Welcome everybody to our latest stacking growth live. I'm Cassidy Shield, one of the hosts, excited about what we're going to talk about today, content community and B2B, both from a personal perspective, as well as from a company perspective and how those two things together come together, have fabulous guests, we have Nick Bennett, we have Arthur Castillo, we have Carl and Sidney, I'll let them all introduce themselves here in a second. As we go through this, we're going to start the conversation like usual amongst the five of us, but I would love to start seeing questions coming from the audience. I think this is a topic that in particular would be great to hear from this audience in terms of what you would like to know from this group of experts in terms of being able to do this for yourself or for your company.
With that, I'm going to go through introductions, I'm going to turn it over to Nick first, Nick, great to introduce yourself, I'm sure most of you know who you are, and kind of just give a little bit of background like what community it means to you and how you got started. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. So I'm Nick Bennett.
I'm the director of Evangelism and Customer Marketing at Alice. Brand new role for me. I'm a traditional field marketer and ADM marketer for the last 10 years for tech companies globally. So for me, I've kind of taken community into the aspect in the two different buckets.
You've got LinkedIn as a community, and then you've got these third party communities as well and just doubling down on that. So excited to learn from everyone, excited to answer some questions and hang out. Well, yeah, thanks Nick for joining us. We're really looking forward to this.
Arthur, let's test out that connection. Love you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you got into the community and what it means for you. Hey everybody, Arthur Castillo here, Senior Manager of Field Marketing Community here at Chili Piper. And I guess kind of an interesting journey.
I'm going on that refine lab has helped with quite a bit, which is the transition from sales to marketing, still trying to convince Carl over there to do the same thing. But in terms of what community means to me, maybe I'll answer it through that lens. I noticed that sales, it seemed like, was having less and less of an influence on buyer journey. And with the rise of communities and how we're able to engage with our peers, I felt that if I wasn't thinking more like a marketer, I would have been left out on a lot of these buying conversations.
So to me, community means trying to be the dumbest person in the room, being surrounded by your peers, being in those buying conversations where you see what's top of mind for your persona or anybody else that you're trying to learn more about. I love that. And I knew somebody was trying to push Carl into being a marketer. So now I know who that is.
Carl, speaking of which, why don't you introduce yourself? You can talk about your hair kind of if you want. Talking about who my daughter thinks I look like now. I'm a fan cry.
Yeah, I mean, it's Carl Ferrer, I'm Director of Sales here at Refine Labs. And I can confirm that Arthur has been trying to get me to migrate over to the marketing side. What he doesn't realize is that I am one of the most conflicted salespeople probably on Earth because my entire sales career has been devoted to selling marketing to marketers. So I feel like I'm already there and less of a salesperson every single day.
Who knows? But great to be here. What community means to me, then some great answers are ready. I think communities are areas of wherever, the internet, places I hang out that I'm proud to be a part of, if that would be kind of one extra characteristic that I would add to the table, right?
And I think they can be a number of different things that could be linked in. It could be like Nick mentioned, some private slack channel. I think Chili Piper particularly does a good job with this other form of community, which is I'm on their customer advisory board and I'm proud to be on that. And I've been asking Arthur for hoodies and t-shirts for like six months now.
But I think there's something there as well where it's like, it's not even really about Chili Piper to hang out with other salespeople. So can I surround myself with people that are smarter than me that will challenge me, that have already achieved the things that I want to achieve? That to me are the kinds of communities that I'm looking for. And yeah, pretty excited to learn even today.
So thanks for having me. That's awesome, Carl. And I'll say the best for last in Sydney. Oh geez, always make me blush on these.
I think he loves doing that. It's great. Everyone in Sydney Waterfall. If you have demand here at Refine Labs and what community means to me is a place where I can learn from others, a place where I can also give some of my expertise and help others.
That's just like one thing naturally I love to do. And again, it could be in a bunch of different formats, but I think that's really what it comes down to is learning from others and learning different tactics. It could be ways of thinking. And the last thing is just connecting with different peers where I normally would probably never have a relationship with out that community.
Like I was just on a community event and chatting on Slack with Nick right before this event. And we probably would have never done that. And I feel like I kind of know him if I saw him at a restaurant, I would be like, Hey, what's up? So to me, that's like the emotion that you want to provide in a community as well.
Excellent. So that's the groove. We're really looking forward to this. And there's kind of a few angles I want to all of us to keep in mind as we go through this.
There's the kind of you as yourself creating your own community in terms of being out more than sharing and putting yourself out there. There's joining third party communities or starting your own, which Nick and Arthur have done and we'll talk about that. And then there's kind of the community around the company. And so I'm just fascinated to kind of hear how we all think about the intersection of these.
But let me first start with Nick and say, what was like the first step? Like if you go back to the beginning, you're probably a field marketer, you're probably like all of us. You're not really out there. You decide to get out there.
