In this episode of Confessions of a B2B Marketer, I'm joined by Jared Robin of RevGenius. We get Jared to share his journey from an inside sales rep to a field sales rep and discuss the importance of community-led growth. He provides advice on how to drive growth through community, dark social, and build a community that actually engages.
As a sales professional with over 15 years of experience, I have seen firsthand the power of community-led growth. When done right, it can be an incredibly effective way to increase sales and maximize success. Here are my top tips for leveraging community-led growth to achieve success in your business: 1. Identify Your Target Audience: The first step in maximizing success with community-led growth is to identify your target audience.
Who are the people that you want to reach?
What do they need from you?
What do they value?
Knowing who you’re targeting will help you create content and campaigns that resonate with them and drive results. 2. Engage With Your Community: Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to start engaging with them. This means creating content that resonates with them, responding to their questions and comments on social media, and building relationships through networking events or online communities like LinkedIn or Facebook Groups.
By engaging with your community, you can build trust and loyalty which will help drive sales down the line. 3. Leverage Influencers: Influencers can be a powerful tool for driving awareness of your brand and products among your target audience. Reach out to influencers who have an established following in your industry or niche and offer them incentives such as free products or discounts in exchange for promoting your brand on their channels or websites. 4.
Utilize Social Media Platforms: Social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc., are great tools for connecting with potential customers and building relationships within the community at large.
Post regularly about topics related to what you sell so that people become familiar with what you offer; use hashtags so that more people see what you post; engage directly with followers by responding to comments; run contests or giveaways; create videos showcasing how customers use your product; etc., all of these strategies can help increase engagement levels on social media platforms which will ultimately lead to more sales down the line! 5.
Measure Results & Adjust Accordingly: Finally, it’s important to measure the results of any campaigns or initiatives related to community-led growth so that adjustments can be made if necessary in order maximize success going forward! Track metrics such as website visits/conversions/sales generated from each campaign/initiative so that changes can be made if needed based on performance data rather than guesswork alone!
Following these tips should help ensure maximum success when leveraging community-led growth for increased sales! Remember – identify who you want to reach; engage directly with them; leverage influencers where possible; utilize social media platforms effectively; measure results & adjust accordingly – all of these strategies should help ensure maximum success when leveraging this powerful tool!
Thanks for listening and hit me up if you have any questions!
Jared, welcome to the show. So great to be here. Thank you for having me. So we're going to cover a few things today. So for those that don't know, Jared is a co-founder of RevGenius, previous VP of Sales and person with extensive sales experience. I want to keep, so we're going to dig into community building, et cetera, and the RevGenius story.
I actually want to go back a bit though to the FedEx days, six years, I think the job title was like strategic sales, something along those lines.
Could you talk about like the six years of FedEx in sales and how that went?
Six and a half years and it went well.
I mean, the interesting part about those years is I left a technology startup after three months before that. I was making $32,500 base, roughly 40 KOTE, my first job out of school. And I was just cold calling.
I'm like, this stinks. Now the funny story behind that, it didn't feel like I was moving anywhere. And it was such a small sample size and I was so impatient, but I just wasn't that comfortable in the situation and I left. That company was Seamless Web. It became seamless.com and it went through two acquisitions that I wasn't a part of. Now I had no equity.
Maybe they would have given it to me over time. So whatever, at the time there was definitely no equity restarting, but I went to FedEx and I needed to because I needed validation. I needed validation that I was good. I was pretty good at school, ups and downs, but overall I was in the gifted program and stuff like that. I don't know if I maximized how well I did.
In three months at a sales job, I hadn't achieved a level of success.
Clearly, it was still my ramp that showed anybody anything. There was hopefulness. They're talking about moving me fast up the ladder to, I guess, AE or I was inside sales. So it was full cycle at the time, but I guess to more responsibilities. That was great, but I needed some emotional stability.
So FedEx, I got paid 48K from 32.5. So that was a big bump, roughly 60K OTE, which afforded me the ability to move out of my house with my mom. So that was big.
FedEx, and also at the time, keep in mind, we're talking 15 to 20 years ago. I wanted to be a medical device rep or a pharmaceutical field sales rep. That was my aspirations. I didn't realize this technology thing had legs to it, so to speak. By being paid $32,500 frigging dollars, they didn't show me that it had legs to it either as an entry level.
