Community Tactics with Gradual: Launching Peer Circles for Cross-Functional Impact

Joshua Zerkel Hello everyone and welcome to Community Tactics with gradual. Today's topic launching peer circles for cross functional impact. One of my favorite topics. I am Josh circle. I lead marketing and community here at gradual. In case you're new to gradual, it's all in one platform for community builders to turn a connection into lasting business impact and grow engagement beyond your product.

Before I introduce today's guest, a quick note please drop your questions in the Q&A and we will try to get to as many as we can. After the session ends, you will also still be able to ask Jen, our guest expert, more questions and share your thoughts via the forum. Amy. We'll share that link a little bit later in the webinar.

Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce our guest, Jenn Delconte is a community strategist and marketing leader with over 15 years of experience helping B2B tech startups grow through connection, content, and advocacy. She launched the compute community at Klue, scaling it from zero to over 15,000 members, and previously founded a boutique events and community agency serving Canada's innovation ecosystem.

Jenn Delconte Thanks so much. It's so nice to be on this side of the screen. I'm usually behind the scenes producing a lot of these these events in the past.

Joshua Zerkel So yeah, as a community builder, I think, it's great when we get to be on the other side.

Jenn Delconte It's very nice, but there's a bit of imposter syndrome here because I'm usually the operational person. But today I'm really excited to share with all of you how I launched a small but mighty community activation tool that I affectionately call Peer Circles within CLU. So this isn't just an event series or a virtual roundtable. This was an intimate strategy on how we could engage more of our key customers and community members and turn them into collaborators.

When it came to launching a new product, a whole new campaign. So today I'll give you some of the step by step instructions so you don't have to start from scratch, and you can jump right into it. But before we do that, I know Josh mentioned a bit of my bio, but I wouldn't be here if I couldn't share some of the fun that I've had over the years as a community and events strategist.

I'm used to being that person that's had to figure it out and do it all. As a solo marketing manager producing events like a charity bike tour, you can see with Mario on the the side there, as well as a five day Silicon Valley tour for university student students. So everything was in-person and then Covid hit, and I had to turn all of those community connections virtual, which I'm sure most of you resonate with today.

I'm not I'm not alone in that regard. So fast forward. I joined CLU, a 200 person Canadian competitive intelligence software company, in 2023, and I was the very first community and events strategist put on here to build the community. Excuse me? The community from scratch. And so I'm proud to say that we built the community from 0 to 1500 unique folks with the gradual team, truly, gradually, with every new feature that came out.

And it really helped me enhance a lot of the virtual skill sets and taught me how to start connecting with folks virtually. So that's where we are today, where I love to build listening to customers, and that's how we came to Pure Circles. So today in this short session, I'm going to show you my simple outline on how to create your own peer circle to spark conversation, how to get that facilitation guide.

So it's not just on your shoulders. You can actually empower your team to lead the convo as well as scale the program. How to activate your customers within the community. After the discussion or that point in time, and then how to turn those insights into action across some of your other departments. For me, this was most successful within Customer Success product, and our marketing team.

So as Leanne mentioned, Josh mentioned, if you have questions throughout, just pop them in the chat. I'll do my best to kind of multitask here, but I'll keep keep us rolling. So why peer circles? Where did this come about? I had just returned from mat leave, with my little one, and I came back to a whole new community and content team.

I built the community from scratch, but we were at a pivotal moment where we needed to go back to the drawing board and figure out how we can continually engage more customers. We built the Compete network, which was more of a top of funnel, larger brand play to educate folks such as product marketers and competitive intelligence professionals. But we hadn't quite cracked the code on how to get customers to engage more.

So I did a bit of a road tour. I interviewed folks of over 25 different customers, and then did an internal roadshow to figure out where does community lie here and where is there an opportunity with resounding, the customers were resounding and said that they just want to connect with each other. Customers want to connect with each other.

They want to talk to the same folks in their industry and their segment, and they want to talk about using the product. This was a bit revolutionary for us because we purposefully did not build a product community from the ground up, so it took a moment to reset. But we also started to learn that our internal teams were all working in silos.

We were all talking to the exact same customer, but on three different channels, and no one was really bringing it all together so that that customer voice could really rise up and make more of an impact. They also were telling folks in some of those other departments that they also just want to talk to other customers and connect.

So I turned on our forum capabilities just for customers to give them a safe space. However, it was a bit of a slow go. I started with a small beta. Try to get some folks in the room, really chose some of those key customer champions to post, and ask me anything similar to the tactic today, but it was constantly pulling teeth to try to get customer success to engage in there and see what their customers were asking about, or even product.

