S2E7 – How to build a community as a B2B SaaS? with Mike Rizzo

How to build a community as a B2B SaaS? In season one, episode eight of our podcast, we were privileged to host Alex Theuma, where we discussed how to create a community within a B2B SaaS. In this episode, we take the subject matter a notch higher as we host Mike Rizzo, the Founder & CEO of Marketingops and community-led Growth Advisor at Rev Brains.

We discuss the importance of having a thriving community as a B2B SaaS. Mike shares valuable, actionable tactics on How to build a community as a B2B SaaS. 

Establishing a thriving community within the realm of B2B SaaS demands more than just a product or service – it necessitates a strategic and holistic approach. Crafting a robust B2B SaaS community involves creating a space where industry professionals, clients, and stakeholders converge to exchange insights, best practices, and solutions. By fostering meaningful interactions through tailored content, engaging discussions, and collaborative initiatives, companies can forge lasting relationships, enhance customer loyalty, gather valuable feedback, and ultimately shape a community-driven ecosystem that adds substantial value to both their offerings and the industry at large:

• What is community-led growth?
  • Community Led: Being intentional about continuous feedback from community members.
  • Different community types: User community, customer advisory board, influencers, etc.
  • Diversity in community needs is based on user types, personas, or roles.
• Starting a Community:
  • Begin with a hypothesis about a problem you want to solve.
  • Actively engage with the community to validate your hypothesis.
  • Emphasize the importance of talking to potential community members.
  • Community building as a form of user research at scale.

Common Mistakes when building a SaaS community

• Lack of identity and intention for the community.
• Balancing between being a part of the brand’s community or an independent initiative.
• Engage experts or partners to support and add value to the community.

Challenges and Solutions for communities

• Challenge: Enforcing guidelines and addressing unwanted behavior.
• Importance of protecting the community and maintaining its quality.
• Solution: Clearly communicate and reinforce community guidelines regularly.

Framework Mentioned:

• CMX Spaces model for different community types (product, support, etc.).

Key Takeaways:

• Community-led means intentional feedback from constituents.
• A hypothesis-driven approach to building a community.
• Engagement with community members as a form of user research.
• Importance of clear community guidelines and identity.
• Partners and experts can contribute to community success.

Key Timecodes

• (0:29) Show and topic intro
• (1:30) Why you should listen to Mike Rizzo
• (2:17) What is community-led?
• (5:10) The importance of knowing your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
• (6:31) What needs to be in place before starting community-led growth?
• (9:00) Common mistakes companies make while starting community-led growth?
• (13:09) The ideal community-building process
• (18:43) Challenges and obstacles experienced while building a community
• (22:37) The online vs Offline communities
• (27:54) How to grow to 10K MRR.
• (29:45) How to grow to 10M ARR

Transcription

[00:00:00.300] – Show intro

Welcome to Growing a B2B SaaS. On this show, you’ll get actionable and usable advice. You’ll hear about all aspects of growing a business to a business software company. Customer success, sales, funding, bootstrapping, exits, scaling, everything you need to know about growing a startup, and you’ll get it from someone who’s going through the same journey. Now your host, Joran Hofman.

[00:00:30.000] – Joran

Welcome back to the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. Our goal is to help other B2B SaaS founders to grow by giving them all the insights they need from industry experts. In season one, episode eight, we chatted with Alexander Theuma about how to grow a network, and we also discussed a little bit on how to grow a community. Today, we’re going to dive deeper on how to build a community for a B2B SaaS company. We’re going to do this with Mike Rizzo. I learned a new title as Mike is a community-led founder at Marketing Ops, a community for marketing operations professionals. Next to this, Mike is a community-led growth advisor at the RevBrainz. Let’s just get this conversation going. Welcome to the show, Mike.

[00:01:09.440] – Mike Rizzo

Hey, glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me on. Always happy to talk shop about community and marketing apps. It’s always a pleasure. The last time you and I chatted, we got pretty nerdy pretty fast. I’m sure this will be interesting, hopefully for your listeners, too.

