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. Building community is smart business.Erica Kuhl currently runs a 3 million+ member community where members (called Trailblazers) go to connect, learn, have fun, and give back. Erica also runs community programs that fuel vibrant engagement; The Salesforce MVP program, community group program, Salesforce student programs, and Trailblazer placement program.

Watch Erica's talk from CMX Summit 2019.

You can find all the CMX Summit 2019 talks here, and get ready to CMX & Chill.

Notes from Erica's talk

"The power of community is that it envelops a business in its surroundings."Definition: Intrapreneurs: Entrepreneurs working inside an organization. Focused on innovation and creativity. Transforming ideas into profitable ventures."The Permission to PlayBuilding community, you need to ask permission to your customer to “play” with them, to have them in the community."Current community experience part:

• Learn
• Connect
• Have Fun
• Give back

Three flavors of Community Metrics

1. Customer success

What Trailblazer community members do for their companies:

• Improve organization’s productivity
• Improves ability to increase adoption
• Accelerates innovations

2. Business growth.

• This is measured comparing community members that engage with the Trailblazer platform (vote, post, ask or answer questions, etc.) with others who aren't engaging. Correlation, but not causation.
• More pipeline: 2.x more deals generated by community members
• Bigger deal size: 2 times larger deals generated by community members
• Higher Product Adoption: 35% faster than the non engaged
• Lower Attrition: 3 times less likely to lose as a customer, than non-engaged community members
• Answers save millions in Support Deflection.
• Every case = $50 so every deflection (calculated as 20 views of an answer = 1 deflection is worth $50)
• 85% of traffic to their platform comes from Google
• 4000+ questions asked and answered per month
• 83% of questions are answered by the community (peer driven)
• 500k answers views
• $2 million monthly support savings (est.)

3. Personal growth

• Community changes lives.
• Trailblazer: lifelong learner, innovator, disruptor; paves the way for others to do it with them
• People helping people leads to better careers:
• Build professional network
• Build personal brand

Marketers help make the metrics stick!

• Internal employees are a strong driver for the community
• Feature “fellow” employees in internal newsletter - praise them or make visible in some way

Check out all the talks from CMX Summit 2019. Get ready to CMX & Chill.

*This post was authored by the CMX Community in the CMX Summit 2019 Collaborative Notes