What kind of drove you to do that and kind of what was that journey like at the beginning? Yeah, it was, you know, it was interesting. It was actually like a pandemic hobby for me where I remember I was in Laguna Beach. I was working at Clary at the time and my boss was Kyle Coleman, who was very well known on LinkedIn and we were hanging out at Laguna Beach beautiful place and he was like, Hey, you should be like engaging with the community more.
You should be focusing on lifting up others, helping others, especially as we were trying to figure out what can we do to not only build your own brand, but also build the company brand as well because we know it will impact pipeline and revenue in the long term. And so he actually put out a challenge to his direct reports and it's like, you should double down on field marketing because no one else on LinkedIn talks about it. Literally out of, you know, 700 million plus users or whatever the number is. I was the only one that talked about it on a consistent basis and the impact that it has to accompany as well as to an individual.
And it was really kind of like a competitive nature for me. I love competition on big and this forts. And so when everyone, anyone, you know, says, let's do a competition. I'm 100% all in.
And that was really the journey from, yeah, I just started from there, started to figure out what does community actually mean when you're in a pandemic, where you're locked in your house and you don't really have much going on. I've been remote to the last eight years. So it wasn't too much different for me, but I couldn't, I wanted to find ways to elevate my career, both from a personal and professional aspect and community was the first thing that I turned to. And then LinkedIn, in addition to that, in honestly, it was a game changer.
So it sounds like for you, it was fairly natural. Kyle just throughout the challenge and you're like, Hey, you know, if you're going to call me out and put down the gauntlet, I'm going to go for it. Is that kind of how it went? Absolutely.
What do I actually want to be known for? And he kind of helped me from the field marketing lens because I didn't think anyone would want to know what that means or care what it means in kind of a community aspect. But as we know, the pandemic is impacted field marketer is probably more than anyone right now and trying to figure out what does that mean to your content strategy, distribution events, all of those things and trade shows for those that enjoy those, you know, how does that all play together? And so it really opened my eyes to kind of a bigger aspect of what I wanted in both my life and kind of from a professional aspect.
And if it wasn't for him, I probably wouldn't even have done it. So I'm definitely very thankful. Yes, we have a few ingredients here and I'm going to come your way here, Arthur, in a second. One is, you know, you had buy in from leadership.
In fact, it was his idea too, as you found a niche early, which I think is important where this was something you were comfortable talking about. You probably didn't think of yourself as an expert, but you were. And as you started gaining some momentum and putting content out there, I think you probably found your voice and kind of confidence and so forth and so on. That's kind of taken off from there.
Arthur, I'd love to kind of hear your journey where there are other elements involved in kind of your progress or did you see some consistency with what kind of a dick outline. Okay. From what I heard, yeah, it's funny. I still think I'm on this journey of defining my niche.
And I kind of now have built a little bit of a following with the transition from sales to marketing. But if I go back, I think this has always kind of been my playbook in sales, to be honest. And I think Carl does this really well too, where he's time like I've sold very vertical specific SaaS real estate automotive dentistry. And anytime I started selling, one of the first things that I would do was kind of look and say, Hey, who are people who whenever they speak, people are like, Yes, that's my buyers are listening to.
So, and then from there, what I'd basically try and do is just show up to their events, add value to if they're posting on LinkedIn, add some cons there, ask them questions that may be getting them a little differently. And over time, what actually happened was you slowly become a part of that person's community. You like bite off a chunk and I started to be known more and more. So to me, I think that's always been the playbook.
I've always been fascinated by trying to understand, Hey, based on where my buyers are at, what type of information are they listening to? What is like the whole? Yeah, we are breaking up a little bit there, but there's a piece of this that I kind of want to hone on, I think as a key element. And that is your participation early on in other communities.
And by just participating in the communities around you, you're able to kind of start kind of forming your own community. It's an interesting and important aspect of this sort of having senior leadership by in finding a niche. It's like really just participating in other communities, finding your voice and then kind of you become a little bit more of a center of gravity for kind of your early followers. I'd love to hear then from Sydney and then Carl kind of the same question of like, how was your journey getting into this?
Like, I know both of you, after you were already kind of celebrities where I'd follow you and you know, see all the words and wisdom you put out and eventually got to work with you. But what was the early days like Sydney? How did you kind of make that jump and what was kind of going through your mind at the beginning? So when I started at Refine Labs, obviously, I started here because I was passionate about what the company did and trying to help change me to be marketing.
I think that's a common thing about anyone that works here. And you know, I'm learned from Megan and Chris. I never thought it was going to be a part of my day to day where I would be engaging with people in a community and learning from them. But it was an unlock for me because I had the permission to do so.
And it was never, hey, go start posting on LinkedIn. We want you to help refine labs and grow your following. It's definitely like, figure out what is important to you and what do you want to talk about and how to build your brand. So a lot of people I think think that we just post here at Refine Labs because we're advocates of the company and we love working for the company, which is true.
