Friday Sep 16, 2022

Ep 39 - Community-Led Growth in SaaS Vol 1 with Laura Coscarelli, Jillian Bejtlich, and Nisha Baxi

Community-led growth marketers know that nothing drives customer acquisition, retention, and expansion like a community that is truly passionate about your product, especially in SAAS. Social proof from happy customers speaks for itself, a great referral program is the gift that keeps on giving, and launching your product with community that will provide you with honest feedback is invaluable as you scale.

In this episode, we sit down with 3 community experts to shed light on the value and ROI community building provides SaaS companies. We talk about why trust, authenticity, and listening are values that community thrives in and how to get started with community building.

Here’s What We Discussed:

[05:50] Our experts share how they got into their current community roles, what previous experiences prepared them, and which traits are most valuable for their roles
[12:06] Jillian’s advice for those who want to get into community management but don’t know where to start
[13:32] How to communicate the ROI of community building for buy-in from skeptical execs or team members
[23:38] The starting point for building a community is putting the customer first by asking them what they want
[28:25] Making sure members feel seen and heard is the key to rebuilding trust with your community after dropping the ball
[33:57] Top tips for increasing member and community engagement
[44:42] Our experts share their thoughts on utilizing exclusivity in community building and community management
[50:31] Software that our panel can’t manage their community without

About Our Speakers

Laura Coscarelli, Account Executive at Higher Logic, Laura is an Account Executive at Higher Logic. A former teacher, she spent a decade managing online communities and then consulting for non-profits, associations, and corporate customers on how to engage their networks online. Now Laura helps organizations that are earlier in the process of building their digital engagement strategies as an Account execute (it’s easy to sell something you really believe in!) When she’s not cheerleading for her customers, she enjoys hosting fondue dinner parties, restoring old houses, and biking with her husband in Washington, D.C.

Jillian Bejtlich, Head of Community at Zapier, Jillian is a quirky, ambitious, and enthusiastic techie who is enamored with online communities and the complex data and psychological puzzles they present. She is currently the Director of Self-Serve Customer Experience (SSCX) at Zapier digging deep into curating a customer experience that delivers the right information at the right time and right place.

Jillian has spent her entire career working in and on communities of all sizes, in all industries, and of all types. She has extensive experience with all things community and innovation management including engagement, strategies, metrics, analysis, and interface (UI/UX). She prefers the hardest, ugliest, and most inglorious community challenges.

As Jillian is actually a data nerd at heart happiest swimming around raw data and visualization tools, she is most interested in digging deep into how data can be used to predict future community user behavior and how community design and interface impact desired and undesired behaviors.

Nisha Baxi, Director of Community at Gong, At the heart, Nisha is a community builder and customer advocate. Through the power of an active community, any organization can increase retention, crush its pipeline and build lasting relationships with its partners.

At 19, her first job was to create customer success stories for IBM. She didn’t realize that would set me up for a lifetime of enabling startups and customers to succeed through education, evangelism, and structured partnership. She had the pleasure of growing a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurship organization to 15K members. She’s built programs and frameworks at Microsoft, Salesforce, and Facebook that are still used today continuing to drive adoption and fostering loyalty.

Her passion comes from the joy of bringing people together to achieve a common goal, and you’ll find her putting together a panel of Fortune 100 execs, enabling teams who are passionate about a new idea, and mentoring and being mentored by folks along the way.

About Our Moderator
Kayci Baldwin, Director of Marketing & Platform at Ruckus, Kayci has been building and growing communities for impactful brands for nearly a decade. She was a co-founder of Six Things, a brand and digital creative agency dedicated to working with underrepresented founders.

Quotes

“You really have to be a person who wants to seek out relationships and doesn't have an ulterior motive. Having true servant leadership but also, still being really organized and thinking about where this fits into the overall experience. And that's gonna really lend yourself to being a community person.” – Laura Coscarelli

“I've always tried to work with communities where I, as an individual, am actually legitimately passionate and excited about the thing that the community stands for. And that really helps me connect with my users in a very, very authentic way.” – Jillian Bejtlich

“If I'm starting a community, especially at the beginning, is it impacting the core operations of the main departments that it needs to hit? Is it impacting customer success, product, marketing and support?” – Laura Coscarelli

“Anytime someone says, ‘How is [community] gonna impact the company? Just ask what are the four things that we care about this quarter or this half. And then just map out programs that align with that.” – Nisha Baxi

“If you're starting a new community… Put yourself in the shoes of your customers. If you can, ask your customers, ‘We're gonna build a community, what do you want from us?’” – Jillian Bejtlich

“In the beginning, it's about building trust and getting the heartbeat of the community.” – Nisha Baxi

Software Mentioned:

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!

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