Why Community is the New Go-To-Market Strategy

Yurii Lazaruk

00:00Welcome to the Community ROI Podcast. Here, senior community experts, founders, and level managers tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about how community impacts business growth. By listening to these conversations, you'll get actionable steps on how to connect community goals with business goals to skyrocket business growth while still bringing extreme value to community members. My name is Yurii. I help people and brands shine through communities and personal connections. And my guest is Paul Jones, a nearbound marketing pioneer and founder of Bridgio, where he helps B2B brands replace outdated inbound and outbound tactics with community-driven growth and build authentic connections that drive revenue, and with whom we've connected because of amazing Chris Catania in his community book. So welcome, Paul.

Paul Jones

00:48Go, Chris. Yeah. Thank you. I'm excited.

Yurii Lazaruk

00:51Super happy to meet you and also to talk to you. It's always very, very interesting to talk with professional community professionals who at some point somehow influenced other community professionals because I truly believe that in a community world, it's kind of small if we compare it to other niches. So everyone kind of influences everyone. And then it's like we have a snowball of all this community stuff. And before we jump into this community part, so tell me, what's nearbound marketing?

Paul Jones

01:19So nearbound marketing is, so you have outbound, you have inbound. And a couple of years ago, I didn't come up with this term, but you started to hear of this new term nearbound. And nearbound marketing is, all right, outbound was let us go out to find the customer and bring them into business. So heavy on content generation, heavy on SDRs, if you had a whole inside sales team. Basically, the strategy with inside sales was let's get a huge list and let's annoy the hell out of people calling them to try to sell them our one point solution. So both of those strategies, I think, are really simple and simple, really basic.

02:06So nearbound is, well, what's near to us? Where are our customers near to us? Where are they engaging? What's near to us, where our customers are, that we can be as well? That's nearbound. So heavy on partnerships, and then also communities.

02:25Communities are near to where you are as a business. So you look at the landscape of the total addressable market, you look at the market in general, and you just simply ask the question, where are our customers gathering? Where are the water coolers where our customers are? And you can go near to, near to those places through partnerships, or you can create your own water cooler as a business in the form of a community.

Yurii Lazaruk

02:52You told me before the recording that you've been in this industry for a long time already, and you've seen how community developed. So I'm curious, what are the main milestones that you've seen during your experience, professional experience?

Paul Jones

03:06With milestones in terms of community, or milestones in terms of just different go-to-market strategies?

Yurii Lazaruk

03:15Let's go for both, you know, because I feel like at some point, community entered this go-to-market strategy. It was not a point before, but I feel like somewhere it entered. So I'm curious, like, what is your perspective on it?

Paul Jones

03:28Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I think, I don't know where to start on this one, but there's so much to talk about here. And I think it's really fascinating if you look at the last seven years. So I'll start with this.

03:42In all the business communities that I run, I facilitate them. And typically, they're executive groups that come together. And we have, they're all communities of practice. So it's like a mastermind, but a little bit more developed.

03:56And all last year, AI dominated the conversation. And what's happening, I think, is people are kind of getting burned out on AI. It's here to stay, obviously. It's something we need to tackle and approach. But this year, I'm finding that it's a little bit different.

04:13I was attending someone that is a really big speaker. He was speaking and he was applying for South by Southwest, which here in the United States is one of the biggest conferences ever. And what their focus is this year is the audience wants to, last year, the audience wanted to know about AI. This year, the audience wants to know about connection.

04:37So we are seeing, and I think since the dawn, well, since digital, the digital era has really taken over, I think that even subconsciously, people are more focused on connection. Connection is the single best predictor of your happiness in life. It will keep away depression. It will keep away mental illness. It will make you happier. The loneliness epidemic here in the United States is a big part of all of this, right? And so that is the underlying engine, I think, that is driving a lot of innovation.