So FedEx in my mind would give me a better path to structure numbers and all of this that a medical rep would need. I was an inside sales rep and it was a journey. I wasn't great in the beginning. I was personable, but I wasn't closing a lot of business. I was number five out of 12 on the team.
And then a light bulb went off that the single most important thing I could do that early in my career was close business, net new business, or net new business any which way from current accounts or new logos. I don't know what I was thinking before that, but it really gripped a hold of me. I was the fifth person to be promoted in my group as a result.
The stack rankings, they literally promoted one after the next day after the next, super objective. I was in a great company like FedEx, dotting the I's and crossing the T's and making sure it made sense. And then it was my turn and I had stepped up and I had gotten my promotion. And right before that, I realized I had to kick on the afterburner.
So now I'm a field sales rep making a little more money. I had the lucky fortune of being an inside rep during the recession. So the last recession, the reason why I didn't leave early or whatever, because I guess I could have, I didn't know what I wanted to do, but having any job was important. And I had that.
And the people that were in field sales all had to take a 5% pay cut and I didn't have to take that pay cut as an inside rep. So they were making more than me, granted, but months after when I got that promotion, I was able to get it at the full amount and not have to. So I was fortunate in that way.
And I was also fortunate that I had the same territory I had as inside and that doesn't always happen. So I knew the territory well and I made Presidents Club number one out of 500. And so that was great. And I got promoted. I think strategic rep just meant I handled the biggest accounts on the team. I got the senior stuff, all of that.
And I took that lateral promotion because it was on the same team because I knew I wanted to do something else, something a little more enterprise. And that wasn't technically enterprise, but there was some, there's quite a few six figure deals to be had and even like a seven figure deal hiding. So it was close enough for me to get that experience.
And then along the way after Presidents Club, I'm like, I, there's nothing, I don't want a 5% raise to be a manager or handle bigger accounts. Like it just wasn't interesting. I felt like my ambition wasn't being satisfied. So I went towards technology.
How many years have you been either selling or in sales management slash leadership?
Over 15 maybe. If you include retail sales in high school, probably 20 plus. Wow.
Because when I, when I try to look up people that have done things that are quite good or impressive, and for me, like starting something like Refgenius goes into that category, look back on their LinkedIn page to try and understand, okay, like how does this person have credibility here?
And I was just scrolling through yours and I was like, wow, this guy has really done the yards in the world of sales. So I've had an eclectic background. That's why I connect with so many people and I can be empathetic to a lot. I've had the structured technology background.
I've had, you know, just like the homey sales, like the relationship sales type stuff, which works in some industries like FedEx a little better than technology, et cetera.
So if you, and this might be tricky to nail it down to one thing, but if you're going to give like someone that's just starting sales one year in like a piece of advice based on your 15, 20 years, what would it be?
Integrate your fears. And what I mean by that is meditate, like do the things outside of learning about sales, about learning about business that's going to help your mental and your emotional states. Because one thing I promise, I imploded after being the number one rep in the country, maybe the world at FedEx in my division out of 500 people imploded after that.
So like just because you have success in a role or in a life on paper, monetarily or whatever other things that you're looking to get you've gotten doesn't mean you're comfortable. And doesn't mean, and the biggest superpower, because when you've been doing it for a while, you learn some things is being level-headed and being able to go into any situation, not reacting and stuff like that.
And sales is a very emotional or has the ability to be a very emotional space. In my opinion, the most outside of being a founder, the most, and it'll prepare you for all the loop-de-loops, all the layoffs, all the whatever, if you have your shit together. Nice. I love how it's not like a tactic.
It's like the meta thing that you have to get right if you're going to get good at it.
I mean, it's for life.
If you said, how do you be a good founder?
I would say the same answer.
Yeah, nice. So that's a nice link to my next line of questioning, which is founding RevGenius or co-founding RevGenius.
Did that come out of a pain that you saw when you were in a sales role, like lack of peers or connection?
Absolutely.
I mean, it came out of a hybrid of things.
One, I realized I needed to get out of sales or technology. I needed to do something creative. And I loved bringing people together. I ran a fashion magazine as a side hustle. And our parties were epic where tons of people were there. And what I realized was it was a content publication, but it built a community around it of the designers that we featured, the writers that wrote, the team.