[00:01:25.800] – Joran

I think it’s going to be exactly the same thing today. As you mentioned, we already chatted, so I know why should people listen to you. But if I just ask you a really Dutch blunt question, why should people listen to you today?

[00:01:36.650] – Mike Rizzo

I hope that you find what I have to share insightful. I’ve been on a journey building a community-led platform for marketing operations professionals for a couple of years now. I’ve learned a few things about what it takes to build a community of practice. That is what we are, as a community of practice. But I’ve also learned a thing or two about what it takes to build a customer advisory board and a customer community as well, since I did that in a past role. But ultimately, I’m a marketing technologist along the way, so I tend to think a lot about scalability and creating programs that hopefully are not bespoke one-off efforts. Maybe that’s why you should listen to this.

[00:02:15.130] – Joran

Nice. No, that’s a definitely good reason. You have Community led growth advisor, community led founder. I think it’s a new term for many people listening. What in your words does community led mean?

[00:02:28.240] – Mike Rizzo

For me, community led is all about really being very intentional at asking for ongoing feedback from your constituents. In our case, it’s a group of professionals that practice marketing operations. But in some other cases, you may have customers that fit into a certain target demographic or audience or user type. Depending on how you slice up your community and the intention of your community, whether that’s persona-based or role-based, if you’re a SaaS business, think about admins versus non-admins or marketers versus sales reps. I can see a world where you want to communicate pretty differently to those folks, and they’re going to have very different needs, and they’re going to want to have very different conversations. For me, community lead means creating a space to allow those different types of professionals, those different types of customers or users, to share their desires and what their pains are. You may or may not be able to solve those. It might not within the scope of your SaaS product to solve that problem, but it’s good to help them figure out how to potentially go solve that. I think we’re seeing a lot of this in the market right now.

[00:03:39.440] – Mike Rizzo

There’s a big motion around near bound and partnerships and this whole idea of an ecosystem system, referrals and references and partners. Yeah, your product can’t solve everything, but I’ll bet you someone that you work with that you partner with closely might actually be able to help. Community led is about creating a space to be able to hear that and then support that.

[00:03:58.840] – Joran

You mentioned two really interesting things, asking for feedback, so people can really engage with you within the community, but also segmenting the actual community. Based on, for example, as you mentioned, job titles, which is, of course, really important because the marketing person is going to have something different than the sales guy.

[00:04:16.240] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, that’s a pretty basic way to think about it is job title and segmentation. When I was at Mavenlink, now, Contata, when we thought about building our customer advisory board, which, of course, is a very intentional small group of community members and users, there were probably five different permutations of how we might architect that board. It might have been by industry vertical. It could have been by the type of company that they were, like company size. It could have been on the plans that they were using. There was three different tiers of the software. Maybe we pull a board together for each tier. But being intentional about who it is that you’re going to speak to and identifying what it is that you’re building, whether that’s in a small customer advisory board in a large community, that’s really important. You need to be super intentional about who it’s for and why you’re trying to pull them together.

[00:05:09.360] – Joran

In every podcast episode, it comes back your ICP, your ideal customer profile. If you actually know who you’re building it for, then most likely getting that customer advisory board together is going to be a lot easier because you know exactly who you’re actually building your SaaS for.

[00:05:24.720] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, I’d say, if you’re lucky enough, not every company knows who they’re building for yet. I think that’s the important part of community-led. Just to circle back on that topic, community-led isn’t about necessarily who you pull together because you think that’s your ideal customer or you believe that’s your ICP. You should allow the community to guide you on what your ICP should be. And that is community-led. You can lean in on what you believe is a problem set and find out very quickly that it’s not that big of a problem for them. And so I think it’s a give and take of, Look, we’re going to pull together the folks that we believe are our ICP in some community orientation or customer advisory board. But we also want them to give us directionality on, are we solving the right problems for them? And do we need to think about adjacent use cases or industries or whatever it is and make sure that community can lead you in a direction of providing value?

