How to Scale Customer Success Through Community Programs

Hear me out...what if we started treating our partner programs less like siloed one-way biz-dev functions and more like a community? I've had a few conversations this week about how to keep momentum, how to build differently, and how to engage at scale. My response: build your program like it's a community. Bring the ALL together. Think about it. Your "ecosystem" technically is a community, it's just not CONNECTED like a community. But what would happen if it was? A lot of things will happen (I've seen it work). When you bring ALL of your partners together like a community, whether it's in one general Slack community, a community portal like Circles, or something as simple as a monthly gathering (Nick Salvatoriello ran a great monthly meeting for all partners at Drift). You start to see something of a network effect within your ecosystem. When you pull them all together, like a community, here's what happens: 🔸 They start to learn from each other, what's working, what's not. How to do more within the partnership. We would highlight one partner a month and the work they were doing to show the other partners what great looked like. 🔸 They start to get to know each other and work with each other. Agency partners start talking to your tech partners and begin providing services to those tech partners and now thinking about how those integrations work more holistically to service the customer and drive more usage with the customer versus you just thinking singularly about your product. 🔸 Value rises in what you are building in your program. You're no longer standing there with your hand out, you're standing there inviting them into a community that has the potential to become a serious revenue driver for their business, as you would ideally be teaching them how to do more for the collective customer base. Chances are you're already doing some of the same things a community offers, you're just doing them in random acts of delivery or one-offs. A community offers: 🗳 Tactical training 🗳 A resource hub 🗳 Events 🗳 An opportunity to network and work with others. At a minimum, your program should already be delivering on these things. Go treat your partner program/ecosystem as a community and watch amazing things happen. Be Great. Be Arcadia 🐻

Notice a gap? What do you do about it? Do you wait for a solution or create it yourself? I noticed a need within the community space and had to find a way to fill it. How did I know? By getting to know my members. I asked what they needed-> surveys, one-on-ones, emails,... Need: Community members wanted to connect. Goal: To bring them together in a common spot. Problem: No common place to gather virtually. To gain more support: Spoke with active users (whom I built relationships with) to contribute and help me promote the event. *Solution: Set up a monthly recurring virtual meet-up -> 'Connect CommUnity' *Benefits from this meetup ↳Members became friends online & offline ↳Learned more about each other & built trust ↳Collaborated at events & in projects together ↳IRL connections happened (picture in comments) Impact of it? ↳Enhanced customer experience ↳Members were excited to hang out ↳Established meaningful relationships ↳Members felt appreciated and heard ↳Over time, members started to host the meet-ups. The beauty of it all? I got to see this all unfold and witness the amazing connections form. Gain more insight into what they needed by listening to their conversations. And continually help create a better environment for them all. ⭐ If you don't see a way to solve a problem, create the solution instead. You don't need to wait for a large crowd to get started. Start with what you have and add on. (If you need help, ask your members)

What have I been up to at ZoomInfo, on the team building our first community? 👀 👇🏼 First - what's happening in these B2B powered communities that's so valuable to members, and the company, alike? ↪️ Conversations about buying decisions - dark social in action. ↪️ Real time reviews of products and features. ↪️ Q&A about product/roadmaps for companies. ↪️ Product-specific training sessions. ↪️ Programs tailored to members for learning, mentorship, product knowledge, etc. Plus, lots of great networking, knowledge-shares from peers, and my personal favorite: a jobseeker securing a job from a community connection! Justin Levy and I want to ensure that members join Modern GTM and see an immediate value add to their day to day life. We have really smart people in the community sharing daily tactical tips from the ground. And here are two major KPIs we track internally: ⭐ Deals closing at higher velocity when impacted by community programs/initiatives, defined as a person joining the community before they become a customer. ⭐ Retention attributed to community with X customers from a given account involved as active members. Would be incredible to play a small part in ZoomInfo's massive success with net new customers, and all of our thousands of existing ones, too. ~~ So, how can you get your internal teams involved in community building so everyone can benefit from the space? I think of it like this: ✅ Product: run product launch teaser sessions with community for early feedback, create test groups for product betas, regular product training sessions gain traction with all kinds of community members - prospective or customers ✅ Research: source groups of relevant people and incentivize them to hop on a call to answer questions/walk you through their workflows, listen in on any channel discussions for insights ✅ Sales: get to know your buyers and potential buyers, take a research cap and observe, run weekly sessions on platform demos/sales skills/thought leadership for members to engage with you in ✅ Marketing: get bites of content from the community to leverage in promo, create content WITH community members, give them opportunities to activate across socials, create 1-1 matching programs for references, do a series on customers in your community ✅ CS: create an easy and more informal path to getting common questions answered, use slackbot to identify common questions and create an FAQ sheet that's easily accessible, create regular content for customers within community ❤️ 🚀 #communitybuilding