It was really hard to show them that there's a ton of value for them to engage and to really get, part of that community as well with our customers. So everyone was fragmented. We were looking for insights, and we were all trying to tackle how our customers were managing. I, I'm sure most of you have also experienced that.

It's rapidly changed how we all work and operate, and everyone wants to be that first to market in terms of figuring out how to weave it into their product to make it even better. So building the building blocks, I hopped on a call with one of our customer champions to get feedback on this new customer forum. He said it was great.

It's nice to have something, but what he really wanted was to talk to other enterprise leaders. At the same time, he had mentioned this to his Customer Success manager, who asked me, hey, can we just get a small group of folks in a room? I'll bring the customers, you produce that. Let's see what we have here. And voila!

We listened to our customers. We figured out a challenge that brought folks together. We selected a few customers from different stages of the lifecycle, so some were much more engaged. Some had were just onboarded and really fresh to the product with a new perspective. And we launched our MVP in bracket C, our minimum viable peer circle. We started really, really small, like six people max.

We figured out what questions would land, which I'll show you in a second. And then after we launched that first one, we quickly shared insights to be able to build it out for some of the other folks. We really did launch with basic questions. What's working when it comes to AI in your organization and what's not? And then as a last minute addition, which really wasn't a big strategic moment, but it was really just how it all came together.

We invited the VP of product to join the conversation just in case. Any questions about what's possible? And what's not actually came up. We started rolling out four weeks at a time. After that first initial session, we found that we started to segment the invite. So enterprise folks wanted to talk with enterprise, some of the smaller companies.

It's just a different mindset. Some folks have a massive team they're working with, others are solo like, similar to myself. We limited all the seats to build that FOMO and kept it gated. So on our gradual community, only our customers who had opted in could truly see and unlock that extra value of being able to engage with their peers in these small, intimate sessions that featured one of our VIP guests.

It just so happened our VP of product was so jazzed by the first session we ran that he offered to sign up every single week to continually talk to these different customers, and he was thrilled by it. He kept mentioning it to the CEO as well as in our all hands company meetings. And so that was the moment where I really figured out,

This is finally a way to engage some folks across these different departments in some of the planning up front. We sent those questions in advance. We sent them the link to see who else was going to be in the room in this peer circle that are also struggling with the same challenges that they had. And then we also sent them to the community forum so that folks could start to explore and learn about different topics before entering that room and having a discussion with other folks.

Interestingly, one of the assumptions that we had made was that competitive, intelligent folks don't want to talk to other competitive, intelligent folks. They keep their their secret sauce close to the heart. But when you start getting into best practices and some of the challenge that challenges they're having on the daily basis, a lot of them were able to relax and actually appreciate that they're not alone and that others are feeling the same way.

And it was so intimate that they would open up more and have a lot more time to share, rather than a webinar or something a little bit broader, where it can be intimidating to even ask a question in the chat for fear of looking like you don't know what you're talking about, or that you should have all of the answers at this exact moment in time.

So to set the stage, these were the questions that we asked. This was all related to AI, but really it's the similar questions that I asked in those discovery meetings and that that little road show that I did with some of the customers when I returned from maternity leave. So basic open ended question what's working well for you right now related to your industry?

The top, the job to be done that you're trying to focus with your product. What's your biggest blocker you're facing? How are your teams approaching this challenge? And then what would help you move faster and make progress here? The key is really not to focus on your product, your company, and to actually open it up so that folks are sharing more of their day to day.

And it helps you learn and discover perhaps some things that you hadn't heard from them before. Now it is important to prepare someone as a facilitator. It seems very straightforward. We're just going to open up a zoom room. We'll invite eight people we know six people. Five people might show up just given last minute tendencies. And it was a free event as well.

But you really want to have that facilitator who's really walking through and making sure that conversation is flowing. Their job is not to be the VIP, with all the answers. Their whole role is to be listening there, tapping on some of the quieter folks there, going even further. And so with a little bit of practice up front, and perhaps getting some of your facilitators on a call, you can actually get them to be much more confident.

And they also help to time keep and leave five minutes at the end for for a call to action to join us back in the community. So when it comes to execution, we capped these sessions to 45 minutes max. We landed on an 8 a.m. Pacific time frame work which worked really well for more of a 4 p.m. end of day in the UK and the Mia region, which from a community strategy perspective, we also hadn't fully tapped yet.