05:17That coupled with, and you asked me about the history, marketing just isn't converting like it used to. So we were in this stage, you know, 10 years ago where marketing was doing really, really well. Ads were coming on. Everyone was trying all these different things. We were generating a ton of content. The whole, like, content is king is still something that a lot of people talk about, right?

05:45So where we've come now to is we're faced with, well, marketing isn't doing as well as it used to. Marketing is floundering. It's one of the most turned over positions in the executive suite. Doesn't matter which company you're a part of. That is the lowest tenured position in the company for a lot of reasons. But I think that that's also showcasing that the way that we are going to market needs to fundamentally change.

06:16And so if you look at what humans need and then what we've done in the past and combine that with, well, what can we do today? How can we solve these problems? And you look at it more holistically, like, well, what do human beings need? They don't need to consume content. There is no need to consume content, right? What they need is connection.

06:39And that is where community comes in. And I think community is such a huge, important part of this. And so five years ago, you start to see community really ramp up. It was crazy. Just that word became like a buzzword that everyone got really annoyed with.

06:58And people get all, you know, bugged about the definition of community and for good reason, you know, because you have influencers calling their audiences communities. That's not a community, right? So it's important for us to understand what it actually is. But I think all of this is just speaking to this underlying need for connection. And so you had community come onto the scene.

07:22In the very beginning, all of these very large businesses understood, and if you look at it just on paper, right, if you have customers, you need those customers, you need to give the support to those customers. Typically, support is going to be under cost of goods, which is going to eat into your margin, which isn't going to make you look good to investors. And also, if you're growing as a company and as a business, your support team is actually going to have to grow with your customers. So it's going to become one of the biggest cost centers ever. So a business is smart and they're going, ah, that's not great.

08:00And then community all of a sudden becomes this really shiny thing where it's like, oh, we can create and manage a community for support deflection. That way, our support team doesn't have to grow. COGS can stay relatively lower and we can operate more efficiently. So I think that's where community really started to pick up traction initially was in support deflection.

08:23And now it's, we're kind of moving across the landscape going, well, it's not just support deflection. We're actually getting a lot more out of these groups than, than just that. We're, we're getting, you know, product ideas. We're, we're, we're getting people going out and talking about our product. We're getting involvement. Like there, there's just so many, so much more benefit.

08:44And so I think it's a very exciting time at this point because, um, the old playbooks had a life that they had an expiration date to them. Um, and, and this new playbook is, it's almost like, uh, it's almost like maintaining a garden, right? Like you're growing something that's going to bear fruit and you can just keep growing it. It's, it's not like you're going out and cutting down, you know, and gathering the fruit and then moving on. It's, you're, you're choosing to stay.

09:15And this goes back to nearbound. You're choosing to live in the market that you're at and make that market better through community. So I don't, I don't actually know if I answered your question, Yurii, but, um, I just think that the history of how community is coming into the market and how people are using it, it's really exciting. And just the timing of everything has just been perfect.

Yurii Lazaruk

09:37You know, when you were talking about connection and the loneliness epidemics, you reminded me of this Harvard Study of Adult Development that they were doing for over 70 years. It's already, and it clearly show that human connections, like, makes your life happier and longer. So it's not like something that we come up with to invite people to community, like, hey, go build communities, blah, blah, blah.

10:00And also if we're talking about connections, communities, there are very different types of communities who we're talking about, like communities in your neighborhood, or for example, community, professional community around some product or around some service or that some companies built. And so I'm curious if we're talking about the definition, you already gave a little bit of glimpse of idea, like what's exactly community for business. And since like, still from your perspective, what's your definition of a community for business?

Paul Jones

10:28All right. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and I'm going to give you an answer and it might not be the answer I have a year from now, but I love this question. And I think that we should have panels debating and discussing this. If I think about community at its core, and I think this is what really differentiates community from audiences or from large gatherings of people, is that in a community, every member of that community has the potential to provide value to every other member in that community. I think that is what differentiates community from anything else.