[00:06:20.640] – Joran

Yeah, that’s interesting because my assumption was you need to get your ICP really clear and then you start building community, but you say, okay, you don’t have to have that right now. Maybe then a question as in what needs to be in place or what needs to happen first before you really can start thinking about community-led growth?

[00:06:38.220] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, you need to have a perspective or an opinion. You need to have a hypothesis, I think is probably the better term for it. I often think of community building, customer advisory board building, and heck, marketing operations as a category akin to being a product manager. When you’re a product as a product manager at a B2B SaaS company, or really any company for that matter, you have a hypothesis, you have a theory, maybe there was a bug that was reported or there’s a gap in the market, and you start to do user research right away. A community at scale is massive amounts of user research, whether they’re your current customers or not. In order to get started is you have a general hypothesis of a problem that you’d like to solve, and then you go to market and you try to validate, is this really a problem or not by pulling together what you believe is the right group or constituents, community members, etc, to validate if you’re headed the right direction. You’ll really quickly start to learn whether or not you’re headed down the right path, and you can pivot and adjust from there.

[00:07:46.680] – Mike Rizzo

That’s a common mistake that a lot of folks make. I’m going to say, Pick up the phone and talk to somebody. Of course, we don’t pick up the phone anymore, but just start talking to people about this stuff. It doesn’t need to be perfectly baked. You don’t need to know your exact ideal customer profile in order to start a community. What you need is a hypothesis, and then you just need to start talking to people.

[00:08:07.180] – Joran

Yeah. I think we did a summary episode of all the advice the industry experts gave of season one, and the The big thing was talk to your customers, talk to your customers, talk to your customers. In your case, you’re actually saying, if you want to build up the community, you need to start testing your hypothesis. You need to start not just talking to your customers, but also the people out there, and then just testing.

[00:08:28.560] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, that’s exactly right. We We want to validate that the problems that we want to solve or that we think we want to solve are the right ones to be solving for a particular set of folks, or we might find out that it’s a different group. Then as a business or as an organization, product team, you name it, you can make a decision on, Okay, maybe that wasn’t the right group. The TAM is not large enough, right?

[00:08:49.640] – Joran

Yeah, and for people who don’t know what TAM is, TAM is the total addressable market. Well, how big is the market you’re going after? So that is definitely a good one to always remember when you start building SaaS at the beginning. You mentioned, I guess, already indeed one common mistake, so not talking enough, I guess, to the prospects or people out there. Any other common mistakes companies make?

[00:09:10.120] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, I think it’s weaving back and forth between not Having an identity for your community, depending on what you’re building. If you are building a user community that is a very different intention, and it’s like, why? What did you pull them together for? Is it an innovation-based play where you’re trying to get ideas to make your product better? Is it a group of folks that you want to hopefully gain as influencers for your audience? Those are potentially a different mix. They may be users, but they might not use your product that often, and so they’re not really that helpful for an innovation perspective. But if you think about, Oh, we need to understand the trends that are going on in our industry, you may want to pull in folks that are adjacent to your customer base or could potentially be customers one day or are your customers, but they’re not your day-in, day-out user. They’re closer to the problems that are happening in the industry. That’s a very different type of group that you’re pulling together. When you go back and forth between the idea of what type of community you are and the intentionality of it.

[00:10:17.080] – Mike Rizzo

Is this meant to support our customers? Is it meant for innovation? You just need to stick with one thing and start, I always say, aim small, miss small, and keep that focus for your community member so they know what the purpose of the community is. Adjacent to that and along the same lines is this idea of, is the community your community from your brand, or is it something that you’re doing as a bigger promotion in the market. Inbound is a great example of that. Inbound created a community of marketing experts. Over time, they educated the market on a new methodology, and they pulled people together around the concept of Inbound. Now, Inbound, of course, was popularized by HubSpot, but they did a really nice job of balancing the load between there’s just Inbound and then there’s HubSpot, the product. I think they wove that narrative into their brand ethos in a really healthy way. But if you go back and forth between trying to act like it’s not a part of your brand, but it is, then you leave a sour taste in your community users’ mouths, so to speak. Don’t tiptoe around it. Either let it be your brand’s community or let it be its own thing, but try to be really intentional about how that message weaves into your brand area.