Those folks wanted to engage with some folks in North America, but historically all of our other event timings just hadn't worked out. So we finally unlocked that sweet spot. If there's anything that you're taking away from this that seem to be a great time to resonate where you can get that global community together at once, we kept it really focused on the customers, so they should be the ones that are speaking 70% of the time.

Our special guest, as I mentioned, was our VP of product. He was amazing. He could actually dig in a little bit further with some folks as well as say, hey, that actually is a great idea. That's something that's possible. Or hey, let me take that back to the team and loop back with you. So we had some authority in the room to try to bring some of those actions, or those ideas into action following that.

And then 10% should be that facilitator. We had 1 or 2 sessions where the facilitator, they spoke a bit more than they needed to, and they started teaching, which is very natural when you're in a room and you want to jump in and you're excited and join the conversation. So I'd really encourage you to take a step back and really allow your customers and guests to do most of the talking.

The guests are the ones that add the spark, and they can sometimes go in different directions, which is okay. You can go off script. But there's always those moments where you can bring them back. We ended up recording our sessions on zoom. We let people know that they would be recorded, and then we let them know that we would be looking at the transcripts for who could analyze for different trends and different sessions.

From there I used Gong Recordings and ChatGPT and I created executive summaries to say, hey, here's some of the highlights. Here's where we can dig in deeper next time. This is a really juicy topic that we could learn more about. And so it was a constant iteration and a feedback flywheel. We'd also try to tighten up the questions every time, tighten up the facilitator guide, and then we would escalate all of the feedback to either the Customer Success team or product to really try to figure out how are we building some of these challenges into the product roadmap.

And then the CSA team, they took it even further and developed their whole new training guide, so that other customers who weren't in the room with those customers could still leverage some of the content and the challenges that we were hearing, so that they could empathize more with our customers. I think that was a very unique advantage that, that's how you can scale some of those learnings as well and bring them into practice.

We also started capturing some of the quotes with the product launch teams to help us improve messaging, and we really brought our customer champions and advocates into the fold to make them feel much more engaged. There were some great quotes that we started featuring on our launch, which I'll show you an example of how this was woven in at best practice.

And we also continued to see our advocates come back for more as they found these really valuable. They had an opportunity to speak and share and engage. So for outcomes and impact. This is where I briefly ran through this list. But truly, there was an adoption of new features and requests to join betas that some of the customers hadn't read their email or been aware of just yet.

So it was another way to really bring some new ideas to light. We validated some different use cases across segments that some of our messaging wasn't landing with the enterprise folks, and that was okay. It was time to pivot. We increased that customer champion engagement, which was a program we had launched before doing the forum launch to try to figure out who are some of these bigger voices that we could be learning from and helping us co-create some of the community program alongside what they're already going through.

It helped to shape the product, launch messaging, and ultimately influence pipeline and retention. At the end of the day, when it actually came time to do our big launch. So here's an example of how we wove some of the content into the launch. This was earlier this year when CLU launched our compete agent. We we found agent and I.

There was there was some hesitation around going, you know, having your own, avatar. However, if there was a way to personalize it and really emphasize that this is someone that it is you, it's just having you do your own work faster rather than replacing you, that that was really important. So we had folks like Claire from SurveyMonkey really bought in.

We developed her avatar for her as a bit of a surprise. And then we launched a page as well where you could build your own character and agent. This was just a really fun part of the launch that we also wove back into the community. We also had a WTF is a compete Agent event aligned with it, and so we were continuing to build that momentum as we were preparing to build our own AI agent here.

So some do's and don'ts. So what I learned was really keep it small and focus. Bigger isn't always better. More webinars, more and more and more with tons and tons of guys. That wasn't really what was resonating with our customers. They wanted more small sessions where they could contribute as well as learn from others and share examples. It was really focused on that one topic, which, I kept it broad for this, but it was much more focused when we actually delivered.

And then I shared snippets strategically with the Customer Success team, with product, with our marketing team, and then with the broader company about what and how our customers are actually adopting AI into their day to day. And then we worked out loud. We tried some things that didn't work. We had an amazing first MVP, then we did a four week series.

Then we tried to launch it again, but with a different product line, but we were starting to use it as a lead gen tool. We over programed it, there was a bit of fatigue and it didn't quite land, and so we went back to square one of getting rid of, getting rid of that lead gen tactic and really making it much more organic about some of those folks, and even repeating the PR circle a couple months later with some of the folks who had initially joined, we also were mindful of who those facilitators were.

If they were really keen to start educating and teaching, that wasn't necessarily the best format for them. Although, yes, we use their their skill set in another way in the community to really go back onto the forum and to reengage and to teach and to capture and share with others. So I built a basic playbook today. I'm going to continue to build on it, working out loud here.