11:07So I do a lot, I, uh, you can see here, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm a big river person. I, I love river trips. I was a river guide for a really long time and I have my river family. I have my river community and river trips are really fascinating, especially multi-day river trips.

11:25Number one, um, here in the US you, you have to apply for permits. So you can't just go on a multi-day river trip. You, for all the good, the great, amazing whitewater rivers, you have to apply and it's rare. And then someone pulls a permit. So then they get like 16 spots. And then, so, so then they, they put together their team, right?

11:47And, and you either have the skills to row down the river. You either have the gear or you're just a great add to the total chemistry of the group. Like, so on a river trip, every single member, every single participant has the ability to provide value and is trying to provide value to the rest of the group.

12:09So what could that look like? Well, for me, I, uh, have, I, I, I can navigate so I can row on the oars. I have the gear. So that provides value. So that's going to get me into a river trip with my group, right?

12:23But when I bring like friends and stuff, I've, I've brought some friends when, when we first started with my little river family and I was telling them, hey, look, you've got to figure out a way to provide value to this group if you want to come back. And I have one friend, he is amazing. He didn't know anything about river trips. He didn't know any, I brought him on one trip and I told him, I was like, hey, you got to go to Mama Christie's boat and you need to help her unload because she always has the kitchen.

12:51When you go down a river trip, you, you pull over onto a beach and you have to unpack the boats and you have to set up the kitchen and you have to go set up your tent. What most people will do is they will grab their tent, go set up their tent first. And I was like, Doug, you got to go unpack the kitchen. And if you do that, you're going to get in on this group, right?

13:13And so the entire five-day river trip, he is going to Mama Christie's boat. He's unpacking the kitchen. He's pulling everything out.

13:20He's working harder than anyone else because he realized, wow, I don't have a boat. I can't row. I need to figure out a way to provide value to this group. Well, we've been doing that for three years. He's been on, on trips.

13:32And it was really funny because usually someone calls me, says, hey, Paul, we got this trip. Do you want to end on this? I'm like, sure. And then they give me an extra spot. I call him.

13:42Well, one day I got a call. Hey, you want to get on this river trip? I'm like, absolutely. And they're like, can, I'll give you two extra spots. It's like, great.

13:50I call my buddy, Doug. He already got the call. He was already invited. In fact, he got invited before I got invited, right?

13:58So the reason why I share that story is because that to me is, is really a great, it offers a lot of clarity into what a community actually is. And it is, it's not something that you passively participate in. It is that you first have to recognize that you have the ability to provide value to the group and then figure out how you're going to provide that value. And it's in that, it's in giving that effort where you really start to feel the connection. You can't passively not, you don't get connection without effort. And so the effort is in participation and trying to help other folks.

14:36And so I actually, Yurii, think it applies to neighborhood communities. And I also think it applies to business communities. The difference, though, is what's, what's, what's, what's our, what's our focus?

14:49You know, in a neighborhood, everyone wants to help each other. Everyone wants everyone to stay safe. You want to build a long-term relationship with people. You're motivated to do that because you're living right next to them, et cetera, et cetera.

15:02In the business context, it's, it's not as palpable what the goal is of the business, of the gathering of community members. And that's why I think it's important to define the who, because if you, it's, I call it connection chemistry. If you bring together random people, they're not necessarily going to provide value to each other.

15:27So the way that you define a business community is, okay, who is it if we were to just simply gather them together? Who is it that's going to be able to provide value to everyone else? Meaning that their perspective, whether they have failed on initiatives or whether they've been successful on initiative, both the failure stories and the success stories are going to be valuable to the rest of the group because they all have context with each other. So it just kind of changes, the goals kind of change. But the underlying, the underlying impetus is that simply people, just because of, of being part of that group and being selected to be part of that group, can provide value to everyone else.

Yurii Lazaruk

16:13I would say is rule number one: if you want to get invited, always unpack the kitchen first, unpack the kitchen first.