[00:11:38.560] – Joran

Yeah, that makes sense. It comes back to what you said at the beginning, not having an identity. So make sure that you know exactly what the goal is. And a couple of other interesting things you said, as in, I think a lot of people, including myself, sometimes just think building a community is indeed user-based. So you’re going to think about, Okay, we’re going to create a community of our users, maybe even turning it into a customer advisory or somewhat, and then that’s going to be our user base. But I think one thing you said, trends within the market, those are your maybe ideal clients or they know exactly what’s happening. That could be a really good one as well. So they don’t have to be in your user base right now, but maybe later on.

[00:12:17.360] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, exactly right. I think it’s always a great idea to explore, should we pull in experts that are in our field that could potentially help influence the direction of where we’re going next? It’s okay that they’re not our customers. In fact, it’s even better that they’re not currently using our product today because now we are trying to understand what their challenges are and maybe why they’re using some other solution or no solution. They chose spreadsheets over some other thing. It really helps expand your ability to understand the market and the challenges that are faced there.

[00:12:55.360] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. I think everybody is stressed for time, right? We are as well. We’re just making jokes of it. Busy times. So we just made time for the podcast. But making time or engaging in the community is, I guess, another thing. If you have to start from scratch, so you have to build a community for a B2B SaaS company, What would be your approach and why should people join it from their perspective, as in what’s in it for them?

[00:13:22.540] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, again, I’m going to go back to it depends on what your purpose of the community is all about. There’s a acronym Iconium, popularized by a group called CMX. It’s a model, really, a framework. It’s called Spaces. That SPaces model is meant to help you try to make a decision on what the intention of your community is for and maybe how you would try to measure its success. There would be a product-oriented community. This is like product innovation, ideation, those kinds of things. The S in Spaces is support. This is really a place where it’s like, this is a knowledge base. This is a place where you can submit tickets. This is a place where other community members can come in and answer those queries that are coming in from your other customers. The intention of that, of course, is to potentially reduce the load of your support staff. You might measure that through the interactions of the way that they search through your knowledge base and the views of the articles and the number of answers that are coming in from other customers. Depending on what you’re building, that’s how you then go motivate different users.

[00:14:32.740] – Mike Rizzo

Again, if you’re using a proper community forum type of platform, you may find the features and functionality in that particular environment, lend themselves nicely to gamification and celebration of those that are involved. Someone may want to get involved, as I’m sure we’ve all seen in things like Reditus and you name it. There’s a reward system. If you have built an environment that says, Hey, you’re You’re a champion. You’re the number one respondent on all of these different things. We see it really well in the HubSpot support channels. They get these really fancy badges for being the best, most supportive partner in the thing or whatever. Those are motivating factors for a lot of people to participate. I think if you focus in on, again, the intention of why the community is being built and what you’re doing it for, then you’re going to be able to motivate people to get involved in a number of different ways. One of the things that I find really exciting as an opportunity that I didn’t really have a chance to fully try to implement is this idea of in a customer-oriented community that is maybe support-focused to try to reduce the costs of your support staff and really help each other out, learn the product, innovate, those kinds of things.

[00:15:49.740] – Mike Rizzo

There’s actually a really great opportunity to pull in your tangential pieces of the extended community, so to speak. What I mean by that is think about your partner channel. If you were actually to say, Hey, here’s what it’s like when you become a tier one partner, we’re actually going to showcase you as the partner that is going to be there answering the hardest questions in the community for the next three weeks. Every single one of them, we want you to be there answering those questions. It gives you great visibility into you being an expert at this particular product. Imagine an ISV partner for Salesforce. They get to be on a pedestal for a day, being celebrated as experts in their field. That’s really cool. You want to think about different ways to take what you’ve done with the community and allow other parts of your business to participate in a healthy manner. It’s a rising tide. I never had a chance to do that when I was at Maven Lake. But I think for those that tune into this and building community, start thinking outside of the box of just who it’s specifically for and how to go activate other parts of the business to support that same initiative.

