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

Join Derek Anderson, Co-Founder of Bevy alongside Atlassian Sr. Director of Customer Engagement, Leslie Lee, Salesforce VP of Community Erica Kuhl and Slack Developer Marketing Manager Elizabeth Kinsey for a session on building communities. TEMPLATE - Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the 🌎largest community for B2B software. Subscribe for weekly updates: https://bit.ly/2IlxeYl Twitter: https://twitter.com/saastr LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2724976 Quora Group: https://www.quora.com/q/cloud Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SaaStr/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saastr/ Our North American Event: https://bit.ly/2OXeAYh Our European Event: https://bit.ly/2OZTad8

Erica is the Sr. Director Community at salesforce.com. Erica started the Success Community over 8 years ago and now it is 1.3 million members strong and the de-facto place to get questions answers, network, share ideas and gain greater success using Salesforce. She also created two thriving Customer Advocate Programs – the Salesforce MVP program which recognizes the top 1% of community members across social channels for their expertise, leadership and ongoing contributions and the User Group Program where customers volunteer to run local and vertical special interest groups all across the globe. Erica has been at salesforce.com for over 12 years and held various roles over the years ranging from teaching Administrators to managing content at Dreamforce, their largest customer event. ---- Erica Kuhl - Senior Director of Community @ Saleforce.com - CMX Summit 2014 is produced for CMX Summit - CMX Summit - http://cmxsummit.com Related Videos: * http://youtu.be/ZrJxoC7oqFo * http://youtu.be/ieCXiH4CHzM * http://youtu.be/IZn42Mdex-s * http://youtu.be/Y-Bu_iQZfyk * http://youtu.be/KTnKe7-MaKc * http://youtu.be/xmrgMFv_DZ8 * http://youtu.be/KOC7Cv1NhOg * http://youtu.be/FjYGagk8XhU * http://youtu.be/BLgmzVV0jKQ

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.