16:19Yeah, still, communities, business communities are different because usually it's some kind of a company or a business. They're building it to get to some goals. So they have some ideas and it helps marketing, support, product, whatever you call it, and then invite people. So people are coming and they always like, what's in it for me? What do I get it? So they're not joining communities with this approach to help to bring value.

16:42It's something that community builders are usually trying to kind of like teach and guide members. Hey, you help to have others do this, do that. And that's exactly how you get value because when you give value first, you get it back and that's how you grow and that's how you learn.

16:56But it's not the way it is because people usually are joining like, hey, what's in it for me? What can I get it? And if they don't get anything in the first, I don't know, few hours, it's like, oh, it's not in it for me. I'm out of here. So if we are talking about like building the business communities, how to ensure, you were talking about like getting the right people, how to ensure that you are getting the right people into the business community?

Paul Jones

17:22Well, I think first, there's a couple of layers to what you mentioned. First, it is figuring out that group that you want to gather where you feel very confident that, like, for example, if I get a bunch of CMOs in tech together, they are going to be able to provide value to each other. They are going to be able to learn from each other.

17:43One of the things that I like to do when I'm building communities is I don't, you don't want to be too open in your definition of who should join, but you also don't want to be too narrow. So, for example, with CMOs, I would want to bring CMOs from different industries together because they're going to be able to learn from each other. Oh, this industry has these issues and these variables and they are tackling marketing in this way. This CMO over here is going to be able to learn from them.

18:12So, the only way that that works, though, is if everyone is willing to come with an abundance mindset and be vulnerable. So, there can't be any scarcity inside of this type of a community. And I think that's where you kind of have to, I think that's where community guidelines and community mindset becomes really important. It's important to remind people about that. You want them in that abundance mindset.

18:39What I have found, Yurii, is that most, well, not most, a lot of people won't join this community because they have that what's-in-it-for-me kind of a mindset. But there are a lot of people out there that are relationship-driven people. You wouldn't believe, like, we do recruitment on LinkedIn. We will reach out to people.

18:57You wouldn't believe the people that we reach out to that say, yes, I'd love to come to one of these. I'd love to be involved. I'd love to start coming to these community events. It's kind of, there's just people that I think understand the value and the importance of relationships because they've learned over time. You can't get to where you want to go by yourself. You have to have and maintain those relationships.

19:25So I guess first you have to define what's the community that we want to build and you build it around, can everyone provide value to each other? And then from there, yeah, you're going to have some people that don't join, but you're also, the people that do join are just truly incredible, amazing people because they're relationship-first people.

19:45And I think those types of folks, you can do so much. You can have so much fun with those types of folks. They're very easy to facilitate. They're very easy to mold. They're very easy to engage with because they understand that underlying principle of relationships do matter.

Yurii Lazaruk

20:01I feel like you're already going to the next level because usually the first level is kind of like educate people of what community is and why it's important to make connections. And it feels like you're skipping this moment, you're already going to people who understand that connections are valuable and one plus one doesn't equal two, but it equals 11 because that's how you grow because you multiply all your connections, you multiply all your knowledge and that's how you move forward.

20:25And still people are busy, like especially you were talking in your example about CMO. So they have a ton of work to do and I'm not talking about the work. They have families, they have pets, they have parents, they have like whatever, they have Netflix, worst-case scenario. So there's always something competing with the community. So I'm curious, how do you identify these people? How do you ensure that you invite exactly these people who are ready to give value first?

Paul Jones

20:54I love that question. I'll start it with a story. So a few years back, a company hired us to build them a community of fractional executives. And at the time, this was before fractional executives became really big.