However, for me, it's also a personal brand perspective. And I want to learn from other people. I want to understand people's points of views, how I, that's kind of like how I learn. And I'm a very like outgoing, talkative person.
So I think that came natural to me. I will say I'm not right. I don't like writing. I'm not a writer.
I would much rather like that's kind of why I'm trying to get into video more on TikTok a little bit. I struggle with writing. So for me, it was also something to work on one of my weaknesses. Like how could I learn how to write, be better at writing, write more impactful.
And so for me, I think more about it as a personal branding opportunity. I've made so many more connections. I probably won't have to like, I don't, my goal is I don't want to have to ever interview for another job again. And I want to be able to show my skills and not have to rely on a resume.
So that's just like from a personal point of view outside of, you know, core refine labs. Yeah. I'll tell you brought in the personal aspect. I mean, I think that's fundamentally important to doing this.
I mean, there's obviously wanting to do this on behalf of your company and helping there. But I think first and foremost, it's really neat to that. I mean, I think that's a great way to start at a personal level for you to kind of take the time and the commitment to doing that. Carl, you're the sales guy and the way I had some trouble with Arthur would love to hear kind of your story and kind of, how does that tie into being a better salesperson?
And kind of why did you start and so forth? Yeah, there's a couple of different questions there. I mean, why I started was because I wanted to leave a company three years ago, four years ago or so on. I wanted to go work for an awesome company like HubSpot.
So like very selfishly, I was like, Hey, nobody posts on LinkedIn. Like it was like a ghost town three years ago. If anybody remembers, you know, it was like me and like Arthur and Chris, you know, and Cassidy is definitely more crowded now. But I think I really resonate with what Sydney said because I think a reason that I stepped out just to begin getting more active in community was because I lacked for I had underdeveloped skills and character traits that I wanted to not be underdeveloped anymore.
And I knew that that was going to up level my career, which it did. It landed me an awesome gig. I had multiple offers to choose from and I got to choose to go work and spend time in up level my career at HubSpot. And then fast forward, I never applied to refine labs.
I don't even think there was an application. There was never a resume exchange. So those are like those personal kind of tangible ways that I was helped in my own journey. And I think an opportunity more commercially, I guess, like for my employers, like refine labs is that I get the opportunity to niche at an intersection of two ideas, this idea of like sale where the sales and demand gen fit.
I am uniquely positioned to speak on this because nobody else is very dramatic about the save of it. There's maybe nobody else on earth that is like selling refine labs, except for Eric. So like I have this opportunity to see something in a way that no one else sees and I have a perspective that no one else really has. And that's up level into my own brand, but also to the community around me.
It fuels the refine labs engine because it's like, okay, Carl doesn't talk a lot about like self-reported attribution and demand creation versus demand capture. But he does have this interesting voice around what his sales look like when it's viewed through the frames of demand capture and demand creation. I think it's just understanding where you are in your career and where you're specifically at is extremely unique. And there are lots of people that are hungry for those non-obvious insights that only you can bring to the table.
So it takes confidence to kind of step out and capitalize on that. But it's really rewarding, not only for me personally, but for refine labs as well, you know, like it drives my blind. So that's how I can do it. I like how you thought about the intersection between kind of the company and kind of in your position and finding the kind of that unique niche, which was something we heard from Nick earlier.
But I'm going to turn the question over to you next. I think it's a one we often all ask ourselves that came from the audience. And that is it does feel easier for us to talk about this because we're sales and marketers selling to sales and marketers. What happens when you're a marketer and you're selling, as this example, you know, cybersecurity operations or finance or supply chain, how should you think about that in terms of getting started?
Do you worry about the company? Do you focus on what your unique niche is? How do you find that intersection? Any thoughts on that?
I'm sure you can ask this quite a bit. Yeah. I think you have to kind of balance it really delicate. Right before I came to Alice, I actually worked for a company called Logs.io and we sold to engineers and developers.
And I realized very quickly that that wasn't the type of audience that I do well with, but it was really interesting because the way that you market, the way that they think about community and the way that marketers and salespeople think about community is very, very different. And it's very much that data like factual, like they love white papers, things like that, whereas like the whole dark social aspect and everything that you focus on a LinkedIn community aspect, like they don't, they may be on LinkedIn, but there are a lot of them aren't posting content like that. So I think you have to balance more of like the brand that you work for and the company that you work for kind of building community up through that, or if there is third party communities. But I think it's still, if you're, I don't think as a marketer, regardless of what industry and the principles of what you're saying is still true.
Like you're still going to be talking about marketing related stuff and you can apply it across different aspects of industries that you work on. You just have to find influences within the company that they'll listen and trust as well. And that's where the SMEs kind of come into play too. And like we had a CTO that was incredibly well liked huge on Twitter, like literally every event that you would go to, people would want to line up to meet this person.
And you could do as much marketing as you want to this industry, but like you put a CTO that is well known SME in the space like sold so much software through that. And like it was just, it's just finding that balance I think. I like that. I'll give my own personal example before five labs I worked for a company building analytics software.
