In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Nisha Baxi, Head of Community at Gong. Nisha opens the episode by sharing a bit about her background before diving into all things community at Gong. When building their community, she went through the process of selecting important member engagement activities and their values to inform the health of the community.  In any role, it’s key to show ROI of your community to ensure you have a seat at the table to positively impact the business outcomes you’re setting out to achieve through the program.  Next, Nisha discusses some learnings from building the community program and strategy at Gong for the last year or so. To close out the episode, she shares the 4 B2B SaaS community trends that she’s watching out for in 2022 and beyond. Follow Nisha on Twitter. Follow Gong on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Molly Kipnis, Community Manager at Gong. Molly kicks off the episode by sharing a bit about her background and role at Gong. From her experience in social and community, she shared traits that she believes make a good community professional. Digging into her response, Molly shares engagement strategies that she’s tried that haven’t gone well, as well as one that has. Document processes to create playbooks, so anyone can pick up where you left off is extremely important in making things scalable within your community. Next, she discusses what her day-to-day looks like as the community manager at Gong, even with each day being different there are a few consistent things daily. Molly touches on the types of programming they’re building out and testing to create a world-class community and one that lasts the test of time. Diving into their virtual meetup program that launched in Q1 2022, she tested a few different things to better understand engagement within the community and rolled out the formal program following experiments. In order to grow and show the value of a program one must have KPIs, Molly shares how they show the ROI of both communities at Gong. To wrap up the episode, she shares her top 3 B2B SaaS community trends for 2022 and beyond. Follow Molly on Twitter‍ Follow Gong on LinkedIn and Twitter

Nick Mehta opens up the episode by sharing a bit about himself and Gainsight. Diving into the conversation, he explains why Gainsight leaned into community as a lever for growth from the very beginning to help expand and grow their Total Addressable Market (TAM). Community at Gainsight has grown geographically and both by the ones owned by Gainsight and those outside of Gainsight serving the greater customer success profession.  Next, Nick shares how he and the leadership team at Gainsight get buy-in and show ROI of their community efforts to the board and Vista Equity Partners. Zooming out, he discusses the insights and opportunities that he and the leadership team saw that gave them the confidence to proceed with acquiring inSided.  Earlier in the conversation, Nick mentioned Peloton and now it’s time to hear what he’s learned about building community from Peloton and what they’ve done well from his perspective.  To close out the episode, he shares the 3 community trends he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond. Follow Nick on Twitter. Follow Gainsight on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Sam Richard begins the episode by sharing a bit about her background. In her role on the Growth Team at OpenView, she’s hearing more of their portfolio companies - Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led - begin to focus on developing community strategy for their organization.    For companies that are Sales-Led and building a community, they’re looking to empower their evangelists and customers, raising them up in the market to be thought leaders in the space.    Sam is a believer in the “crawl, walk, run” approach for anything, and that includes community, and to hire someone to specifically own and manage the community efforts at the company. She discusses how companies can build a developer community and an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)-specific one from her experience.    Next, Sam explains her top 2 points lessons from working with and watching companies launch communities to help others succeed.   Circling back to an earlier point, she breaks down the process for showing the ROI of a location-based community program that a company is executing.    To close out the episode, Sam shares 3 community trends she’s seeing and watching for in 2022 and beyond.

In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Caroline Salis, Community Manager at ZoomInfo. Caroline Salis begins the episode by sharing a bit about her background and what ZoomInfo does. To dive into the conversation around community at ZoomInfo, she shares the behind-the-scenes knowledge of what started the conversation about building a community - both internal employee advocacy and customer ones.    As a multi-product company serving different audiences, Caroline discussed the research conducted to inform the strategy behind building a single community for their customers. Proceeding with their plans to launch a customer community, ZoomInfo decided to launch it as a LinkedIn Group, so Caroline shares the why behind that choice.    As their community continues to grow, she’ll develop new ways for members to engage with each other by listening to them. With the community being live for approximately 6 months now, Caroline focuses on qualitative metrics versus quantitative ones.    Next, she shares the lessons she’s learned while building the 2 communities at ZoomInfo, along with learnings from connecting with other community professionals.    To close out the episode, Caroline shares her 3 Community trends in the B2B SaaS space that she’s watching for in 2022. Follow Caroline on Twitter. Follow ZoomInfo on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Alex Su opens the episode by sharing more about his background and why he got recruited to join the Ironclad team. He shares why he started becoming more active across social media platforms and learning more about social selling.    He shared his expectations for his content at the beginning and how they’ve evolved over time, as he’s built a thriving community across four social media platforms. He’s been successful by learning directly from his audience to inform his content topics.   Alex explains how he develops new content and that he creates different content for the different platforms he’s active on.   Next, he what metrics he watches to ensure that his content is continuously resonating with his target audience. A small segway from metrics, he shares his insights and predictions on the balance between creators and viewers on social media platforms.    He’s always been posting on social media, since posting on a personal blog when he was 18 years old. While it’s certainly easy for people to be worried about posting on social media and experiencing feelings of self-doubt, he believes many people don’t focus on the potential positive outcomes of doing so too.    He shares 2 creators in the legal space that inspire him and the Ironclad approach to how they build community through different members of their team.    Lastly, he shares the 3 community trends in B2B SaaS that he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond.