21:12So to kind of give you an idea of how the fractional executive world evolved is they call it the silver tsunami. So you had all these CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, et cetera, that were nearing retirement age. They have incredible experience, but they don't, they're tired of the corporate runaround. You know, they want to live life on their terms and they want to utilize their wisdom and experience. So fractional is a great option. So you basically work, you know, you give a client a certain number of hours and you charge for those hours and businesses that couldn't afford, you know, an executive with that much experience still get the experience, but at a fraction of the cost as well.

22:00But to give you an idea of what happened with this particular group, when we first started building this group on LinkedIn, we did some search, we did some research and we found, you know, there was probably less than 3,000 people that had, that were calling themselves fractional executives. Of course, you have consulting, which was really big, but fractional in particular was less than 3,000. Today, it's like over 120,000. It just blew up in the last three or four years. Had no idea about these people, had no idea about this type of a group. But this, this company came to us and they said, hey, we want to build this community.

22:34And so I did some research and I said, okay, fractional executives are, I told them, I don't think this is going to be a good community to build because I think that the fractional executives are going to look at each other as competitors and they are not going to want to come in and talk to each other. There are markets and there are roles and there are communities that you just can't build because people have that scarcity mindset and it's difficult, right? It's not often we come across that, but I told the client, I was like, I really think you're going to waste some money here. They said, we want to do this anyway. And so I said, okay, we'll do it.

23:14I didn't have a lot of expectations. We went into it and we started, you know, building it. And the very, very first meeting that we ever had, I think we had like 50 people on our very first event, virtual event call. We, I was going through the principles and the principles of the community is we are the rising tide that lifts all boats. We are gathering here to help each other. And the way that you help each other is by sharing your experience, whether it's a success or a failure, we all can learn from this.

23:44And the comments and the engagement just blew up. People were like, yes, we have to help. We're more than willing to help. I just was flooded with this abundance mindset that just naturally existed with this group. And that actually turned out to be one of our most successful communities. I mean, we would get over a hundred people consistently on all of our calls.

24:07And we do, we do breakout rooms. The way that we do these types of events is they're very connected, connection-heavy. The communities of practice, social learning theory, that kind of a thing. But I was blown away with how abundant-minded all of these people were.

24:24And as a result of that, they truly, we had amazing conversations. We had amazing breakthroughs, amazing insights. You were talking about generating content and insight inside of a market. We have, I mean, you could have had content for a hundred years based off of all the things that were discussed.

24:41One of the things, and I'll mention this too, that I think is a reason why people join community. At least one of the things that we talk a lot about is this concept of positive deviance. So it's in the book Influencer. Kerry, I think, I forget his last name, but there's like three authors, Influencer, it's a green cover.

25:03But this concept of positive deviance is really important. And I think it directly applies to community too. And I think it's also a big motivator as to why people get involved in communities. Positive deviance are people that are doing things differently, but getting positive results.

25:22So that's actually one of the main benefits of a community is that when you're involved in this community, you get to see, oh, these people are doing this a little bit differently. How can I tweak it a little bit and incorporate it into what I'm doing? And then you feel confident in the results that you can get.

25:40So I think that's what was happening a lot inside of these fractional groups is you had all these executives that were typically part of these massive corporations. All of a sudden, they're all by themselves and they're cut off from the ability to learn innovation. They're cut off from seeing a wide array of behaviors and identifying positive deviance and incorporating that into them.

26:02So they were hungry for that type of a connection. And yeah, so that's what made that, I think, so successful. But at the end of the day, I think communities in general attract relationship-driven people. I don't know that there's a secret at all aside from, like, creating a community because the community is going to attract those relationship-type driven people.

Yurii Lazaruk

26:28Yeah, because I feel like when people hear the word communities, they already have some kind of expectations, some kind of connections. So they already paint this picture that it's something where other humans are involved. And if those humans are involved, most likely it's not some random people. Most likely you are connected with some higher goal or with some challenges that you need to overcome together or, like, anything that may glue you to it. So it's not just you are meeting random people on the street and then you don't know what to do with them. So I'm curious, specifically in this case of these fractional experts, what was the business model of this community?