But it's something that I'm happy to share with folks as well. Afterwards. And really, it can go through an event checklist if you're building something from scratch and gradual. Some of the outreach copy and sample invites that we used, especially as we had this gated. So it really was invite only. We used our customer success managers to send that personal invite or through a slack DM if they were connected on their instance.

There's a facilitator guide as well as some debrief prompts, and then post event templates that you can take a look at as well. And yeah, that's a wrap. Really, there's a ton of stuff I could speak to on what was working, what wasn't, but it was really important to start small spark those conversations. And then also you really need to drive and demonstrate those outcomes.

Most of the time, folks just want the bigger numbers. There are 150 attendees, but when we really drill down into those smaller, intimate engagements, there was a ton of insight that we wouldn't have captured if we had gone more of a traditional route. So I'm curious, I'm kind of curious, like, who owns customer conversations in your organization?

If you were siloed like myself, what are some of the ways that you also bridged it? I'm also here to learn because it's, yeah, I love community because it's an ever, ever growing practice where the game can change. So yeah. So with that, I will stop sharing. I think I see a comment in the chat. So yeah.

Joshua Zerkel Jen, thank you so much for all of this. I see April is here with us. April, if you want to pop in with any of your thoughts or questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. By the way, Jen, thank you so much for all of that amazing content. The playbook we will share with everyone who has registered after the event, so no worries, everyone will get access to it. It looks amazing. I'm looking forward to using it myself as a matter of fact. So thank you.

One of the things that came to mind for me as a question is you talked a bit about, like the program, how to run it, etc. but how do you decide who gets invited to participate in customer feedback groups like peer circles?

Jenn Delconte Yeah, this was really important that we tapped on a mix of our 25 customer advocates. And so those were folks that weren't bringing in the biggest dollar figure from a revenue perspective, but they were the most engaged. So they were the ones that were continually signing up for events. They were the ones raising their hand when we had podcast speaking opportunities, and they were folks that we had connected with in real life, which wasn't very often considering that we really only had minimal in-person events during that period of time.

So that was really important to get several of those champions on board. But then we also were looking at how do we engage folks in amea and abroad that we don't normally have. So we had three different lists going at all times. We did segment by enterprise and growth, but those different lifecycle stages. So we aimed for two advocates who were really in there, super passionate, could speak to the product day in, day out.

They didn't have all the features turned on yet. So it was also a great way to test and engage what's been resonating with them. And then we had a few new folks who are still fresh to the product. And then, yes, we had a few folks from different geographical regions. So honestly, it didn't end up in this perfect formula where I could say x plus y equals z because everyone has different schedules.

Maybe the the 4 p.m. and Amir was tricky. I'm seeing April that. Yeah, scheduling the time for hosting them. It was a bit tricky, but we ended up going with our VP of product, who always had that 8 a.m. timeslot on a Thursday morning that he used for digging into long conversations, customer calls, trying to figure out what was working, what wasn't as they were developing that roadmap.

And so we just stuck with that. And, yeah, we had several folks who did drop out last minute. Something came up, as it normally does. So we would usually open it up for eight seeds, try to keep it really focused on a specific industry, different segment. And we had a ton of success. And even folks learning across different industries, it was okay if if there was someone who showed up that wasn't quite the right fit. I know that they took something away as well.

Joshua Zerkel Yeah. I think in any sort of, program like this, we have people from a variety of different roles, backgrounds, etc. sometimes it may seem like someone is the hot person out because they don't fit the mold exactly for what you're looking for, but often they bring really interesting things to the conversation in different perspectives. So it's good for you too.

One of the things that you mentioned also, anytime you do an event, there's always like, oh, people drop out or things happen at the last minute, especially event like this where it's highly curated. How have you found ways to increase attendance or engagement at these types of events that you've hosted?

Jenn Delconte Yeah. So one thing I did was send a personal email ahead of time listing out everyone's profile in the community who had registered and who was attending. And so there was a bit more of that onus on those folks to show up, to engage. I know, like there were some interesting logos that folks would say, oh, I've always wanted to meet that person, or we have the CFM team.

Hey, I invited this other customer that you've been wanting to see. We'd love to see you there as well. And so just really trying to build in some of that, those social connections that can be tricky to schedule those one on one connections. Especially as a busy CSM or a busy community person who's juggling multiple tasks. That was great to just even have that more publicly facing.