And you know, the question of like, how did I get into this was my marketing team base. We said we need somebody out there evangelizing and building a community and you're it. So go do it. And I was an introvert.
And this was something I had no desire to do. And my team kind of just kind of push me out there. The complete opposite of Nick, who's boss came to him and said, go do it. My team came to me and said, go do it.
And I wasn't an analytics expert, even though I use analytics and marketing and I could talk about that. The hack I had in my head, maybe this will be helpful for marketers, maybe not is I went on a quest. And so what I went on a quest to do is learn from the experts in the analytics space. So I would go interview them and I'd start a podcast.
And instead of putting out my own content, I would put out what I learned from them. And what happened is very much like what Arthur said, I started being part of the community because I was sharing what the community was learning back to the people that I wanted to target. You can do this for cybersecurity, you can do this for supply chain. If you're curious, just go on a quest and figure out from those who are experts in the industry, kind of use their voice and their expertise, kind of share with others and build that way.
And over time, you'll become an expert if you do that enough. So a little bit of a hack there with that helps me went out. Nick, I'm going to come back to you and I'm going to kind of get Arthur feedback on that. That was a question about like how to balance these things.
Let me ask it from the other direction, which is you have a, you know, you do this for yourself. You do this for a community that you've built, but you also do this for Alice. And so when you think about that, how do you think about that and how do you balance kind of your activities? So you're devoting enough time and attention to building the community for Alice versus building your own versus building kind of what you and Arthur started.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. And I know Pete, Larenko, who's on as well, we talk about this a lot because in, I would say 98 to 99% of the content that I create on LinkedIn, it actually doesn't mention Alice at all. I actually don't talk about Alice in a lot of the content that I create, but I still will drive a million dollars in pipeline this year, just from organically creating content on LinkedIn because it is, you know, I am connected to a lot of the ICP, I am connected to the marketers and the accounts that we want to get into. And when they see you creating content of value and delivering something that can help them on a daily basis, it makes you want to go one, click that person's profile, see what they do, realize, oh, maybe I do have a need that they could solve and I'm going to reach out and DM and just say, hey, I'd love to learn more.
Could you put me in touch with someone? And so kind of that, you know, self-report attribution has been huge for us. We made the change, I think in November last year and we got rid of the drop down on the demo forum and it's like, how did you hear about us required question? And on, I would say two to four inbound demos per week right now, they'll mention my name, LinkedIn, TikTok now is coming in.
I have some stuff on YouTube now that I've been playing around with to try to get my podcast more out there. So it's been really, really interesting. And then going back to the other aspect on, you know, the community that Arthur and I created revenue era, we really wanted to create something that was very revenue marketing focused that helps chili pipe for Alice, but ultimately it was our own communities because, again, we wanted to set ourselves up for future success, what we never had to apply to a job again. And so we wanted to make sure that we had four key audiences.
So field marketing and events, demand growth and ABN, that was kind of like the key ICP. And then four pillars of the revenue era were like community content, tools and templates. And then we had four core values as well. And so the whole goal was if we can, again, deliver value on an everyday basis, tie that into what we're doing across TikTok, LinkedIn, all these other social channels, it just makes it come across that you are SME in the space that people want to work with you, that they value your input.
And so when they are going to look or make a decision, they're going to come to you first, hopefully and explore whatever product or service that you're offering. And one of the things I like how you map that out is about value for the community. Now, I'm going to ask you this question. I'm going to try to tie it to the thread we have going on here in the chat about not being the subject matter expert.
I assume you're not the subject matter expert on those four topics in your community. I am not, but we have definitely subject matter experts that we've kind of curated through the community so that we can deliver on that. So this idea of finding a subject matter expert was kind of in the back of your mind when you built a community of like, you know, a little bit about ABN, but you're really trying to bring people in who know ABN as an example to kind of be in that community. And then the question is like, what's in it for them and the value and so forth, which I think is a good framework to provide for any community you're going to build, whether it's CFOs or cybersecurity or whomever is like, what's the value for them and how do you get them to participate and you facilitate as an example.
I would love to hear from the audience as we go on if that's starting to answer some of the questions we have in here about building a community that's kind of outside marketers and salespeople. So if it doesn't or if you have other questions, keep asking. I'm going to take another angle of the question I saw here. I'm going to come to you Sydney and that is how do you think about measuring this?
So there's on one aspect, the personal brand measurement, which is do I ever have to, you know, create a resume to get a job in the future? What about like kind of the relationship between the company side of this? So when you think about Refine Labs as an example, what Alice, for example, Alice from Nick, like, how do you know this is working for a company? Well, Nick, we have a great example that they updated their forms.
That's something that we talked about here a lot of self-report distribution. And we, you know, like it's very clear and drives car to measure the impact of a community, especially a private Slack community, something that's hosted on a different domain. And people don't want to be forced into some type of community that is trackable also. Like they will be like, no, I don't want to do this.