Paul Jones

27:02Yeah, so with this one, are you talking about the fractional executive group?

Yurii Lazaruk

27:06Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Jones

27:07Yeah, so this one was a nearbound play for them. So we did this for their partnerships team. And their partnerships wanted to form and create partnerships with other fractional executives. So they wanted to understand, they wanted to have presence in that landscape of fractional executives. They wanted fractionals to know, especially the marketing fractional executives that, because this was an advertising agency. So they wanted to start building partnerships with them as basically becoming part of their team.

27:35One of the things that I have found is really interesting, and I think it's important for everyone to know, is, especially because your podcast is Community ROI, right? So community and ROI, like those two things really need to be defined, especially because of where marketing has come. Executives are used to, if we put this much money into ads and it converts in this way, we know exactly what we're going to get out.

28:04And I don't think community can be that predictable. And I don't think that you can, you should look at community in that way. And it's, it's, this is the friction right now. This is the rub. And it's actually, this is pretty crazy. We want predictability so bad.

28:25My, one of my, one of my good friends ran a ring company for a while, e-com ring company. And, uh, he, he was produced, you know, he was able to buy his rings for, for very, not very little, but he was able to buy his rings relatively affordably. And he was selling his rings for 10x what he was buying them.

28:44So you would think like, oh, wow, the profit margin is really, really good. And his profit margin wasn't good. It was only 10%. Why? He was spending the rest of his margin on ads to get to market.

28:58So at one point we were out, we were, we were doing, uh, we were skiing or something. And I was like, dude, who do you work for? He's like, I work for myself. I'm like, you, you work for Google and you work for Meta. They are taking so much of your margin. They're crushing it right now.

29:15And I think that's where we're at right now is these executive teams are like, okay, well, if we put this many dollars in, this is how many dollars we're going to get out. They want that predictability. And with community, it's a completely different play. And that's why I'm loving where all of us are at right now is because we're in uncharted waters where the executive teams are demanding this, this kind of predictable ROI and communities are saying no. And, and we, we can't cannibalize the community for some kind of predictable ROI, like you want it to be.

29:45So then what, what role does it play in business? Um, what, what should it, you know, how should we think about it? Well, we can't think about it as demand gen. We have to think about it completely differently. And this is what we've kind of learned over time.

30:03The, a business community is a place where you have proximity to your customers. You're nearbound to them and you're building trust with your customers. Then on the, on a completely separate side, not even related to the community, this is where you have demand gen and you let your community know what you're doing.

30:22Like you might have a webinar, you might have X, you know, you might have these things where you get to talk about your point solution. You get to talk about the pain and the solution that you are and that you provide, but you don't do it inside the community. You do it over here. And so what happens is, is because you've built trust inside of this community, people will migrate over here to learn about you, but they have to be two separate things.

30:43And so with this, with that fractional group, that was one of the things that we learned is that, um, it was, it was like a, again, tiger by the tail. It was amazing. It grew really, really fast. And we were having all these amazing conversations.

30:56We had to sit down and say, okay, our strategy here is presence and trust. We want to build presence in the market and we want to build trust. And that's the purpose of this group.

Yurii Lazaruk

31:06I feel like building a community is very similar to learning how to ride a bicycle. You see this shiny, beautiful bicycle in front of you and you can do some steps and most likely you will learn to ride it, but you will never know. Would you ride it like for some, uh, trips or like near the seaside, or you will be doing some stunts for Red Bull? You never know, but you need to learn how to ride it. And then what will happen next will happen next. You will find out only like during this journey.

31:35And I feel like it's very similar with the community. Is, there are some steps to take to start it from scratch, to give it a momentum. And then the sky is the limit. So I'm curious from your experience, when you are building community for business, what are the first steps that business owners or anyone who build the community for their business have to take to kind of like start riding this bicycle?

