Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!
Former VP of Community at Salesforce Erica Kuhl joins us on this episode, Erica started the Trailblazer at Salesforce which has become the gold standard of both online and offline community. This is one of those episodes that you need to relisten to with a notepad because there are that many strategies we covered. We will talk about the key to growing an in-person community, building a community team, the best metrics for community and so much more. Take a listen!
To Long; Didn’t Listen
Derek Andersen:
Welcome to the C2C Podcast. I am your host Derek Andersen. After holding my first event in 2010, I went on to create Startup Grind, a 400 chapter community based in over a hundred countries. Along the way, I discovered the greatest marketing tool of all time, your customers, yet I couldn't find anyone sharing how to build a community where people could experience your brand in person or at scale. On this show, we talk with the brightest minds and companies on the planet about how to build customer to customer marketing strategies and create in-person experiences for your brand and customer before your competitor does.
Derek Andersen:
Our next guest, Erica Kuhl, set the standard for building a world-class branded community. When we filmed this interview, Erica was the VP of community at Salesforce, and started the Trailblazer Community at Salesforce 10 years ago, which has changed the way companies look at community. She recently left and has started consulting companies on how to do the same thing. Now, Salesforce has over a thousand in-person community groups and millions of online members. In this chat, we talked about the four best metrics for community, how they got to a thousand community groups, and what she would do differently. Take a listen. Okay Erica, tell us what Salesforce is and what your role is there.
Erica Kuhl:
Salesforce is a customer relationship management and a platform, helps us connect to our customers in a whole new way. I ran our Trailblazer Community that is made up of things like our community in-person groups all over the globe, our Salesforce MVP program, our online community and student and placement programs.
Derek Andersen:
Where did the name trailblazer come from?
Erica Kuhl:
So it actually came from actually my boss. She thought it would be good to unite our customers and give them a name. They've always been united by this common passion and love for Salesforce and for changing lives and for being lifelong learners and pioneers, and the word that that is is a trailblazer, and so it stuck and made sense. We put it on a couple hoodies, and we had the zipper come right in between the trail and the blazer, and it just worked. It all of a sudden made you feel that you were part of something much bigger.
Derek Andersen:
It's amazing that it's such a familiar word, and it's a word used for all sorts of different things, but it really feels now like you can't say trailblazer without saying Salesforce. So it's kind of interesting how this whole branding and marketing and messaging and sort of the mission, and it feels like this authenticity around the people and the customers, the people at Salesforce, also the customers that use Salesforce are all sort of wrapped up in the identity of this sort of Trailblazer Community thing.
Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, you're right. We have our own internal Trailblazers as well. We earn our badges, we become rangers on our platform. We do amazing things to give back internally too, and we earn that hoodie. We don't give that hoodie out to just anybody, you need to earn it. We are part of it, because our Trailblazer Community is not just our customers, it's our partners, it's our developers, it's our employees, it's all of us.
Derek Andersen:
True story. I was in the San Francisco International Airport a few months ago, and I was taking an international flight, and I saw this random person wearing a Trailblazer hoodie, and I walked up to him and was like, "I know these people." And he was like, "Whoa, easy there buddy." It was like this immediate thing that ... And I've seen so many of them around the Bay Area and in airports and other places, but it's really like, even something as simple as that, like the hoodie, and it's a special thing. People are really-
Erica Kuhl:
Proud of it.
Derek Andersen:
They're really proud of it.
Erica Kuhl:
They wear it, and we're not forcing them to wear it. They want to wear it. They love that identity and what they did to earn it and part of it. Yeah, it's really cool.
Derek Andersen:
So you have this amazing online community, also this amazing C2C community, why do you think getting the community together in real life is important instead of just making online do all the work or cover everything you need to help them?
