Continuing our streak of having decision-makers on our podcast, with us today is Max Altschuler. Max is the founder of SalesHacker which was acquired by Outreach, where he is now the VP of Marketing. Max was also the cofounder of CMX which was acquired by Bevy. Max has a deep knowledge and background in creating communities. We are going to talk about the growing trend of communities getting acquired, how can you start a community from scratch, what to focus on when creating value in a community to have an impact on a company’s core product and much more.
Continuing our streak of having decision-makers on our podcast, with us today is Max Altschuler. Max is the founder of SalesHacker which was acquired by Outreach, where he is now the VP of Marketing. Max was also the cofounder of CMX which was acquired by Bevy. Max has a deep knowledge and background in creating communities. We are going to talk about the growing trend of communities getting acquired, how can you start a community from scratch, what to focus on when creating value in a community to have an impact on a company’s core product and much more.
Too Long; Didn't Listen
Derek Anderson:
Welcome to the C2C podcast. I am your host Derek Anderson. After holding my first event in 2010 I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over a 100 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 Anderson:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Max Altschuler, who's the founder of Sales Hacker. Last year, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach where he is now the VP of marketing. Not only did he start Sales Hacker, but he also helped start CMX which Bevy acquired the beginning of 2019. We're going to talk about the trend of communities getting acquired, how to start a community from scratch, what to focus on to create value in a community that has real impact. Take a listen.
Derek Anderson:
Max, can you describe what Sales Hacker is and what Outreach is and what does Outreach do.
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, I'll give you a little bit of backstory here. I was the CEO and founder of Sales Hacker, which is the leading resource for all things B2B sales. We're a publication, full-fledged media company. We do large events up to 1,500, 2,000 people in San Francisco, New York, London. We do webinars. We do, we have a podcast. I think it's about 10,000 downloads per episode. And we're a resource for B2B salespeople, B2B sales leaders who want to come and learn about all the new kind of modern ways to sell. Anything that hits a textbook is pretty much dated as soon as it's disseminated. We want it to be something that was living, breathing, and always real time from people that are actually doing the jobs in the trenches, real practitioners so we created Sales Hacker.
Max Altschuler:
And from there, we built this amazing community. We've got about 126,000 subscribers right now. About a year ago, 2018 August, a company called Outreach acquired Sales Hacker. Now Outreach is the leading sales engagement platform. We help reps and companies better engage with their prospects and customers through a platform that allows you to email, make phone calls, pretty much engage on any channel and track the activities from those engagements to replicate the best practices across your entire sales team. It's kind of a perfect fit between best in class, modern sales software and a modern sales or future, the future of sales community and network.
Derek Anderson:
Awesome. And when did you start Sales Hacker?
Max Altschuler:
Started Sales Hacker in September of 2013 and I can tell you a little bit about that too. We, let's see, I was doing a meetup because I was just peeking out on all of these different things that we were doing in the sales process that were leveraging different areas, technology or leveraging virtual assistants in the Philippines to be our SDRs. And started meeting with other people who were doing similar things at similar companies. And that turned into a monthly meetup, which turned into a small conference that I did once I left the company and then kind of spiraled from there, from one conference to multiple conferences, to a media company it is today.
Derek Anderson:
There's this kind of interesting trend of communities getting acquired by bigger companies like Sales Hacker, Indie Hackers, product on even us acquiring CMX which you helped create. Why do you think brands are doing this?
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, community is extremely important. There's a lot of reasons to that. One, you want to be able to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way and I think there's a philanthropic angle to it, but you also get the ability to provide value for an audience that you are eventually trying to sell to. And I find that in the sales process, the easiest way to sell to a company is to provide immense value to them, provide them so much value that they want to buy your product, that they want to ask you about your product. And usually, if you're lucky they do that. If you're not, you can provide a ton of value and you still have to make the ask. But at least when you make the ask, you've already provided so much value to the individual that they are at least more opener or receptible to speaking with you and hearing you out and evaluating your product.