Paul Jones

31:57One of the things that I've learned over the years is it's pretty wild. And I'm curious if you see the same thing, Yurii, is, um, a lot of businesses really don't know their, their buyer persona. They don't know who is buying their product or how to market to them.

32:16And they think that they do, but we'll go, most of the time, one of the things we do when we first start working with a client is, is we really narrow in like, okay, who is it that, and, and I'll just say persona because it's not necessarily the buyer. A lot of times the buyer is different than the user. And so things get kind of confusing. So what I'll usually sit down and I always work with the founder of the business to say, who is it that you would be excited to be spending your time with? And sometimes that's different than who they have been marketing to, but that's a key thing is where do you want to be spending your time?

32:57You know, so, so we talked about audience and then we, we, we talked about community over here, right here in this middle is this, is this really old outdated thing called networking. And, um, that kind of has overlap with community. Maybe it kind of doesn't, like, that's its whole, a whole other topic, right?

33:15But when you sit down with, with, when you're thinking about building your business community, you have to think, who are the people that are actually going to make our business better? Who do we want to be spending time with? Who do we want to be solving problems for? Who are we excited about spending time with?

33:31A lot of networking. The reason why I brought up networking is because a lot of networking in the past was, um, you're just kind of going to these groups and you're not necessarily always talking to the persona that you want to be talking to. Community, business communities is where you get the chance to say, well, if I was to fill up a table of people, uh, who would that table be filled with, that, that I would want to be spending my time with? So that's, that's the first thing I think is, is making sure you're narrowing that down.

34:02And it's not just lead conversion or lead, lead creation. It is the reason why I always work with the founder and I always want the founder involved is if we can narrow that down. And if there's opportunity in that space that we create or we identify, um, when you get the founder involved, that founder is going to be a better leader for a lot of reasons. They're spending time with their, with their persona, with their, with their customer persona. They, they are truly learning how they talk about challenges, um, how they think about the challenges.

34:37So ultimately that founder is going to build a better product, market the product better, run better internal meetings when they're, when they're going into meetings and they're talking to marketing and they're talking to sales or whoever they're talking to, they have a deep knowledge, like names of, and faces of people are going to come to their minds because they are engaging with this community where they want to be building products and who they want to be serving. So, um, that's what that's, I would say is the first step is, is really the answer shouldn't be quick.

35:13Like you might initially be like, oh, this, this group of people is our customer. And then we might have a conversation and go, okay, well, what about this, this, and this, and this, because at the end of the day, if you're going to build a garden as a community in this area, in this space, you want it to be a place where you can continue to invest in it and watch it grow and get better and better and also serve back to you. So the ROI in terms of the community from that approach is, again, it's not just lead generation. It is, it is so much more than that. You will build better products.

35:46You, like, here's a good example. One of my clients, uh, my longest-standing client has been with me for five years. We built a community and the way that they were positioning themselves, they're an AI company. And we were going, we were, uh, building a community of, uh, customer support folks.

36:03Um, the way that they positioned their AI business was, uh, you know, hire us to, to basically answer your inbound tickets. It's, uh, you're going to work more efficiently. You're not going to need to hire as many people.

36:16Well, over time, as we began to build this community and we were curious and we did all sorts of things, we were asking community members and a lot of community members were just having discussions about the challenges that they were facing and the way that they, the challenges that they were expressing was not, uh, efficiency. It was not lowering headcount. It was, how do I retain my CS people and how do I career path? How do I help them career path? So that right there we knew was the pain.

36:48So now we had to switch the messaging strategy to, okay, well, for what we do is we're going to take all the inbound support tickets that, that your CS reps have answered like 10 times that day. And we'll just take care of it. We'll eliminate that from them.

37:05So by doing that, they're going to like their job more. Their job is going to be a lot more nuanced. You know, they're, they're going to be able to tackle things that interest them and they're not sitting around answering the same question 10 times a day. So, so you can set up now career paths. You're going to impact, uh, staff retention quite a bit on that because people can feel and be a little bit more creative. So that's another, you know, one of those benefits, I think.