So turning on that gradual feature of see who else is attending, I find has been really effective. I'd also send them a reminder 24 hours in advance and say, hey, these are the questions. Our VP of product, Adam, also posted some thoughts on the community in advance. Take a look at there if you're kind of curious.

I'd be posting some of the summaries from previous sessions, so it wasn't like they were walking into a room where they, they felt, you know, I don't know anything. Should I show up? So I was really hoping to build as much confidence in them to attend, even if they didn't have all the answers on how they're using I, which was our topic of choice at the time.

Joshua Zerkel That's great. I think that really warms people up to the experience that they're about to have, and the people they're going to meet and what they can expect when they come in the door. That's fantastic.

Jenn Delconte Yeah. And even folks did take the time to just reply to me through an email or on gradual to say, hey, I'm so sorry, Jen, I cannot attend. So I think it really does speak to, yeah, sending some of those personal invites that are not as scalable. It's doing that stuff that doesn't scale and seeing them as a human, or just connecting those dots without just sending out the mass email.

Joshua Zerkel Great. April has a question. She popped in where the questions that the VP posted in advance only visible to the invitees?

Jenn Delconte No. So those ones were still broad, but he shared a whole new product vision on how we're going to tackle this new wave of innovation within CLU. So it was really commendable for him putting himself out there. Traditionally, our product team had been much more behind the scenes. They weren't as willing to take that step because they were worried.

What if what if there is negative feedback out there? And so there was a lot of encouragement from folks saying, it's okay. This is where we can identify what some of those biggest challenges could be, and then how we can solve them collectively. And so yeah, that was the biggest moment was when, our, our VP really saw the vision and saw the momentum that we could be building and took some time out of his busy schedule to really contribute and engage.

And in turn, a lot of our customers respected that too. So he even opened up his mail and said, hey, if you don't want to post it on here, that's fine. Here is my direct email. You have my direct line. And so his approach really built into that ethos that we were building within the community as well, to try to break down those barriers, be as approachable as possible.

We're all just trying to figure it out.

Joshua Zerkel I think being honest about that and giving people a space where they can contribute and feel like they're part of creating it, along with your company. These sorts of programs like Pure circles, focus groups, forum conversations, people want to feel like they're part of the process, not that they're just being fed a product. They want to feel like they've had input on it.

And this is a very authentic on the ground way to do that.

Jenn Delconte Yeah. And like I said, a lot of them were begging to join a beta that was closed. So they're like, no, I want to be part of creating that. Like you have something that can solve this challenge for me on a day to day basis. That's so cool. I want to be part of that group that gets to play with this first.

So that was also reassuring to see that excitement and engagement. And then when it did come time to launch something publicly, it's, hey, we built this avatar, or hey, here's your agent. It was they were much more willing to engage, and could see where that was going to, to help them with them, those jobs to be done.

But it's a never ending list of jobs to be done. I find that there's anything I do more with less has been a resounding thing.

But yeah, the do more is the the key phrase there. Even though the tools can help us now, we have to do a lot more things. I mean, you have to.

Yeah. And that's where it seems counterintuitive to say, email them personally, set up a guide. Like there was a lot of manual stuff that I probably could have easily just put something into. An AI agent, a tool helped me do all these things. But, yeah, we really wanted to have that human to human connection and know that it was it was generating that email, encouraging you to join us.

Joshua Zerkel And I think people get it when you do that extra effort of the person to person connection. That's really the the magic of community work. And this type of customer facing work is people see it, they notice it, they know when something is automated and they know when something really isn't. And yeah, that extra mile that that we go as customer facing teams, people see it, they appreciate it.

And I think they respond really well to it. So kudos to you for for really putting in a program that made all of that happen for your organization.

Jenn Delconte Yeah. Thanks. Yeah.

Joshua Zerkel Well, with that, I just want to say thank you. Jennifer is spending the time to walk us through pure circles. This is really awesome. And I hope everyone who is watching live now and who will be watching the recording takes a lot away from this, because I think you shared some real gems. If you want to connect with Jenn online, Jenn, where should they find you?

Jenn Delconte Yeah, join me on LinkedIn or I'm happy to jump in here on the forum. Send me a DM if you're on the community as well. I'm always, yeah, accessible. I'm always online.

Joshua Zerkel All right. Well I encourage everyone to connect with Jen. Please continue the conversation with her and with the rest of the graduate community in the Amy that's in the forum, and you can find [email protected]. All right. With that I want to say thank you everyone for attending. Thank you, Jenn, for being a fantastic speaker. Thank you Leann behind the scenes for helping run the show.

And we'll see you at a future event. Bye for now.

Jenn Delconte Thanks. Bye.