So I mean, when we think how do we know if this is working for communities or how do we know some of our customers are doing different things, it's really self-report distribution because that's what's going to tell you what is creating demand. And a lot of things that Nick just mentioned, his personal brand is creating demand for Alice. His other potential communities, the Alice owned communities will probably show up in self-report distribution as well. I'll say, okay, here's this community that's driving that as well.
So those are all positive signals that it's working and it's resonating. I think you can also look at engagement. So that's like the business metric, but and I'm also curious, I'm like, Arthur, next point of view on this is you can start a community, but you have to get people to use the community, be in the community. You only get as much out of a community as you put in.
That's something that I've learned. I've tried to narrow my communities to like four to five instead of like 20, just to be in one because I'm only going to get out of it when I put in and the time that I put in. And even if you're not contributing, you could still be learning and listening and watching things to get out of it before you might feel confident to start contributing. But I think there's a lot of engagement type of metrics that you can look at that are non-traditional.
What I would not recommend doing is scaring all these people, adding their email addresses manually to a Salesforce campaign. That's just like, it seems like very, very over the top to do that. I'm sure people do that as well. They'll track that, but I don't think that's the same way to look at a business metric, especially at a C-suite level.
So yeah, I'll probably take it over to Nick or Arthur to comment of like, how do you know, do you look at engagement? Do you look at those types of metrics in your communities, personal community or obviously branded communities as well? Yeah, I can jump in. So I've got kind of two interesting answers to this.
So for a revenue era where it's not an Alice owned community, same with Chili Piper, it's just Arthur I and Joel who works for Laddis, this was something where we are measuring the engagement. It's something where we're just trying to help others, but we're not monetizing it or anything. There's no, it's more just getting it off the ground, helping others delivering value. The other aspect that we have in Sydney, you were on there earlier, is the M2 community.
And so M2 is a community that was put together by Mutiny, Chili Piper and Alice. So it's again for revenue marketers, but it's much, the engagement there is much, much higher because they have dedicated resources. They're actually like, it's backed by businesses that are putting money into it. And so they can support it a lot more versus Arthur and I, this is just a side hustle for something we wanted to do to try to help more people out, get people jobs, make people feel more impactful in the marketing that they're doing and evangelize.
What does that actually mean for people? So I mean, yeah, I see a huge difference between the two and honestly the M2 community, the engagement, the level of commitment to people and what they're delivering is a lot more. But the money that goes behind that is way higher considering forever. We put $0 in and it was more just a place where people that hang out and get to know each other.
On a side note, Nick, or I've seen this with Carl and Sydney as well. When you see your name in a lead form, that this is the reason that they came to your company is because Nick or Carl or Sydney, how does that make you feel? Yeah, it makes me feel really good. It's like, you know, it's interesting because it feels like everything that I've worked hard for and I don't do it to like boaster, like rub it in people's faces or anything like that.
It's just, you know, when you work really hard on something for the last two plus years and you show up every single day, day in and day out, even when for the first six months where I saw no traction at all and before like 12 months is when I started to see a little bit of traction, but like I still showed up every single day even when someone was listening to me or at least what I thought no one was listening to me. And so to start to see, it start to bear weight and like things start to come in and last year, you know, drove 500k, 250k of that close. Like it's really good to know that the impact of what I'm doing outside of work and this community aspect and evangelizing for the brand is actually making an impact to the bottom line. I love that.
Let me change directions a little bit. I'm going to direct this to Arthur and then anybody else on the panel who may have had this experience. And that is let's go back to most of the companies we deal with are kind of bought into this. What happens when they're not or they're skeptical?
So let's take the leadership team and Arthur, you go and say, listen, the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to go off and start building my personal brand and eventually that's going to be helpful for the company and to make it all figure out the company community and so forth and so on. Like, how do you have that conversation with leadership if the leadership is not coming to you saying we need to do this like a next case? Any thoughts on that? I have thoughts here Cassidy.
If Arthur is still gathering his own thoughts or the internet connection. Yeah, I think we are just got a rough internet connection today. I think we just lost him. Yeah, Carl, go for it.
Yeah. I'm in a weekly position to answer this question because I get to hear the private grumblings of marketers in my sales conversations that are asking for my advice on how to create change and transformation internally in their own orgs, right? And so the advice that I give them, it can be a little blunt sometimes, but there is a dig and Cassie, you talk about this on LinkedIn a lot too. There's a degree where you're, it's not there's a burden that I think marketers sometimes try to push on to their leadership.
Like they need to get this. They need to understand why community is important. They need to understand what I'm doing. I try to change the way marketing leaders think about that and to say, well, what have you done to kind of earn that opportunity to test something that is wild to us?
It's not wild, right? It's not a community. It's like, yeah, you should be posting on LinkedIn organically. And we think it's crazy that our orgs are not, but it's like you have to earn that right.