Nigeria Talley begins the show by sharing her background. At Carta, community is all about creating true partnerships and being helpful to those in their target audience however and wherever they can be. Carta’s community efforts currently are de-centralized, spanning different platforms and channels, yet focus on showing up authentically and focusing on being inclusive. Their partnerships focus on developing mutually beneficial ones, so Carta can support them in whatever way the organization needs.  The two tenants of their community are inclusivity, generosity, and partnership, helping everyone by making resources available and supporting them.  She focuses on creating positive experiences wherever they’re engaging with members, since that’s what people will remember. Next, Nigeria shares how the Carta team decides which markets to do activations in for their audience.  She shares how they measure the ROI of community at Carta across the channels of their de-centralized community program. Closing out the episode, she shares the 3 community trends she’s watching for in 2022 and beyond in B2B SaaS. Follow Nigeria on Twitter. Follow Carta on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Sandy Mangat opens the episode by sharing a bit about herself, including the main pillars of her role today.    To set the stage for the conversation, she discusses why they launched the Product-Led Sales (PLS) Community and their goals for it. Next, she shares how the PLS Community supports people and companies building their Product-Led Sales motion from 0 to 1 with tactical information, frameworks, and foundational knowledge.    However, not every PLS Go-To-Market (GTM) motion will be the same at every company, given how closely intertwined it is to the product(s). Stepping back for a moment, our conversation goes into what is Product-Led Sales and how people support users in that GTM motion.    Approximately eight months into their community-building journey, Sandy discusses the growth of their community, focusing on quality over quantity, in relation to the metrics that they will focus on as they approach 1,000 members.    Lastly, she opens up about the lessons they’ve learned through building the PLS Community and the most exciting trends in community she’s looking out for in 2022. Follow Sandy on Twitter. Follow Pocus on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews James Kaikis, Co-Founder at PreSales Collective.   James begins the episode by sharing a bit about his background and how he and his co-founder got the idea to build PreSales Collective. Next, he shares how they’ve grown PreSales Collective to over 18,500 members globally, dominantly through inbound efforts and letting their members shine.    In hopes of having a “free forever” community, the PreSales Collective team needed to develop corporate partnerships to continue to serve their members well. However, they don’t work with every company. The PreSales Collective team firmly believes that any partner must be able to show value to their members and not splash their logo or place an advertisement.    They’re currently restructuring their member experience after a year of going wide and being everything PreSales. After learning more about PreSales Collective, James shares why they launched PreSales Academy and the stability it adds to their business from a revenue perspective.    He shares how they measure the success of their community, focusing on member growth and community engagement and lessons he’s learned along the way of building this thriving community.    Lastly, James shares 3 community trends he’s watching for in 2022 and beyond. Follow James on Twitter. Follow PreSales Collective on LinkedIn and Twitter. Follow PreSales Academy on LinkedIn and Twitter.

In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Aaron Leeder, VP of Partnerships & Alliances at Pavilion. ‍Aaron begins the episode by sharing a brief introduction about himself. Getting into the meat of the conversation, he shares how he’s built the partnerships strategy at Pavilion. In order to support the strategy, a team is needed to support partners throughout their lifecycle with Pavilion. Aaron shares how the team builds mutually beneficial partnerships with companies, as well as the opportunities that their partners have to engage with the members of Pavilion. He talks about the balance between partners gaining value by working with Pavilion and the partnerships supporting a positive member experience. Next, the conversation turns to discuss how the partnerships team shows partner companies the ROI from their work with Pavilion. Companies are experimenting with how to leverage communities as a growth lever for their business and their goals attached to their involvement in the communities they select. Aaron is seeing speaking engagements at events or conferences, not only a table or area, to share insights with the audience and have the attention of the room is important many of their partners. Zooming out a bit, he notes that the partnerships team is a profit center for Pavilion and shares a bit about how the revenue is used within Pavilion. Lastly, Aaron discusses 3 learnings he’d share with a community that’s looking to build a partnerships team to drive revenue for the organization and value to members. Follow Pavilion on Twitter Catch Pavilion in a city near you during Elevate, their roadshow, throughout the Spring and Summer of 2022.