Yurii Lazaruk

37:31I feel like you already talked about two, two very important moments. First of all, like spending the time with, like, inviting to your community someone you'd like to spend time with, because that's exactly the, one of the big mistakes that communities are making. As you've said, they're inviting someone and then, ah, whatever. I don't care about those people. And then community dies.

37:53And also the second, the second moment is that you still have to help people grow. So they're not there just to use your product, but they need to grow with you. And that's how your product is also growing as your community.

38:08So basically you are on a very similar journey. You are growing your business. They're growing something they want as a professional journey or maybe their businesses or they're making their life better. So it's always like win-win situation.

38:21And, uh, otherwise if community doesn't bring any value, if it's just human connection and there is no growth, at some point people like, yeah, okay, it's good. I have this friends, but why should I spend time there? I will come back in, in a year, check out what's happening and then go away for a year. But when people are constantly growing something that they really need, they're sticking with you. So that's, that's, that's, that's a very easy thing.

38:43And, you know, I really have so much more question and we can really go deeper and deeper and deeper. And we already jump into very, very deep, uh, moments of community building. And I really wish to have the sky is the limit, but time is the limit to our conversation. So the final question, what is one thing to do right away for someone struggling with identifying their community ROI?

Paul Jones

39:08Uh, okay. Identifying community ROI. What's one thing? I would just say, I'm actually surprised that this doesn't happen more often. And this is a very simple answer.

39:22Um, in, in one of our last couple months, we have, we have another, uh, community of growth marketers and we were discussing attribution with them. And I, everyone in that group, a lot of, uh, most everyone was saying that, uh, the best way to attribute is first contact with somebody. So in terms of community ROI, if you want to really start to see, you know, and start to measure and see the impact and how people come into your business, and they're all going to come in differently, is make sure that inside of your CRM or whatever you're using, uh, community, it has a tag. So you can attribute that as like the first touch. Simple, but I think a lot of people don't do it. And, and, and I think that, uh, that'll, uh, for sure show ROI over time.

Yurii Lazaruk

40:07Last but not least, name two people I should reach out to, to talk about community ROI.

Paul Jones

40:14Um, Chris, definitely, you need to have Chris back on the podcast. He's, he's great. So you already mentioned that. Um, and I would say, uh, I'll have to connect you to, to one of my clients. Uh, they've had some excellent community ROI and it might be cool to have them on the show.

Yurii Lazaruk

40:34Please do. I'd, I'd love to talk specifically to founder business owners who are running to hear also their perspective, uh, because it's like super, super valuable. And what is the best way to connect with you?

Paul Jones

40:46Uh, if, if you want to connect with me, find me on LinkedIn. So Paul Jones 101, uh, you can find me there and I'm sure we'll drop a link.

Yurii Lazaruk

40:54Very, very easy. So Paul, thank you so much. First of all, I'm super happy that we connected once again. Uh, kudos, like, thank you, Chris, for in like mentioning you in, in, in his book and like how life connected to you. And then, you know, here we are talking to each other and you're sharing your experience. The world is just a big, small village and that's, that's how it works.

41:14And you definitely have a ton of experience. And I really love your focus on specifically business, not just good to have, but like how it helps you to grow and like both, not just business, but also people. So how, how those things connected. And, um, yeah, thank you so much for sharing your experience so openly.

Paul Jones

41:33Hey, thanks. I enjoyed the conversation and, uh, I'm looking forward to staying in touch.

Yurii Lazaruk

41:37Yes, of course, Paul. Thank you very much. And, um, yeah, see you in the community world.

Paul Jones

41:41All right, man. Sounds good.

Yurii Lazaruk

41:42And thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions about how the community can help you reach and overcome your business goals faster, let's connect on LinkedIn and talk about it. That's it. We're done. See you in the next episode.