Max Altschuler:
And if you educate them enough, then you actually end up growing the total adjustable market. For example, if you, for us for Outreach, we have the Sales Hacker community and then as we educate people with Sales Hacker, it helps them understand that they need to leverage technology in the sales process. It helps them understand how to build modern workflows and that helps us, but it also helps our competitors. It also helps complementary products to us. It helps everybody in the entire ecosystem because we expand the knowledge, we help companies build a future focused or future centric sales process. And that means that eventually they need to layer on training, they need to layer on technology, whatever that is. It helps us, it helps our competitors. It helps complimentary products, helps everybody in the ecosystem.
Derek Anderson:
Let's say, you're kind of unique because you've been a founder of these communities. Most community builders that are probably listening to this are probably building a community, maybe building it from scratch, but on existing product, what do you think is the thing I need to get right in order to start building a successful community?
Max Altschuler:
Authenticity. I think all the best communities that I can think of, especially B2B communities, all start with authenticity. CMX started with David Spinks who lived breathes, sweat, bled community. It's all he cared about, it's all he wanted to talk about, and so when you have somebody like that, they moderate the community in a way that you just couldn't do if you didn't really care that much. If you weren't really authentic like that. And people see that and like, wow, these are really amazing conversations. Because you've got an amazing moderator, you've got amazing face of that community.
Max Altschuler:
You look at SaaStr with Jason Lemkin. When I asked him why he started SaaStr when I started working with him back in 2014, he said it was cathartic. Because he really, he went through it as a founder of a SaaS company and he wanted to do things that would help other SaaS founders. I just geeked out on all things sales, and I wanted to share that and genuinely bring in other elements and opinions to the mix so that people can learn about sales because to me, sales is the greatest profession. You get to build relationships for living. That's amazing to me. I think authenticity is the base of a good community and you can't fake that.
Derek Anderson:
And going off of that, what do you think is the biggest distraction that you can have when you're starting a community? Or maybe the worst thing you can do?
Max Altschuler:
Try and fake it. Yeah. The flip side of that is, and I see this happen all the time, it's companies want to start communities so then they just throw up a landing page, think people are going to sign up and there's no moderation or there's fake moderation. There's no real value there. There's the big conversations aren't happening in your community because they're happening somewhere else, but they can feel that people really care about it. I think, the flip side of authenticity, when companies just try and force it because they're like, oh well you know our CEO thinks we need a community so let's just stand this thing up and we don't know anything about it. We have some hired gun that comes in, that doesn't do the work to understand our persona or ICP or our landscape. That's when it goes sideways. Is when somebody's moderating it or lazily moderating it and doesn't understand the plight or the persona that they're dealing with.
Derek Anderson:
Could you just talk about what specific metrics you use to gauge the success of Sales Hacker? Or maybe more generally any community, what people should look at.
Max Altschuler:
Yeah. The kind of surface level of vanity metrics, so to speak, are your, how many subscribers you have or community members. For us, for the media side of the business, how many people attend the webinars? How many sessions, monthly sessions we're getting. But the deeper stuff is loyalty, engagement. How many people are engaging with content? And how many people are, the newsletter, how many people are clicking from the newsletter? And then how many repeat visitors do we have? That's the most important metric for us. Repeat visitors. And then there's also things like time on page or time on, time in community, things like that, that are important. For us, for anybody. I think, adoption, whether it's a SaaS product or a community, you want people to engage and adopt and dig in and come back. Because if you spend a bunch of money and somebody comes once, reads one article and then leaves, it's you now know you're going to spend a bunch of money to try and get that person back or you blew your first chance. You want people to come and stay.
Derek Anderson:
Now that you work at a company with the software product sort of behind the community, how are you seeing the community affect the product itself?