[00:16:59.440] – Joran

I I think that’s really clever because in the end, the partner is going to share their knowledge, they’re going to share their information. In the end, they’re going to get something out of it in the long run as well. If you keep sharing your knowledge, keep sharing your value, then it’s almost like a lead generator for them. But you’re still sticking them to your product because they know a lot about your product.

[00:17:19.260] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, exactly. The community gets a ton of value because they’re like, Man, I’ve got this burning question that I really need help with. It’s like, Oh, I know that there’s going to be somebody on the other end during this week to answer that question. So I’m going to do it this day.

[00:17:33.540] – Joran

We’ll add the framework, a link to the framework within the show notes so people can check it out.

[00:17:38.900] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah. Each of them, you really do have to dive in. It’s a great framework, but you do have to dive in each time to try to decide what are we trying to do here. And I think it’s a wonderful jumping off point. The one thing I will say that’s tied to the questions that you’ve been asking me is just because you have a framework to follow doesn’t mean they’re going to be success. You absolutely need to have somebody be responsible responsible for this function. There’s a difference between somebody who’s running the community like a product and then somebody who’s like a community manager, for example, or a moderator. There are wildly different things that they need to pay attention to, and you should think about this investment very seriously because it takes people. Just like Martech takes people to run the technology, a. K. A. Marketing operations professionals, community takes people beyond anything else.

[00:18:28.660] – Joran

Yeah, and that makes sense. I I think it’s going to tie really well into the next question because I think when you don’t have somebody responsible for the community, you’re definitely going to face a lot of challenges. Probably like a common mistake, to not have somebody responsible because then nothing probably is going to happen. Any other challenges or obstacles you face while building up a community? Because not everything is going to be probably rainbows and sunshine, I guess. What happened to you and how did you overcome those?

[00:18:56.740] – Mike Rizzo

Definitely not all rainbows and sunshine. Yeah, it’s getting comfortable. In my case, it was, again, we are a community-led platform for these professionals. We’re a community of practice, and we’re instituting guidelines and best practices for how to be involved in the community. I personally had to get really comfortable with enforcing those different things and realizing that it’s my responsibility to protect everybody else. If we see bad behavior, if we see someone coming in really shouldn’t be there. We have to take that action. Doing that in a way that’s delicate. Learning that slight nuance of, Hey, you’ve done something that doesn’t adhere to our guidelines. You need to be aware of it. This is your warning, and we may have to take action in the future. But getting yourself comfortable as the owner of that community, the moderator, the manager, and realizing that’s actually the reason why your community might actually be successful is that you are sticking to what you say. It doesn’t become unwieldy. I think my hard lesson learned is making sure I got comfortable with that as quickly as possible and then reinforcing it, finding those mechanics to constantly reinforce that. Maybe that means once a month or once a quarter, we go remind our community members, These are our guidelines.

[00:20:23.010] – Mike Rizzo

If you don’t follow them, be aware. I think that’s really important.

[00:20:26.500] – Joran

Yeah, I can even relate to that a little bit already. I’m not in that many communities just because no time at the moment. I do think if you’re in, you have to indeed put the time in as well. But for example, one where I am in, where I’m not actually doing that much, but it’s the product hunt launch group I’m in, and they have really their guidelines. You can’t promote anything yourself. It has to go to full certain procedures. They have guidelines for it. If somebody’s going to do it, it’s going to be banned. They’re going to be kicked out, things like that. It’s really nice that you know exactly what is happening when something happens. If people try to scam the community, you’re the one protecting it. That can be in any way, of course, so they know at least what the quality of the content is going to be pushed in the community as well.

[00:21:11.800] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, that’s exactly right. We build spaces in our particular community to allow for a little bit of flexibility. It’s okay that you… Especially in a world of marketing and marketing operations, people want to talk about what they’re doing. It’s pretty natural. We’re part of a marketing team. I just created a space that’s It’s called Shameless Plug. That’s what that’s for. If you did something awesome, you are promoting a product, you got interviewed on a podcast, whatever, go promote it and celebrate that. But put it in the Shameless Plug channel because everything else is meant to be around discussion around career growth or a particular technology or whatever. But there’s a dedicated space for this. Don’t go like, Shamelessly, plugging all of your stuff everywhere.