Erica Kuhl:
I've always thought that this was the special sauce to community, to making community home is the combination of the two, because nothing really can replace face to face. It's amazing for scale, online is great. It's amazing to pull an entire world together, because we can't all be face to face all the time, but there's just something really special about building connection locally. And so not only that, you build this wonderful local network. Because Salesforce is sometimes difficult and sometimes you feel alone, and we can't be everywhere running our events, we run brilliant events ourselves, but we can't be everywhere. So this allows them to build their own networks locally and feel like they have a population to support them.
Erica Kuhl:
But also, it allows them to also interact more authentically online, because now there's a face and it's not just a login or a profile, you know the person behind it. And so you interact more with respect when you know there's a person behind that profile. So I think that's a really cool reason why it works really well.
Derek Andersen:
It seems too like there's so much discussion about, the loneliness epidemic and how we've become less and less happy the more and more connected we get online, and we have fewer friends than we've ever had in the history of humanity. And so it's almost counterintuitive in some ways, like, "How could I possibly get so many people together in person that it has a meaningful impact?" But the Trailblazer Community, you have over a thousand groups. I mean, I can't even hardly wrap my head around it.
Erica Kuhl:
I know. I barely can either.
Derek Andersen:
Hosting hundreds of events a month.
Erica Kuhl:
300.
Derek Andersen:
300 events a month. I mean, what do you think has made this even possible? What have you done to build something so global, and what seems to be at such an insane scale?
Erica Kuhl:
I think we kept the bar really low. We made it real frictionless to be a part of it. Basically, when we said, "Do you want to do this?" And if they said yes, we let them do it. So we didn't add a whole bunch of layers of bureaucracy. If they had the desire to run a group in their local community, we didn't vet that there was a certain number of customers in the area, or how much product was being sold. It was like, "Do you want to do this?" And then we said yes. And then we gave them the tools. We made the tools super easy. We made sure we had great onboarding documentation. We just made it super, super simple, as simple as we can for them to do it. We pay for them to get everything we put, a swag store together for them to just go and order the things that they need.
Erica Kuhl:
I think all these things are super critical, and we give them a brand. So they can then start building their own brand in their local network and be known and even change their careers. So I think those elements really drove growth, and I think our company also started catching on to the fact that this was an incredible channel of content. There are thousands of people that are wanting content and opting in to run these groups, and they are distributed where all of our sales are or all of our customer success, and they can all get engaged locally. So it was a nice combination, I think, of all those things.
Derek Andersen:
One of the things I'm so impressed by what you do and your team does at Salesforce versus any other companies and communities I see is you're really data driven, metrics driven, ROI driven. And because of this, you have one of the biggest community teams that I've seen across the technology industry anyways, is because you seem to have systematically sort of proven these things along the way to get more, more investment. But are there any metrics, even off the top of your head, of things that you think about around the community that you could just share with us about the value that it creates or has created for you, or just the things the community has created? Are there any numbers or anything like that, that you think of?
Erica Kuhl:
How long do you have? There's lots of numbers. One thing that you asked is the success and growth of the community group program, and I think that did come with attaching a value to it, because I think it was hard for us for a long time. We had distributed platforms, and often people would come to me and say, "How many meetings are you running?" Or, "Is there a meeting in my area?" Or a sales guy would be like, "I'd love to go and attend." And I wouldn't know. I knew, but I didn't know. I didn't really know. And now, I can run a report myself, and I'm not even in the data every day, but my team has set me up with reports that if somebody is like, "How many groups are in the Midwest region?" I click a button and run a report, and I can tell them in a second how many groups are in that region. So that's cool in and of itself.
Erica Kuhl:
But other that have been really, really instrumental to that growth, that team growth, have been able to tie to our business value for our company. So being able to say that people that engage in our community, in the attendees groups, they are driving larger deals within Salesforce, they're creating more pipeline. They're adopting our products faster, and they're staying longer as a customer. And these are critical factors to our business, and they matter to every customer facing ... They matter to everybody, actually, across the company, and also case deflection. So these numbers are not small numbers. We're talking two and a half times more pipeline. We're talking two times larger deals. We're talking 35% higher product adoption. We're talking staying customer for three times longer, so these are no joke metrics.
