The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage

by David Spinks

So please, find your focus!

Prioritize the areas that are most important for your business today.

I tracked questions answered by non-Salesforce and cost offset for support. I also focused on marketing specific outcomes and metrics since I was in the marketing department – such as speakers sourced, quotes and testimonials, and identifying advocates.”

A really simple sales funnel looks like this: Audience > Lead > Opportunity > Sale So you have to find three ratios: Percentage of audience that converts to leads Percentage of leads that convert to opportunities Percentage of opportunities that convert to sales Let's say that 10 percent of your audience converts to leads, 25 percent of leads convert to opportunities, and 50 percent of opportunities convert to sales.

If you need to get 100 sales, that means you need 200 opportunities, which means you need 800 leads, which means you need 8,000 people in the audience. Great! Now you have your goal. You need to get 8,000 people to engage in your community in order to hit the goal. At least that's your hypothesis. Is it perfect? No. Business never is. But this will give you a baseline to work with.

You can build community-based lead qualifications into your CRM, so your marketing and sales team can always see who's engaged in the community when prioritizing who to focus on.

This quarter the community brought in 300 new leads, which led to 75 opportunities and 40 sales, a total of $800,000 in annual revenue. The community has now brought in a total of $2,100,000 in annual revenue this year. 30 percent of our customers are also engaged in our community, an increase from 21 percent six months ago.

All strategic frameworks aim to take a big nebulous goal and make it more specific. They all do this with three elements: The goal you're trying to achieve The measures that will tell you if you've achieved that goal The actions you'll take in order to achieve the goal

V2MOM is the system that was popularized by Marc Benioff at Salesforce and explained in his book Behind the Cloud. There are five elements to V2MOMs, which includes our core three elements with two added: Vision (the goal) Values Measures (the measures) Obstacles Methods (the actions)

Your priorities for managing a brand new community will look very different than the priorities for an established community. New communities won't have established norms, members won't yet feel a strong sense of community, and your operations will be more minimal.

Seed. The community is first started and needs a lot of love and care to keep it alive.

Growth. There's community-market fit and the community starts to organically grow and engage. Maturity. The community becomes well-established, with clear norms and leadership structure. Pollination. The community becomes so large that it breaks out into peripheral or subcommunities, that become their own seed stage communities and move through the cycle while still under the umbrella of the broader, more mature community. The Seed Stage

You need a mature tree to bear fruit. In these early days, focus less on business

value and more on building the foundation of community. The seed is essentially an idea. It's a belief that there's a group of people who don't yet have a space to call their own. The community doesn't yet have a strong identity, set of norms or beliefs, or formal structures. It's a small group exploring the potential of community.

The community builder must show up consistently, time-and-time again, even when no one else shows up, or engagement is slow. You must keep at it, failing, learning, and adapting over and over again. You might be starting 90 percent of the discussions yourself.

Your first members set the tone for every new member who joins after them. So you want to get the right people in there first. You want people who will be genuinely invested, and will have a high standard for the content they contribute to the community. You want givers, who are bought into creating something new together.

In the early days you have to go above and beyond to make people happy, and focus on learning as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Communities often start with very few rules but add more as they run into situations where someone takes an action that hurts the community, but didn't technically break a rule.

About 90 percent of the content is being created by the community at this point, and much of your job as the organizer is to manage, moderate, support leaders, and keep things running smoothly. You take on more of an operational role.

At the heart of community is identity. Humans form much of our personal identities around the shared identities of the groups we participate in.

You're creating and reinforcing a set of beliefs, expressions, and actions for members to adopt and engage in. Everything you build for your community, your forums, events, logos, playbooks, etc. all exist to reinforce that shared identity and create spaces for people who share that identity to gather.

communities is to develop a compelling social identity and bring anyone who shares that identity together consistently over time. Of course, when someone first joins a community, they won't feel a strong sense of social identity

Social categorization. We see ourselves as being in the same general category as the community (e.g., I like baseball and live in New York so I'll start watching Yankees games).

Cam starts to feel a stronger sense of shared identity, and specifically appreciates that this community aligns with their own values. They're still new, so they don't quite feel like they can call themselves a “Sales Hacker” just yet.

as Cam feels a deepening sense of social identity, participates in greater and greater ways, and experiences lots of validation for all of their participation.