[00:21:53.780] – Joran

Do it in the appropriate channels. That’s why they’re there.

[00:21:58.520] – Show outro

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[00:22:38.360] – Joran

I know you’re going to actually organize a physical event in November. I think most of the communities, especially now days are online and you’re actually going to bring them offline. Can you tell a bit more about the decision? And maybe you can also tell a bit more about the event and how you’re going to bring the online towards offline.

[00:22:55.620] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, totally. No, I appreciate the recognition of what we’re doing. So we’ve actually run two years running. We’ve done summer camp. And what that is a 50 person networking event for two and a half days. And it’s deep learning. It’s 50 people in a room, hour long discussion leader takes us through a presentation, and a whole group is contributing in the discussion on how can we learn from each other, guided by a presenter. There’s often about 10 to 12 presenters over those two and a half days. That is so well received because It’s just you to lock yourself out of the world of the noise, our busy schedules, and really focus in on trying to learn from others in the space. We said, How do we 10X that? If there were 50 people at this thing, how do we get 500 people to have as close to a similar experience as possible? That’s what we’re doing at our event in November. It is called Mopsapalooza. Despite the name, it is actually meant to bring together folks from all different RevOps and go-to-market operations backgrounds. That’s the whole point. It’s a festival of learning in the category of marketing and revenue operations, go-to-market operations, if you prefer that term.

[00:24:11.160] – Mike Rizzo

Ultimately, we’re bringing together 500 folks to say, You are learning. It is a community-led event. There are no vendors on stage that got to pay to speak. None of our sponsors got to pay to speak. Instead, we picked all of the content that we thought would be the best for the community, pitched by the community members themselves. We said, great, this is our lineup. We’re really excited about that. I think it’s really important to try to bridge the online world to the offline world because there’s just no replacing what it’s like to connect with people. We all were quarantined for a couple of years, and we got used to this online world we live in. But I’ll tell you what, getting back to hanging out with people and learning from them in real conversations and getting nerdy over a coffee or name your beverage of choice, there’s nothing that replaces that. We’re really excited. But I will say we are doing a hybrid event, so we’re not exactly leaving all the virtual folks alone. And the hybrid activation is like an outsize value. We’re basically saying, Hey, you get to stream like 15 sessions from the in-person event, you get over 15 pre-recorded sessions, and then you get access to all of the recorded content from the in-person event beyond what was streamed to you.

[00:25:25.520] – Mike Rizzo

That virtual experience is going to be pretty well worth it for folks. So we’re still recognizing that not everybody can make it, right? And we still want you to have access to that content.

[00:25:34.000] – Joran

Yeah, I think that’s really nice making it hybrid. But I do agree on you as in, you can’t build relationships always online fully and definitely bring things offline. To give an example, for myself, as in I’m in the SaaStock founder membership group. It’s also an online community, but we also meet physically on offline. Sometimes, even for now the SaaStock event, there’s one day which is purely focused on the community. You get to indeed have a drink with the person, either it’s a tea, coffee, or beer, but at least you can look somebody in the eye. You can go real nerdy pretty quickly, and then you can get to know somebody. And once going back online, you know how somebody is. And that’s just helping to, as you mentioned, deeper the relationships.

[00:26:15.860] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, it’s a shared experience, too. You were both in one place physically at one time, right? You both saw that thing happening, the crazy person that ran down with their crazy outfit on them or whatever. When They gave this wonderful presentation and you got to hear the questions firsthand and then talk on the side of the side. There’s just nothing.

[00:26:37.780] – Joran

Indeed. If you have that, it’s just easier to also get somebody’s advice or just ask him to help you out. I had a lot of the people in the community already come on the podcast because it’s really easy to reach out and then they’re more than happy to share their knowledge.

