know it maybe better than you. What was interesting about the situation with Jive is Jive sold the software aspect. We had the online community. A number of community members, I can't remember... it was 20 or 30,000 I think at the time that I started, but we didn't have the in-person part. While we had good engagement and we were able to personalize and do badges and gamification and create a lot of content, that secondary human element wasn't there. We chose to add in the regional user groups. We called them user groups at Jive.
Sydney Sloan:
What we learned was that if we were to set up... here are the four or five topics that we know or we want to be talked about with the users, and we provided that, so we were lucky that we could identify our local champions. We knew we could handle about five or six meetups based on our budget, and then we had a dedicated person that helped them with that organization. Basically, before there was Bevy, we hacked it in our own platform and then we offered them, "Here are the six topics that we can provide speakers for, be it remote or in person." We always tried to be in person, but sometimes remote. "Here is two standard agendas that you can use", and then depending on how big your group is, we had budgets that were associated with it.
Sydney Sloan:
If you had 25 users, we'll give you $500 to just cover the cost of food and beverage if you have more. We had this nice little kind of kit set up for our local champions and just offered speakers, offered the agenda, paid for the fun part, and just helped them orchestrate. I think that was part of the reason that we were able to keep the local advocates engaged for as long as we did, and then they just want to share stories and build their network. That's what it is. The best part of that in going full cycle is that our engagement and our online community grew. Our local user groups grew and our overall attendance at our annual conference.
Sydney Sloan:
If anybody is ever worried like, "Uh-oh, if I start doing these local events and maybe my summit or my big"... we call it Rev 2020 is our annual conference, it doesn't. It actually feeds it because people know each other. "Are you going? Oh my God, I'm going, too. Let's go together. Let's co-present. Let's tackle this problem together." When they're there, they feel that camaraderie, and then they get to expand it. Then, you promote them as local community leaders and get them together and share stories. It's all part of the fabric of building a vibrant customer community overall.
Derek Andersen:
You've talked about a lot of different kinds of metrics that these programs drive. I wonder, if I'm trying to just start to prove that executive buy-in or I'm running a community program and trying to extract insights that are going to justify growing it and sustaining it, do you have any advice on what metrics you would start collecting first?
Sydney Sloan:
Yeah. The easy ones are your users. Just how many users do I have? Then, there's the frequency, and that's for me engagement now. We call it engagement. How often are they engaged in the community? How often are they coming to events? If you can consolidate that track in one system, that's great. I learned a great lesson from the community leader at EMC years ago, and they did a study that looked at the number of community members and the number of... the amount of community engagement and could draw a direct correlation to the amount of revenue and retention in those accounts.
Sydney Sloan:
When they stack ranked, "Here's all of our community members from these companies, here's how active they are", and then quarterly did that to revenue and retention, it was a hundred percent. You have 20 active users and they are 20X in terms of revenue, then a one. It was direct corollary, and so that's what I would recommend is look at that engagement, tie it back to revenue and growth in your accounts. If you can't do them all, pick your top hundred, that's fine, and start that as the way that you prove value to the bottom line.
Derek Andersen:
I know you're just kicking off the Rev Community, but we'd love to have you back maybe in a year's time or something and you could just tell us about what you've learned from it, what's different from these other communities at Jive and Adobe and others that you've already built and just the success of it. What metrics it's driving. We'd love to do a followup at some point and hear about that and hear how that is different from the other experiences you've had in the past.
Sydney Sloan:
Totally would be happy to. We are taking a different approach, so cross your fingers it's going to work.
Derek Andersen:
It's going to work. Finally, as we just wrap this up, I'd love to know what communities you love or follow and what you love about them, what you think they're doing a good job with.
Sydney Sloan:
Two. The first is HubSpot in terms as a marketer. I love Marketo, too. I'm a big Marketo fan, and when I search for something, it takes me into their community and finding an answer right away. When I go to their programs and events, you feel the energy and I always learn something. Those are my two easy ones, but when I think about great communities, Spora is also another one that I really like, and I just think that they've done a great job in being able to tie the brands into the community experience and the whole brand ambassador idea when you're in person. Sometimes your communities are B2C, sometimes they're B2B, those are the ones that I love.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you like 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.