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It's my goal to help companies create authentic, engaged, and empowered communities.

Erica kuhl 

Hi I'm

I’ll build you a robust community strategy and programs with my extensive expertise, authentic approach, and trusted services. You’ll benefit from a vibrant community of customers that sell, service, and market alongside you while also demonstrating clear company ROI.

About Me

What is Unique About Me.

My Experience: I have over 20 years of Enterprise community expertise. While at Salesforce I built everything from scratch including the strategy, programs, and ROI metrics.  I understand running community programs on any size budget and with any size team from 1 to 35+ people.  I’ve also seen massive company growth from 176 to 49,000 employees allowing me to adapt my strategies and deeply understand challenges at any company stage.

 

My Success Metrics: The ROI I’ve been able to prove of an engaged community is staggering. It  will bring your business more pipeline, larger deals, higher product adoption, lower attrition, more referenceable customers, and increased case deflection. 


My Values: Customer success, authenticity and trust are core values of mine, and I weave these into every project I work on.

Offerings.

My community building formula is simplified into a 5 step process in order to show you results and recognize a return on investment as fast as possible.  I provide the tools, templates, processes, and introductions to make your journey to a successful community a smooth one!

*Phases and deliverables may vary based on your specific community needs. 

Services

recent clients

Intuit Logo(1)
DeepL(1)
Field Nation(2)
DigitalOcean
cloudflare logo(1)
1password
Procore Logo
Zendesk logo (1)
Klayvio(1)
intercom
deel(1)
Segment(2)
Notion 2
Articulate
Untitled(2)
Benchling(2)
Atlasssian logo
classdojo logo site
CTL logo(1)
AWS(2)
Cisco(2)
HubSpotWebsiteLogo
whatsapp
Untitled
airtable logo site
Robinhood
Figma Logo1
Kaplan
Automation Anywhere
tray
ironclad
Logicmonitor (1)
Enverus Logo(2)
Chainlink logo
Unbounce
github
Mural logo
Talkdesk
Skedulo
theskimm
StreetLight Data (1)
Salsify
openspace logo site
SAP Logo bigger
Nanit
TripActions (4)
Lego Education (2)

THE success PLAN.

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Planning

Creating growth and engagement strategies, tool selection, and defining resource requirements

02

kick off

Setting your community vision, goals, metrics, business objectives and roadmap

01

LAUNCH

Communication and campaign launch, execute launch plan, refine metrics

04

DESIGN

Form content strategy, membership and recruitment plan, and design program frameworks

03

MANAGE

Ongoing adoption and engagement planning, define dashboards and benchmarks, and recognition strategy framework

05

Why Care About Community

Why Care About Community.

The days of traditional selling and service are gone. Customers want authentic interactions and they are driven to connect with like-minded people. They will find a way to engage with each other one way or another. Do you invest to provide a trusted, authentic environment for customers to engage with you and each other? Or do you sit on the sidelines. The choice is simple. 

 

Brands are being redefined by their communities and no longer is the question "if" you invest in community but "how" do you invest in community. I will help you get to value as fast as possible.

Check out my PODCAST.

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In Before The Lock is a podcast from me and Brian Oblinger about community, customer experience, and leadership at scale. Listen and subscribe on

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and everywhere that podcasts are found.

Podcast
In Action
Uncommon Conversations: Erica Kuhl, Consultant & Salesforce Trailblazer founder, Talks Strategy
54:51

Uncommon Conversations: Erica Kuhl, Consultant & Salesforce Trailblazer founder, Talks Strategy

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
EP8: Building Communities Evangelist Superfans with Salesforce, Slack, and Atlassian
38:10

EP8: Building Communities Evangelist Superfans with Salesforce, Slack, and Atlassian

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.

In Action.

as featured on.

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ABC7 NewS

Students offering up real-world solutions at Dreamforce in San Francisco

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Dreamforce can be overwhelming for some attendees, but a group of college students are soaking up the experience as part of the "Trailhead for Students" case competition.

RELATIONSHIPS BUILT ON TRUST.

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Stephanie Grice
VP Community & Learning
Atlassian

Having worked with Erica for several years now, I think of her as a mentor and advisor, a coach. She's really kind, open-hearted, and helpful.

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Maryann Ibrahim
Head of Community
Benchling 

Erica always helped us keep focus on the data and what our customers wanted most -- to connect and help each other solve problems.

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Ben Lang 
Head of Community
Notion

Erica is an awesome thought partner, great at bouncing ideas, and able to add value at both strategic and

tactical levels.

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Nicole Saunders
Director, Community
Zendesk

Erica always has great ideas, good information, and different perspectives. You can create so much value working with her (and have tons of fun).

Let's Talk

Let's Talk.

Are you ready to build a world class community of your own?  Fill out the form and let’s talk!

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