[00:26:51.740] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing about running community in general is people are willing to share. They really want to. But again, finding that time and that space to do that is hard. We’re all busy. When you can set aside that time, that event space, that physical presence that forces that behavior. I don’t remember ever attending a virtual event where I wasn’t triple working. I’m listening to the event, I’m answering this thing, I’m going back to the community, I’m talking on Slack. I’m very multitasking.

[00:27:24.780] – Joran

Yeah, I’m exactly the same. At one point, I just think I’m just going to leave the event because I’m just working anyway, and then I just get distracted by the event.

[00:27:32.760] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, exactly. Oh, I heard something interesting. I really need to finish this task. I’m just going to go ahead and shut the event deck. I get it. I get that people are busy, but I hope that… I do go back and watch my content that I have access to, but not everybody.

[00:27:46.820] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. We are coming to the final questions, which are basically advice per stage. When we talk about building a community, what advice would you give somebody, a SaaS founder, who is starting out and trying to grow to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:28:04.080] – Mike Rizzo

I would say start with a very small group in that initial batch of community efforts. Focus in on what you believe are your industry experts or your potential customers or even your early beta testers and treat them as special members. Make sure that they get recognized for the value that they’re bringing to you, whether you, as a founder, decide to set aside some options that they exercise because you issue them 10 shares for being a member over a vesting period of a couple of years, or you tell them they’re going to get grandfathered into some product. But just make sure you recognize the value that they’re bringing and keep it small at First, because running a community, as I said, of any size, whether it’s a customer advisory board or a larger scale, it does take time and it does take dedication. You don’t really want to be distracted and let people feel like they’re not being heard or paid attention to. Keep it small at first, unless you have the budget to be able to hire somebody as a community manager. Then even then, make sure that they’re focused very intently on providing value to them just as much as that group is providing value to you.

[00:29:14.220] – Joran

Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:29:16.360] – Mike Rizzo

By the way, don’t forget to ask them what value is to them. It’s okay if you don’t have the answer, right? What could I give you in exchange for your time? Sometimes people will be like, Nothing. Sometimes they’ll be like, Give me 1% of your company. You’re like, Get out Yeah, but at least ask them.

[00:29:32.420] – Joran

And that’s the beauty with the community, right? You can ask them anything. If you get them in the community, you can basically ask them anything. Or before, you can just ask, Indeed, what do we want in return? Or what is value to you?

[00:29:42.840] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, community-led, right?

[00:29:44.540] – Joran

Nice. When we go past the 10K monthly recurring revenue, and this is a big jump, when we go towards 10 million ARR, what advice would you give SaaS founders here?

[00:29:54.440] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, I would say start leaning in on what is the staff requirement, the people manager side of it look like for managing any type of the community that we talked about during this show, whether that’s product, innovation, content, whatever it is. Make sure that you look at the headcount that you’re going to need in order to run those effectively, and then make sure you are investing in the right technologies. But I don’t mean just pick a forum product or whatever. There isn’t a right or wrong way to do… There’s probably a wrong way, but there isn’t the perfect solution for any one of your initiatives. I would say just make sure you have somebody involved that can try to take what is going to come from this community effort and tie that back into the business. Their mission shouldn’t just be that you have a successful community for whatever its purpose is. It should also be, how do we communicate that value back into the partner channel, back into marketing, back into customer success, back into support or sales or product or wherever it needs to go, make sure that data can flow back to those other key stakeholders in your business and really invest in that motion.

[00:31:07.980] – Mike Rizzo

It’s community often sits on an island. Try to make it more a part of the business and have it roll into some portion of the business. Ideally, not marketing. I come from marketing. I get it. You want to use it. But marketers, inevitably, their KPIs are all about pipeline and leads and all that other stuff. I think I think when a community is built for the intention of driving more revenue, you’re probably missing the point. Maybe have it roll into a different org with some different KPIs. But don’t forget to pass back some information when the opportunity is right. If you see a problem that a customer has in the community, I think it’s okay to communicate that back over to the marketing and sales and customer success team for whatever cross-sell, upsell, motion you want to try to go after. But that’s not the purpose of the community.