It was truly a passion project for everybody. So that was one angle of it. I was becoming disenfranchised with the space. Poor managers here, not getting paid there, all sorts of... And that all happened to tech. FedEx gave me good managers and FedEx gave me my pay on time. It's funny how that happens.
There wasn't as high of a ceiling and that's why we go to tech, but there was a lot more stability and a lot more comfort. And that's why I pushed away from it because I wanted the ambition and the craziness. But I'd been early stage for so long and I didn't have any support on my team or otherwise early stage, especially through all this.
And I lost my job at the beginning of COVID because I brought in... I closed too much inbound business and not enough outbound. I was the VP of sales, but it was a one person shop building out the program. And they thought I wasn't doing a good enough job selling. So I was like, F this, let me do this somewhere else.
And I could have done a better job on outbound granted and all of that, but regardless. And then I realized I needed to create a space that I wish I had. We need to create that because I bet that I'm not the only one and that it's not even that I'm not the only one. I'm part of the majority. And it feels like that's the case.
What was the first offering?
I understand like enjoying the community essentially for free now.
I mean, the whole thing is free and you monetize through sponsorship, I think. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, we're building some other stuff out, but yes, that's exactly where we're at today.
God, it seems to have grown like pretty fast. Yeah. I reached out to folks directly to invite them at a massive clip. And I really wanted to prioritize throwing like, like organizing the most important space in the space. And it was initially just sales and then you branched out to marketing and rev ops and support or. It happened relatively quickly at the beginning.
It was definitely sales leaning, but yeah, we opened it up. Cool. And the value prop is like you come in, you're going to meet people like you and you're going to learn things. Yeah. You're going to learn how to scale like your career and your company. So whatever you need to learn, there's resources for that and there's people for that. Yeah. Nice. And there's a network.
The importance of a network and community shouldn't be understated. It's the most critical part of anybody's career. I could say that again, but yeah.
And so that's something that I'm interested in with, or I ask any like community leader or manager is you get people in, but then how do you keep people engaging?
So first off, a lot of community managers don't do this full time in the space. I want to put that out there. The biggest hack is doing this full time. Okay.
So now that we got that out of the way, right?
Like how are you going to get people engaging in a place that you're not even engaging in?
You fucking kidding me?
Like, come on.
Are you the full time community manager for FDNS or do you have other people?
We have other people, but like I'm the full time founder. We have a team of full time people, a full team. I was full time before I got paid even. And so that's the first thing.
How do you keep people engaged?
It's constantly listening to the space and to the people and understanding what they want and what they need. Building programming around that, creating opportunities around that. And then more so, just as much so it's understand like one of the things we heard recently was an increase in moderation was needed. Actually we need less.
You know, it was becoming spammy and promotional. So cracking down on that actually increased engagement. We have a really cool energy and a really cool vibe and a really cool engaged community that if engagement drops, sometimes it's because of people that are bad actors. It's not because of anything else. So that's interesting. And it's encouraging conversation.
It's doing a bunch of stuff, but it's being there for the community and for the people and talking to them and having them know that not just you'll be there as a community leader, but your whole team will be there and having mission aligned, having values aligned, having code of conduct aligned all to that. You guys have to do anything to increase growth.
I assume we get members putting the employment on their LinkedIn profile, people telling me, we can grow to faster clip. Yeah.
How?
The secret sauce is reach out to people and ask them to join. Got it. That's it.
Are you a member of our community yet?
I am going to be after this. Jeez.
I actually initially thought it was going to be paid to enter, but then I was researching this interview and I saw that it wasn't, I was like, okay, why don't you join right now?
See, this is how you do it. Everybody wants to join. Just ask them. Got it.
I guess you can do that because it's such a no brainer offer, right?
Because they don't have to pay anything. They have to give a bit of their time. If they had to pay, it would be the best offer of your life. There's so many people that have gotten jobs that have gotten tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of value. Your opportunity costs for not hitting sign up is way more than it's ridiculous.
I guess fortunate just from a business point of view, having the attention of these types of people is also very valuable for recruiters and sponsors because these people, if they get recruited, they have big salaries and then also if they buy any software, that's going to be significantly valuable. I think it makes sense or it seems like the business makes sense, but that's probably why you're still doing it. Yeah.
