Community has come a long way but most organizations are still struggling with measuring the value and proving ROI. Hear Erica Kuhl, VP at Salesforce, share the evolution of Community becoming a strategic differentiator in the market and also how they were able to prove direct value of community to their customer’s organizations - in ways that will both shock and delight you. Erica Kuhl currently runs a 3 million+ member community where members (called Trailblazers) go to connect, learn, have fun, and give back. She also runs community programs that fuel vibrant engagement including: Salesforce MVP program, community group program, Salesforce student programs, and Trailblazer placement program.

Build alignment and gaining buy-in with product leadership. - Build a reasonable & scalable process from the start with product leadership & ops - Gain respect and being transparent with your community about product co-innovation - Make product managers heroes in your community - Change the dynamic at an organization to value co-innovation with community. SPEAKERS: Erica Kuhl CEO & Founder Erica Kuhl Consulting Stephanie Grice Head of Global Community and Customer Advocacy Atlassian ____________________________ CMX is the world's largest network of community professionals. Our mission is to help community professionals thrive through world-class tools, training, and resources. CMXHub: www.cmxhub.com Join the conversation: https://cmxhub.com/community/ Get the newsletter: http://cmxhub.com/subscribe Join an event: http://events.cmxhub.com/

Join us for an interview with Erica Kuhl, who is the CEO & Strategic Community Consultant at EKC. She tells us all about the early days of 'community' building and how the burgeoning field is a great place for Catalysts to work in. We discuss flying under the radar to build out proof points and how it is the Catalyst's job to help others understand the value of what they've done, not wait for others to notice and understand. In Before the Lock is her podcast, where she talks about community, customer experience, and leadership at scale. Check it out here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-before-the-lock/id1509551373 Original music by Lynz Floren.

Join Derek Anderson, Co-Founder of Bevy alongside Atlassian Sr. Director of Customer Engagement, Leslie Lee, Salesforce VP of Community Erica Kuhl and Slack Developer Marketing Manager Elizabeth Kinsey for a session on building communities. TEMPLATE - Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software. Subscribe for weekly updates: https://bit.ly/2IlxeYl Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976 Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/ Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Erica Kuhl established and led Salesforce’s Trailblazer community programs for 17 years, growing the community from zero to 3 million. Along the way, she transformed her learnings into core strategies, which she now applies to communities across market spaces, sizes, and scopes as a community consultant at her own business, Erica Kuhl Consulting. She recently sat down to share her experience with the Uncommon community. Uncommon is the community-driven program for community-driven people, powered by Common Room. Learn more at https://commonroom.io/uncommon Choose your own chapter: 00:00 - Introducing Erica Kuhl, Strategic Community Consultant 00:26 - Two best community metrics to measure: Business North Star & Health and Wellness 03:07 - Starting Salesforce's Trailblazer program 08:20 - Winning internal stakeholder buy-in 10:51 - Most closely aligned org functions: Customer Success & Product 15:30 - Evaluating which program(s) and channels to build first 21:22 - Identifying your key persona: Erica & Salesforce's Changemaker Persona 24:12 - Where the Community team should sit in an org 34:24 - Which companies can benefit most from community 38:34 - The 'Why' as the first step to building a community strategy 40:06 - Ruthless prioritization: Using the V2MOM strategic framework 44:29 - Hiring community team members: What to look for 48:22 - Her podcast: In Before the Lock with Brian Oblinger 53:16 - Uncommon Support: Erica chooses the National MS Society

Derek sat down with 3 of the best community builders in the world to talk about how they built their communities. The guests were Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack), Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) and Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce). They talked about how they got started and got the initial buy-in to create the program, what strategy they used to gain traction and get people to their events and how they were able to measure their success for themselves and to prove value to the C-Suite. Here are some of the top tidbits from each of our guests. Elizabeth Kinsey (Developer Marketing Manager at Slack) (starts at 15:21) Not only did Elizabeth build community with the people attending her events at Branch Metrics but also she did that with the panelists who spoke. She focused on the speakers being extremely knowledgeable in the space to provide a lot of value and being very diverse to show the attendees that the community was like them. That went a long way in both building the brand and setting the expectation that the events would always provide value and that they really cared about showing that anyone no matter their background could attend the events. Leslie Lee (Senior Director, Customer Engagement at Atlassian) (start at 12:24) Atlassian is invested in getting feedback from their users and get NPS (net promoter scores) from their users, knowing this Leslie and her team measured NPS on customers who attended community events and didn’t. They found strong correlation with that showed NPS was higher when customers attended community events. Erica Kuhl (VP of Community at Salesforce) (starts at 10:30) Instead of assuming what the community what Erica asked the community “What do you want?”. The answer she got was that they wanted to get connected to each other and get connected and become apart of the brand. The ability to put Salesforce on Linkedin, featuring them at their Dreamforce conference was extremely meaningful and motivating for them. (starts at 18:18) Erica knew that the future of community would be data-driven so she decided to attach the community metrics with the top 4 business metrics that Salesforce had which were: Pipeline, ACV (Average Contract Value), Adoption and Attrition. By doing that she was able to prove that the already beloved community was irreplaceable to the business.