#discussions
Thread
Hello! I’m working on launching an advocacy program in the B2B space that will bring together innovators and thought leaders in the industry. We’re starting with a few select customers and planning to grow the community over the next few years. If anyone has experience launching a new community like this, I’d love to chat and hear about your approach and what made it successful!
Hi Sarah, is this for your customers or anyone in the B2B space? I’ve launched and managed several communities in the B2B SaaS world, so I can answer some questions or give you some ideas.
It’s just for our customers to start off with, then we would expand over the next few years to bring in any thought leaders in the industry. For now, I’m mostly curious how to effectively launch it and get buy-in from the initial members!
Would love to chat and hear your thoughts though!
What I generally advise is to start with a small group of people who commit to making this happen. I call this the beta or founding group. I would suggest 5-30 people depending on their commitment levels (generally you can get internal team members to commit more time to your efforts, but if you find the right customers they’ll be very motivated as well.
A community grows slowly and overtime, so you want to start by bringing this group together, getting to know them, and helping them succeed in their goals for building this community. Don’t worry, it’s not as difficult as it sounds.
What I’ve found to be very helpful is hosting customer discussion sessions. You choose a topic that is important to customers and invite them to join a call to discuss it. In the call you facilitate discussion, connection, and support. Once you’ve started these calls you’ll be able to invite more customers and slowly build the community from this approach.
Once you’ve done this you can launch a discussion forum, now you can encourage people to connect in between calls. As you see engagement start inviting more customers to join and as you help them connect and learn they’ll be more active. Now you can start to promote it more regularly on your customer newsletter, in webinars, across customer success, and everywhere else.
That is exactly along the lines of what I’ve been planning so that’s very helpful to hear! I’d definitely love to chat more about the discussion calls to understand how to successfully facilitate them and get people engaged.
We can do that. Let me see what I can set up. I’d love to do a group call.
Thank you!
We are hopping on a call now, maybe it will come up