And I think a lot of marketers skip that step. They're like, Hey, I want to go buy a platform for this. I want to go buy. I want everyone's going to start posting on LinkedIn.
I'm going to go buy an awesome platform like everyone's social and we're going to scale this now. And they skip steps. They skip the experimentation phase. They skip the positive signals phase.
And so I have to have these conversations where I'm like, Hey, if you want on LinkedIn yet, like you should be driving serious pipeline through LinkedIn paid Facebook, Instagram, like these channels that we know are tried and true that you can put a message in front of buyers, they'll convert and they will buy something. Once you win there, then now we can start to weave in these experiments. And I think sometimes marketing leaders need a little bit of redirection and to say like, Hey, run these as experiments and frame them and sell them internally that way and try to do them as affordably as cheaply, free if you can as possible, prove it and then pitch it, right? So it's like a prove them pitch where I think marketers are the opposite sometimes where they're like, not a little prove after the pitch, right?
You got to let me pitch and buy it and do all this stuff. And that will prove it. And it's just the reverse and it could be kind of like spinning your wheels and not a lot of progress gets made. What are your thoughts on that?
Cassidy, what do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, I like it. I think I don't know if you need to convince executive at the beginning is like what you're saying, Carl, to do this. I think what you need to do is start doing it.
And what they'll do is they'll notice it. And over time as the engagement grows, they'll start asking you and this is my own personal experience. Like, well, how did that work? How do I do that?
Have we seen any benefit from this? And you know, if you set up the ways to kind of understand the early signals of this being effective, then you can answer those questions better. So this is one of those places where I would just kind of do it because it's best for you on the personal brand side and not go ask permission from anybody of whether you should do it or not. And I think there's many, many examples here of how to go about starting doing that.
There's a lot of examples on LinkedIn and people sharing how to get started. So I think when it comes to your own personal brand, just do it and ask for forgiveness later. And by the time people will notice, you're getting positive signals. So that's kind of my recommendation on that.
I don't know, Arthur, if you heard the question, but I'll turn it back over to you. And I was just kind of trying to go through how, you know, how do you kind of get buy in the kind of do this on the company side? It's tough. I was actually very scared or no Nick, if you remember when we were like, hell, it's conscious revenue, everything.
And it got to the point where I was like, man, it's going to conflict with what I'm doing at Chili Piper. Luckily, our leadership saw it as a huge boost to like what I was already doing. And once they knew the target audience, they're like, yeah, we see how this is going to help our brand. So it wasn't as much of a conflict that I built up in my head.
So maybe that's another thing, right? A lot of the time we build it up in our heads where they're like, oh, our company's going to hate us for it. And maybe they're like, hey, we've actually been wanting somebody to kind of take the reins on this and be more active. But I tend to agree with you, Cassidy, I think for things like that, you kind of have to ask for forgiveness before permission or find that balancing line of how do you position this to your company as a benefit and how it's not going to interrupt with your responsibilities in the role.
And in fact, if you can position it in a way that it's actually going to help you, that's how I would go about doing it. I appreciate that, Arthur. Why have you in your connections? Good.
I'm going to come back to you. And that is, I would love to kind of end this conversation with helping, like you need to build a community for a company and you both you and Nick are doing this and we can talk about what we do at Refine Labs after. How do you get that off the ground? So you may already be out there doing it yourself.
You may have already started something with Nick. Now we're talking Chili Piper's example. What's the journey you go through to kind of get a community for a brand going? Yeah, this one's interesting because I think at the time, maybe about two years now, I haven't been with Chili Piper that long, but I know just before I joined, there was talks about us potentially starting our own community.
And my manager, Dan, he actually pushed back on that because we thought it was the flavor of the month. Everybody was trying to start their own communities. And instead, there was enough value out there in communities that existed, which is how do we slowly start to associate our brand? So obviously there was sponsoring and things like that that went into play.
I think that's the reason they also wanted to bring the over from sales to marketing was because they saw I was already an active member in these communities. So they thought rather than hire community manager, maybe stick someone in there, that is already familiar with the community. So if that exists at your company and you see somebody that's actively engaging in these communities, I think that's an easy way to start. But that's the route we kind of took here at Chili Piper, rather than starting our own, what are other communities that we know our buyers are hanging out in, that they're having discussions, how do we understand what they're talking about versus trying to actually grow our own community and own it?
I think there's also something to be said about the one that comes to mind, outreach buying sales hacker. So we're going pretty well, but is there ulterior motives when you do it through your company versus taking a community first approach and just saying, hey, we want to get as many whatever it is, field marketers, demand-to-marketers in this community, exchanging valuable information versus thinking, hey, how do we get our target accounts and our target personas to join this community so that we can later on sell to them? Another tip I'll add that has been helpful for me is, and this is what I did with Carl, actually, and how we became pretty good friends, I saw Carl posting a ton of valuable information. There was one thing that really piqued my interest, and I took that conversation offline, I said, Carl, I love what you just posted here.