I mean, there's a tight rope you have to walk to not just take money to take money and to be conscious of the value it adds to the community and the benefit that community members will get out of a certain partnership. That's critical.
Were you doing the sponsor sales?
What's that?
Yeah.
Are you doing the sponsor?
Cool. Nice. I am. We just hired our first salesperson, so I'll be doing slightly less of it, but I'll still be doing it. Yeah. Nice. Cool. Moving on to community led growth. I've read some of your LinkedIn posts around this and you're highlighting the importance. Does this mean that, let's say I have a marketing automation SaaS business, we have like 50 people, we're growing at X rate.
Do I need to start a community?
If so, how do I do it?
I think you need to start one if a gap exists.
I mean, it's not a quick answer, right?
That's universal across everybody.
What's your motion?
Are you a PLG?
Are you a sales led growth?
Are you somewhere in between?
PLG, like a Notion or a Figma, tend to be able to do it in a certain really cool way. Someone hit a million community led members like this month, like last week or two weeks ago, Jan 18th.
Does that mean users or they have a separate community for Notion people?
Separate community.
Yeah, I believe they're all users. I don't know if they're all paying for Notion, but they're all using Notion. They're creating value within the product, they're helping people create templates, create businesses, all of that. There's one thing there. Now you have a more sales led community.
You can get people in the product in your community if you have a PLG community, right?
First and foremost, that's kind of cool. People suggesting or sharing templates for air tables, they do that. They have meetup groups everywhere talking about how to hack Notion and stuff like that. You could do things in the product even if you're not paid. Now sales led, you have to do it more around the topic. Metadata is a great example. They started a community called Demand. There's some others as well.
CommSource started a community called Community Club. Bevy acquired CMX. These are Slack groups and then some. Definitely do it.
Now, I want to put a caveat there. That's kind of how you do it. You do it on a topic. You don't want to do it on your product. But if you are product led growth, you can potentially do it on your product, especially if there's hype there or do it on the space or something like that. You have more options is what I'm trying to say.
The caveat is to make it successful, you need to have a person doing it full time.
Again, back to my original point. Your level of success from doing this will be probably directly on the hours you could put in or certainly have a beginning spot at full time amount, like eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, whatever, that you could do significantly better things and then grow it and scale it. But there's lighter ways to do community.
You could partner with communities and just be active and engaged where you do it. You could sponsor communities and do that. There's some great people like Lavender who are really great partnering with communities and now they started sponsoring communities and they're very in community and they've built their community out of followers and audience based on what they do on social and how they interact in other communities.
I think the key is you need to be hyper active with the people. You don't necessarily have to own a Slack or own a PLG mushroom, but you do have to be involved with the community to maximize or give yourself a chance to take part in community led growth. You can't even activate it if you don't show up in a community.
It's not even an option for you unless you somehow could get your people to create community on their own. Even if you have or don't have your own community, the important part is committing the time to connect and add value. You have to. You talk to anybody not doing it and they will literally mutter the words, I have to. And they still might not do it, but you get the idea.
They know that they should. The obvious objection there for anybody is that I'm going to go in, spend my time and my expertise and then I'm not going to see a direct return. But then to answer the question, in a month, someone will come inbound and they'll either tell you that they heard about you through a community or they won't and you wouldn't know.
But that's how you can convince people to go and engage because the term is dark social. I'll say this, you could follow your whole business plan and it not working. I do see the need on paper for a quick return and stuff, but this is the most potent thing out there.
And I think the only thing, and I think these challenges are why creators and community hasn't captured a lot of the ad spend or majority of the ad spend, I should say, yet, or the majority of the marketing spend, it's because of lack of attribution. And I think that's also part of the reason why it hasn't attracted a majority of the time spent in general.
Yet there's case study and case study again and why it matters, but alas, there's other metrics at play.
Yeah, exactly. The automated attribution isn't necessarily going to tell you about the word of mouth that happened in a community. I think that's shifting though. You could be as good as capturing that as possible. I believe most of Chris Walker and Refined Labs business is coming through their podcast and through community or creator building efforts.