[00:31:56.760] – Joran

You said, don’t put it in marketing, don’t put it somewhere else. In the org, if I’m going to maybe ask a tough question and maybe it’s hard to answer, but if you have to put it in one department, which one would that be?

[00:32:09.380] – Mike Rizzo

It really depends. I do like it rolling into product or customer success. Success as long as the customer success angle has the support arm to it. Not so much the customer success is really just a channel to do cross-sell/upsell. It’s when you could attach yourself to the CS side of the business that is like adoption, value, that piece of it. Because don’t get me wrong, at some point, your client success team should, in theory, be responsible for more revenue on the books than net new pipeline. That’s your ideal. Ideally, you go from net new pipeline is everything that we need to great, we have it, now we need to retain it. And the cross-sell upsell motion is actually more revenue each year than the net new pipeline. That’s where you want to go. But if you do attach a community to the ClientSuccess org, don’t lose line of sight on this is not a way to try to find just pure revenue opportunities. So you can play a dangerous game there, but I do think it orients itself nicely to that division. And products may really appreciate it being there, too. But I probably lean more on client success.

[00:33:20.500] – Joran

Makes sense. And in the end, coming back to the exact beginning of the conversation, make sure you have a goal set for your community. So give it an identity and then put it in the right org, which probably is indeed CS in my opinion as well. One final question, what is the one thing you wish you knew 10 years ago?

[00:33:39.680] – Mike Rizzo

The one thing I wish I knew 10 years ago. I wish I knew how much the, what I would call the market texture, can be adapted and adopted to the needs of the business. Not in a haphazardly way. Ten years ago, we were almost trying to solve these one-off point solution problems rooms and stuff. I wish I would have, or I guess it just takes time to learn this as your career develops. The knowledge I have now about being able to see the bigger picture of how you can orchestrate the information and the data that comes into your business and how that could support all these other motions. I wish I saw a little bit of that 10 years ago, but I don’t know that we were all there yet either. As technology providers, certainly not my skill level yet. I didn’t have enough exposure, but I’d say, Gosh, yeah, there’s usually something bigger to be able to go after when you’re looking across all these tools that you’re using, and how does that actually enable your go-to-market function?

[00:34:39.760] – Joran

Nice. Nice. Makes sense. Cool. If people want to get in contact with you, Mike, how would they do so?

[00:34:46.120] – Mike Rizzo

I am Mike at marketingops. Com. If you want to email me, you have any questions. I’m also Mike D, as in David, Rizzo, R-I-Z-O. You can find me on LinkedIn if you do the Mike D Rizzo. That would probably be the place where I’m most active, to be honest with you. Outside of, of course, the Mopro’s community. Come join us for free in Slack. If you’re a marketing operations or revenue operations professional, please don’t come in if you’re anybody else.

[00:35:14.840] – Joran

Nice. Indeed. Stick to the ICP of the community. We’re going to link to your LinkedIn profile. We’re going to link also towards a link of the Spaces Framework. We’re going to link to the event of the name, which is really hard to remember. So say it one more time.

[00:35:29.340] – Mike Rizzo

Absolutely. It was November 5 through 8 in Anaheim, California, right behind Disneyland.

[00:35:34.340] – Joran

Nice. For all RevOps people, check it out. Cool. Thanks again for coming on the show, Mike.

[00:35:40.100] – Mike Rizzo

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me, and hopefully we could do it again sometime.

[00:35:44.360] – Joran

Definitely. We will.

[00:35:46.370] – Show outro

Thanks. You’ve been listening to Growing a B2B SASS. Yoron has been ahead of customer success before founding his own startup. He’s experiencing the same journey you are. We hope you’ve gotten some actionable advice from the show, and we hope you had fun along the way. We know we did. Make sure to like, rate, and review the podcast in the meantime. To find out more and to hook up with us on our social media sites, go to www. Getreditus. Com. See you next time on growing a B2B SaaS.