Would you be open to hopping on like a 30-minute Zoom? Let's just jam in. From there, it was history best friends forever. But I think from that point of view, maybe it's not necessarily starting your own community, but how do you squeeze more to the communities that are already out there and are already targeting your personas and how you become more of a valued member from that perspective?
Yeah, this is, I think, a great insight. And now, as we always try to start with, I think, how do we create our brand or our company as the center of the universe for a community? And what you're saying is, it's probably not going to happen out of the gate. A much easier, lower bar is find the communities exist out there and just participate in that value and then take it from there.
I think it's priceless advice. I really appreciate that. Nick, I got a question. We probably should ask this at the beginning.
How do you actually think of and define a community? Is it something we're trying to maintain and hold? Is it just something that happens around us? Like, if you think about Alice, can you even put a number of people on the community?
Or how would you think about that? Yeah, I think it's an organic thing that happens. And so we've actually talked about launching our own community as well. And it didn't really make sense.
Who's going to join a gift-gifting direct mail community? Like, there's only so many people out there, but why would I join a community just for that? Whereas if I can partner with other companies or join already happening conversations in these communities, then it makes a lot more sense. Like, for me, when Rev Genius, which is, you know, is what, like 27, 30,000 people in there.
Now, I was one of the first 10 people that were in that community, right as the pandemic started happening. And so it was great. I was adding value. I was learning a ton from people and then just continue to grow.
And so it was more so what can I do to partner with these communities and deliver on experiences that are elevated experiences? We know our target ICP is there. What can we do to deliver different types of experiences through gifting and direct mail and the content that we create from it? And so that has actually been really, really big for us.
And in 2022, we doubled down on four communities. So we have two on the marketing side. We have two on the sales side because those are the two types of personas that we go after. And it's been really, really great to create, not only create content from it, but deliver those elevated experiences.
And we drive a ton of inbound demos that come from I do hear about us, peak community or women in sales club or something like that. And it's been really, really big. So why go off and spin the wheel and do our own thing when we can already join conversations that are happening. And like I said, let's be honest, who's going to join a community strictly for like gifting a direct mail?
I love the honesty there. I appreciate that. Sydney, I was just thinking, like you probably get this question all the time from our clients. If you look at what Refine Labs is doing and say, I want to be like that, how do you handle those discussions and kind of what do you see anything that you see that you can identify as like things that are lacking in those conversations that you don't need to be in place to make that happen for the customer to be successful?
What's your takeaway from kind of seeing this across a variety of different companies? Yeah, it all starts with, we want to do this. We want to do this. We want X, Y, Z and I think it comes down to first before you can build a successful podcast, a successful event, successful community, successful content, you have to have something unique to say with a differentiated point of view and a subject matter expert.
And I think that's the first step is identifying who might be your subject matter expert, maybe it's a group of people, maybe it's a mix of people. It doesn't just have to be one person. It doesn't have to be a Chris Walker. It could be a mix of different people who have different varying backgrounds that complement each other as well.
So that's kind of step one. And then after that, it's like, we need to prove out that this content is valuable to people first. And then once we prove that out, boom, we can start creating whatever we want to create with it and host it wherever we want and bring that to life. So, you know, very similar to how we purchased at Refine Labs, Chris validated his thoughts and his content was getting those positive signals.
And so, okay, great. Now, how do we operationalize that into an event? And then that event leads our community. That event drives our podcast, that event and that content and that community drives our LinkedIn strategy.
So, you know, not saying you have to do it like that in that order, but I would say those are the first two key steps that people just want to immediately jump into execution and launching a community and doing that. And I think you kind of have to start with your strategy first and your strategy starts with having something impactful to say that's unique and different. If you don't have that, your community will fail, your podcast will fail, your content will fail, your organic LinkedIn post will fail, or it maybe fails. That's a strong word, not be successful, not drive engaging.
I like fail. Fail. That's aggressive. But I think that's the thing.
And when I look at successful communities and successful companies like Nick has done a great job because he's validated, he has a point of view, he knows how to talk to people, he knows how to write, he knows how to create engaging content, and then he can go apply that to a bunch of different ways. And I also think the partnership plays really something that smart companies will start thinking about. And if it feels overwhelming to do this with one person at the company or just do this with one company, that may be an interesting play to get companies aligned and go that way. But again, all the people that are contributing to that, all those companies, Alice, Mutiny, Chili Pepper, they already have the content and the subject matter experts unlock.
And so that's to me why those people join those communities, that's why they like to engage in those communities. So I think that's the first step in my opinion. That's why it's here with us. Yeah, that is great.
So let me kind of reframe that. I'm going to try to wrap all this up. So you need a point of view. I think whether you're a company starting a community or your own personal brand, or you Nick, we talked about finding this niche.