Max Altschuler:
I would say the product does not affect the community and the community probably only affects the product. I don't think does all actually. I think there's a pretty solid wall in between the two. Yeah, I don't see there being any effect either way. I'd say that, being owned by Outreach just allows us the freedom to focus solely on growth and not focus on revenue. And that was pretty freeing and that made the community so much more valuable because before we had to do all of these things to keep the business profitable and now we don't. Now we can, now we just do things that our listeners, readers, viewers would love more. That's the only difference.
Derek Anderson:
Yeah. As this is a C2C podcast, and you all do a ton of events and you bring your community together and you were doing it with Sales Hacker, now you're doing it with Sales Hacker and also with Outreach. Why do you think getting your community together in real life is important and valuable outside of just getting them together online?
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, it builds a brand, gives you another layer or element of credibility. Having an offline event, it makes it more real. You also build that engagement. You build that loyalty, that fandom, that follower, ship that comes with that which is, okay this is like I'm part of something. I belong. I meet other people who are part of something. I feel like more of a part of something. I think it's really important to have that offline element. We did meet ups in 32 cities globally for Sales Hacker at one point. And we stopped doing them because they took a lot of time and they weren't as profitable as I would've liked. But had we been a venture backed company, I would've kept doing them and I think we'll probably start them back up fairly soon.
Max Altschuler:
I think it was key to where we got as a business. And then we also did the much larger conferences for our community. That was cool too. And we always took a different approach. You always have to have an angle. I think that's the key thing. If, back to your question about what makes a good community, I said authenticity is number one, but number two is some kind of differentiation or some kind of an angle. Don't do what's out there. How are you going to find a different way to approach or a different way to provide value, I should say for the people in your community. It's what's the angle? What's the niche? What's the differentiator for your community? And it's the same thing with the in person events. It's all right not, for us what's separating this from just being another sales conference? Well, we do X, Y and Z differently. We focus on technology or people process, whatever technology, there's a different angle, there's a different spin. It's all practitioner led. There's no vendors, whatever your thing is.
Derek Anderson:
Do you think, now that you're at Outreach and you're hearing these conversations, you obviously, you bleed community and you've done it a lot, but are you seeing more and more conversations about community coming up inside of the sort of high growth technology company? Do you think it's something that is, we'll see get much more important? Do you think it'll kind of stay where it's at? Do you think it'll get less important over the coming years? Where do you see the future of building communities?
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, it's getting more important. You see companies popping up now more and more that are supporting communities like Debbie, you guys and community platforms, software, things like that. I think it is getting more important. People want more, I did a LinkedIn post about this a few days ago, but people want more than just software. Your customers, they buy your software and that's expected but your session with your customer doesn't stop there. The next thing is pro serve and onboarding and making sure that they adopt and they get great use out of your software but it doesn't stop there. The next thing is innovation.
Max Altschuler:
It's hiring top talent and building new features that they bought your product when it had a lot less and they just keep getting these free features and additions to your product. And then the next thing after that is the customer experience and that's the community feeling. That's the conferences that they get to go to because they're customers of yours. That's the road shows that they get to go to because they're a customer of yours. That's the community that they're going to be a part of because they're customers of yours. That's the educational resources, trainings, whatever else you offer as a company. That is part of the experience of being a customer of that software. And so it adds on, adds much, having a community adds so much value to what people are buying and it's very important to continue to add to that customer experience as part of your customer obsession.
Derek Anderson:
As we wrap up, I'd love to know what's a community that you love and why do you love it?
Max Altschuler:
Yeah, I mean the Revenue Collective is a community that I'm really digging right now, which is a private community that Sam Jacobs out in New York City is running and it's VPs of sales and marketing and CMOs and CROs from companies of all sizes across the world. He's doing a really good job of curating the members, the cities, the events themselves. Doing a lot offline. Sam is doing a fantastic job. Revenue Collective is one of them. Obviously in our space, Modern Sales Pros is really good too. And then I've always been a fan of Jason Lemkin and the SaaStr community that he's built. Again, coming from authenticity, few people do it better than he does.
Derek Anderson:
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.