Who owns community and why CMOs care

Erica notes CMOs and customer marketers increasingly sponsor communities, especially post-COVID for retention.

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Episode notes

When Erica Kuhl joined Salesforce as employee #176, nothing about her role or title suggested she would go on to build one of the most influential customer communities in SaaS history. Given a broken website, no roadmap, no team, she hacked together the first Salesforce Community with duct-taped technologies, raw conviction, and a fierce belief that customers needed a place to help each other.

That grassroots experiment eventually grew into a 17 million-member global community, became a blueprint for digital customer success, and reshaped the way enterprise SaaS companies think about adoption, retention, and product feedback loops.

Today, Erica is EVP & GM at Gainsight, leading community, education, and in-app product experience—and shaping the emerging category of Digital Customer Success.

This episode is a masterclass in community-powered retention, scrappy innovation, and how one person can build an entirely new motion inside an organization long before the market knows it needs it.

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Timestamps

0:00 – Preview

0:58 – Meet Erica Kuhl: EVP at Gainsight & Former Employee #176 at Salesforce

3:39 – What Early Salesforce Adoption Actually Looked Like

6:25 – Teaching Admins Before Admins Existed

9:40 – Why Erica Pitched a Community Before “Community” Was a Thing

11:25 – Building the First Salesforce Community

13:43 – Scaling Without Support

19:30 – How Community Became a Strategic Retention Lever

24:44 – Defining Digital Customer Success

26:35 – Where to Start: Crawl–Walk–Run for Digital CS