You need to have something that you feel strongly about and you have a unique point of view on. Two, you find the subject matter expert that can deliver it. When it's your own personal brand, it's you. When it's your company, you need to find this person who can be who's willing to go out there and give it a shot.
And I think both Sydney and we all talk about this idea that when you start, all you're looking for is an initial positive signal, right? So you're not going to spend a ton of money and be very elaborate about this. You're going to start small, get some early signals and then figure out expand and grow and make it more systematic from there. So it's kind of like an initial framework to get started.
Some other things I really liked that I heard here is, you know, Arthur had this point, both on personal brand and on kind of corporate brand is a joint other communities that participate in that. So take your point of view and your subject matter expertise and go to a community and be part of it. Learn, build relationships and kind of go from there. And I do think this notion of the partnership models unique, which we really didn't touch much about that.
Go kind of like what Nick, what you've been doing, what you've been doing, what you bring couple companies together, individuals together and start something, their safety in groups, so I like that. What else did I miss on this framework? Kind of stepping through this. Anything else we discussed that we should outline here for the audience?
I think one thing the Refined Labs team does so well in streaming this message out is I think as marketers, we're so obsessed with quantity, right? And we don't think about the qualitative feedback. So even when we're like talking communities, my mind goes to like hundreds, maybe to thousands of members, but I think a community can be a group of five to 10 people that are just sharing these insights. And if you're using them to gain more insights into your customers and how they think and then you take that back as part of your strategy, that's me as a win.
I don't think you need to have hundreds or thousands of members in your community. If you're gaining something and like Carl said in the chat, define the experiment and then you're gaining that knowledge, to me that's a win in terms of community. I love that. Nick, any last thoughts?
Yeah, I was just going to add that. I mean, I completely agree. And so I'm actually running a really interesting experiment this October. And so I am running a B2B marketers creator house, content creator house.
And so I'm getting 12 B2B marketers together in the collective group of us have over 500,000 followers combined. And so we were spending three days together to build community, create content, and we have a lot of partnerships with other companies and sponsors that are looking to get in on this. And we're creating, it's either going to be the biggest success or biggest failure that I've ever been able to pull off. But I've already got like 30 companies that want to sponsor it.
And so the amount of UGC that they're going to be able to get from this and everything is going to be really, really interesting. And so I'm excited to see how this takes community to a whole new level. So Nick, I got asked, is like literally house like you have an Airbnb somewhere and you're in the shop together? Yeah, Charleston, South Carolina.
And so it's going to be interesting. We're actually going to live stream the entire event as well as creating a content there. We're going to have keynotes, DJs, like I'm hoping that it's we don't get in any trouble or anything, but you know, the people that are, you know, have confirmed that they will be there is it's going to make the content experience incredible. I love that.
That was awesome. I know what to say about that. That's incredible. I am speechless.
I love that. Carl, anything that you want to wrap with? You've been quiet for a while, just sitting there looking like an assassin? I'm loud, man.
I'm loud in the chat. I love this. There's a lot of good conversation going. My daughter doesn't think I look like an assassin.
She thinks I look like Jafar from Aladdin. So whatever. So we're good. But yeah, I know I'm good.
It's been an awesome conversation. Excellent. Feel free to drop in your last questions. I'll give you kind of my my party shots on this and in the really two just to think about one is this definition of community like we don't actually track this at Refine Labs.
But yes, Chris in the company has followers. Yes, we have people posting. Yes, we have a podcast, but we're not thinking this is like our community. It's just like this is communities that we engage with and people who are interested in what we have to say.
And we don't go around spending time counting that up. So we think that this is more of just awareness and education and providing value to as many people that we can. And you know, if we provide that value to a girl for time and we're not trying to figure out what that looks like. The second thing is kind of the personal brand to kind of the company brand is, and I think there's a good model for companies going forward is like we literally don't care.
Like our employees could somebody could go off and just talk about cats all day long. If that's what they want to talk about, that's what they're passionate about. We're not asking anybody to go off and post about what Refine Labs believes in. Now we have enough, a lot of people doing that because they're passionate about what we do and what we believe in the value we provide.
But there's no higher order that says you have to do this and that you have to talk about us. It is really up to the individual. And so I think that's how modern companies should think about business going forward. And I know this is going to take time.
The community is brand building is building awareness and you're going to do that through your employees in three kind of your subject matter experts and what they have to say. That's the way you're going to build successful company in kind of a modern world, dark social buyers, et cetera. So again, I think part of this advice to wrap up is you're struggling with this. If you're passionate about doing this and you're struggling to get this over the line and the company you're in, you know, sometimes you got to make it choice to go find a place where you have leadership people using this and there's a lot of leaders out there that do believe in it.
So I'll get off my sandbox and stop there. All right, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Thank you, Nick and Arthur for joining as well as Carl and Sydney.
Fun conversation. Hopefully everybody got value added to it and this will be a podcast in about a week. And we'll see you here in two weeks on the next second part of life. Ciao.
Thanks everyone.