They might not know how to participate, or feel scared to participate, and drop off.

Drop off is normal. Your community won't be right for everyone.

should absolutely have a strong theory of who your community is built for from day one, and have a vision for the social identity you'd like to create.

People: Who are we? Purpose: What do we believe? Participation: What do we do?

“Do people actually need this community?”

Just because there's already a community focused on your broader topic, that doesn't mean you can't still create a valuable community for people. Who does your audience want to connect with, but can't? What do they want to be able to share, but they don't have a safe space to do so? What part of their identity do they need a space to express?

A helpful exercise for defining who your ideal member is to ask yourself, “Who doesn't belong?”

Exclude with empathy. Exclude with the knowledge that not everyone has a community to turn to, and while yours might not be perfect for them, it might be the closest thing they can find.

Inclusivity, when done right, ensures that the right voices are in the room, and that there aren't biases, and inequalities, preventing voices from being in the room that should be in the room.

Before you scale your community, put into place values, guidelines, and operations you want to bring to the world. Make DEI a core value from the start. Do it in the early days, before it feels like a problem. By creating these standards early, you'll give your community a shot at having a healthy balance in the future.

We intentionally avoided using jargon, instead using simple, accessible language. Where a lot of people used a negative tone when talking about the opportunity to work in community management, we wanted to make CMX a positive, highly energized space. We wanted our community to feel relatable, down-to-earth, and fun. That personality shows up in everything from the copy on our website, to the design of our events, to how we welcome members into the community.

Every community has its own personality. It's the personality of your community that can truly set it apart from the alternatives. A community can be professional, playful, hungry, empathetic, inspired, laid-back, quirky, funny – anything you could identify in a person, you can identify in a group of people. Are all the existing communities too uptight for your taste? Start a community that's more laid-back and informal.

By creating a community where someone can express a part of themselves safely, in a way they can't express that part of themselves anywhere else, you empower them to discover who they truly are.

We were specific about the language we used. Instead of “community managers,” which has a connotation of a low-level position, we referred to them as “community professionals.”

Rising Tide Society is now a thriving community of over 50,000 small businesses and 475 local chapters. That community has set up Honeybook as a community leader, and drives significant annual recurring revenue.

There are all kinds of criteria you can use to break down your overall community identity into sub-identities: Contribution level. Focus on your most active users, or most loyal customers (e.g., eBay PowerSellers, Airbnb Superhosts). Industry. Focus on your biggest markets, or the industries where members have the biggest need for community (e.g., Google for Education, Hubspot's Inbound Conference). Location. Focus on members who live in specific regions where you have critical

As you break down your community into the different types and levels of contribution, you'll likely find that there are different identities, and needs for community. When designing your community engagement strategy, get clear on which identities you're focusing on.

“Welcome to our community; please make a massive commitment of time and energy!” isn't a very logical way to motivate people to do something, but that's exactly how a lot of communities and community products are designed.

Some members might spend years in your community and never quite get to the point where they feel motivated to increase their commitment. And some members will move up the curve, and back down the curve as their life and needs change, or the community changes.

You'll ultimately need all four levels for a large, mature community to work: leaders, a core group of power members, a consistent group of active members, and an often-larger group of passive members.

An engaged community is an ecosystem made up of people moving up and down the commitment curve over time.

The Pareto principle applies here, which predicts that roughly 80 percent of the content in your community will be created by 20 percent of your members.

There's this rosy picture that people like to paint when talking about community building. A person has an idea for a community, hosts their first event, and it catches like wildfire! It grows and grows until wow, it's a global community! This narrative is misleading. It makes us think that if we can just set up the right circumstances – the right message, in the right space, with the right programming – then people will flock to our communities. It's that “if you build it they will come” energy. They won't come. If a community grows organically from day one, it is the extreme exception to the rule. In reality, every community builder I've ever spoken to talks about how hard

they had to work to get their first members in the door. Most communities start small and stay small, never expanding beyond the first group of founding members. The ones that get big are a direct result of leaders working to recruit new members, spread awareness, and essentially market their community like you would any other product or service.

Our inclination is to make the process of joining our communities as easy as possible. But the easier it is to get into your community, the less value people may apply to membership.