Erica Kuhl:
And you can't argue with it. And if you want more, you just add a little bit more to the team and we just add bigger metrics. It's a formula at this point.
Derek Andersen:
It seems like there's a hundred different ways you could run these programs, and ways you could roll them out in different kind of content formats, things, but if I go to the Trailblazer, San Francisco kind of community, I see something for me as a developer, I see something for me as a marketer, I see something for me as an admin, I see something for me if I'm in a university. There's all these different touch points and different kinds of events and virtual things and impersonal things that I can do. If I'm starting a community or trying to really find a secret sauce, where do I even start with that? I can't do all of those things to begin with, and I'm sure that grew over time, but where should I start to just figure out what's going to work for me?
Erica Kuhl:
Well, I think you have to be laser focused on what you're doing it for in the first place. I knew exactly what I was doing it for in the first place, and it hasn't changed, it's just grown. But you do have to start small and then you have to start super strong. So whatever you do, whatever matters to you when you're starting it, you have to just do that incredibly well. For me, I was an instructor and I taught admins how to set up Salesforce, that's what I did my first job at Salesforce. And I saw a need for when they left the classroom to have a place where they could go to continue connecting with each other outside the classroom.
Erica Kuhl:
I just thought it was a shame that we didn't have this. So my goal was to have them have a place where they can answer each other's questions and continue sharing information once they left the classroom. I was focused on that, and that alone. And then you can quickly get diluted in things, but that was something I could measure, and that was something that I could do, and then that just sparked more and more growth, and I just added on from there. So you just have to be super focused on what you're doing it for in the first place.
Derek Andersen:
Could you just explain how you structure your community teams and the people that work inside of your team? Just like, what do you have people doing? What kinds of roles and jobs? I mean, not specific of each single person, but just generally, how do you structure things?
Erica Kuhl:
It's changed. It used to be broken down programmatically. So when we had somebody running the online community, we had someone running the community group program, we had someone running the MVP program. And we reached a level of maturity where they were becoming siloed and they started competing against one another, and that's the level of maturity that our community ... So now they're broken down functionally, instead of siloed in programs, everybody does everything across all of the programs. So they have all this knowledge that they share across, and it's been such a great change for our organization. Our community managers, they all do similar things, but we have them focused one, primarily on content.
Erica Kuhl:
We have one focused primarily on product management engagement, engagement within the company. And then we have one strategically focused on engagement in the community. So they have shared responsibilities and that's their focus areas, so that's just the community. And then because students is a newer part of our suite of stuff that we're working on, right now, we have that programmatically broken down until it reaches fidelity and reaches maturity, then we'll do that functionally as well. And then we have a placement, because the ultimate goal for us is to get our Trailblazers into amazing jobs, into their dream jobs, that's one of the major goals. And so we have someone trying to crack the code on that.
Erica Kuhl:
And then finally, we have operations, because this has changed the game for us, this operations. These numbers are crazy. This scale is massive. Our community alone has over a million and a half, almost nearly two million members, and then the groups, and then the leaders and the MVPs, we need operations. And so we have a brilliant operations, little mini power team as well.
Derek Andersen:
So we like to finish these podcasts by just asking if you could tell us about a community that you love and why you love it, maybe outside of Salesforce. I know you love Salesforce committee, but what's another community that you're part of that you just think is doing a good job?
Erica Kuhl:
I'm super inspired by consumer communities, actually, more than anything, like I'm a huge fan of Strava. I think Strava does a brilliant idea. They have brilliant everything actually, about Strava. The way they engage, the way they motivate, the way they filtered, the way you can connect and share, it's just a fabulous community. I think Peloton does a pretty awesome job as well. I really like the way Airbnb does their super hosts and their hosts, and the way that they scale and rate. So I pull a lot of these things from these consumer, really innovative, cutting edge companies like that and try to build that framework into ours.
Derek Andersen:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listen to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod. Again, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.