Yeah, exactly. So we've recently shifted to self-reported attribution, which in theory we would get a bit more data, hopefully someone would say they had from a through XY community if that happened. Absolutely. Makes total sense. I think there needs to be even better systems though, and there will be over time.
And when that happens, you're going to see community and creators, because they're kind of in the same category, capture a much bigger percent of marketing spend.
So this is a bullish for the future of RefGenius, right?
Bullish.
I mean, yeah.
What do you see?
How do you see RefGenius evolving over the next few years?
We're going to become the most important space for revenue professionals. The most important space. I can probably think of two other people who are like two other communities that I think are paid that are like on your guys level.
If there anyone else I'm missing, are there other free ones that are good?
Yeah, and we're rolling out paid for some members and stuff as well. I think our core thing, at least right now, is to create more community versus courses or something like that. We toyed in that last year.
Frankly, it's a lot of work. It starts competing with some of the members because a lot of people are becoming creators now and it almost takes away from community in the sense that it takes our focus away from the community part and the people that are creating their own stuff show up less. So it doesn't support them as much.
So just like having an open space that supports everybody, I think is important to get everybody supported. I'm sure there's some really great ones. There's probably a handful of really nice communities out there that could help revenue professionals. Having a no cost access point as well as an exclusive access point is how I think we can help the most people.
And obviously guys, if you're listening, the link for the RevGenius Slack team is going to be in the show notes. Everybody needs to go and join. I want to come back to your sales experience, if possible. And especially now, if I assume through your RevGenius experience, you've come closer or experienced more of the marketing profession as well. Much more. I'm a marketer now, apparently.
Yeah, I was going to say right now, it seems like if you're crushing LinkedIn, by the way, do you have any advice for marketers looking to build a better relationship with their sales team?
Talk to them. And it sounds so simple, but like communication. Like honestly, the alignment challenges I've seen in our team happen with lack thereof. And then without a central alignment towards goals and stuff and just constant communication and there. So you're saying set up a 30 minute weekly chat, get the sales team there, get the marketing team there.
Yeah, understand why the MQLs are crap or why sales is crap. And work it out together. Perhaps have somebody on top, maybe a CRO or something that could help or CEO or COO or VP of RevOps or something that could help align that based on the goals and the pipeline goals and all that. And then make sure both groups are in community. Exactly.
It seems like communication is the thing that's potentially lacking in any rivalry or fractious relationships between these two parties. Yeah. And it causes siloedness. Everybody has their own goals. They're myopic to that effect and they should be, I guess, or it's normal to be, I should say. And just looking at the bigger picture is important.
Now, understood that you might need a third party to help that bigger picture. Understood. And that's important. And even at a small company, that has to be the CEO then.
Yeah, exactly. A third party who's not aligned with the other side, ideally neutral CRO. That's above them. That is aligned, but not only aligned.
Yeah, exactly. Makes sense.
Anything else?
Maybe for the sales team, how would you look to build a better relationship with marketing apart from just communicating?
Yeah, I mean, communicating to understand. If something is not working, if you're following the processes and the part that's connected with marketing isn't working, speak to your higher ups and let them know if you're an individual contributor and if you're a manager as well. You just have to let somebody know what's going on and why and test new things as a unit that could potentially help. Makes total sense.
All right, Jared, thank you for coming on. We're going to link to your LinkedIn because I suggest people go follow content on community led growth content on sales.
Obviously, we're going to link to the Red Genius Slack link. Everybody should absolute no brainer.
Anything else we should link in the show notes?
Geez, that's great. My link didn't connect with me. Connect with me directly. I want to hear from everybody and I want to help as many people as I can. For sure. Have better, more level headed, chill lives.
Yeah, actually, the LinkedIn post, I think I enjoyed the most. Maybe your most engaged as well was the one on meditation.
Yeah, people were asking me because I just kept dropping it and I just wrote out, this is how you do it.
Is that what you're referring to?
Yeah, I think like thousands of likes.
Well, happy to help. Amazing.
Jared, I want to thank you for, it's great because I don't typically have sales or people with serious sales experience on the show. It's great to get more of that insight. Then obviously, community is definitely an opportunity for any B2B marketers listening. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your wisdom so honestly. Thanks so much. I hope the candor was welcomed and nice.