RevGenius & The Collab: Common Room’s GTM Creator Playbook

Introducing our brand new series featuring exclusive content from Jared Robin, Founder of RevGenius and The Collab. Dive into revenue generation with actionable tips, real success stories, and expert advice from the B2B world. 

Kicking off with an interview with Rebecca Marshburn, Head of Community at Common Room.

(Interested in community? Check out our 101 playbook or the article on the Community-Led Growth)

Dive in!

Rebecca Marshburn is the Head of Community at Common Room. She stewards and hosts channels and interactions wherever their customers, champions, prospects, creators, fans, or anyone interested in GTM strategy and community strategy intersect and engage, whether it’s in their digital channels like their Slack, LinkedIn, or Twitter, or at IRL events, meetups, and conferences.I had the opportunity to chat with her and asked her about their new GTM Creator Playbook.

Common Room GTM Creator Playbook

Rebecca: [Common Room] works with individuals who are making incredible contributions to their own communities and audiences in the GTM space.

They know their audiences best and they know their communities best. When we work together with them, we see those creators as our GTM Partners, and as conduits and advocates to their own communities.

When I think about the playbook for our GTM Partners—its foundational tenet is really very basic. How do we tell the truth? How do we make this a win-win-win—a win for our creator, a win for their audience, and a win for Common Room. How do we keep it authentic to our creator and their audience, and be relevant to the work they’re doing?

We give them autonomy to create as they choose based on what they’re learning at the time and what the right content is for their community at the time. We don’t give them scripts.

What I give to them is feedback and transparency about where our thinking is as a company—where our positioning is, where we’re going next as a product and our product vision, what’s launching and when…but that info is not meant to supersede the authenticity of the creator and their audience.

Finding the Right Fit for the Program

Jared: How do you go to find the right fit for this program?

Rebecca: So there’s two things:

1. Creators within the persona we are trying to reach –  We’re all about intelligent GTM. We’re all about building our customer intelligence platform and helping others understand the defining pillars of a customer intelligence platform. And so, from there, there are personas that specifically would get the most value out of a tool like Common Room. And that’s going to be that full GTM squad, right? So it’s going to be marketing people, sales people, ops people, marketing ops people, revops people, success people, obviously community and DevRel people. And so with all of those personas together, that’s where we start.
2. Creators that are genuinely excited about Common Room.  I want to find creators that want to work with Common Room and dive into the product. They’ve got to believe in Common Room. They’ve got to have wanted to spend the time and be like, “oh, oh, yes”, I see how the people that are interacting with me would get value out of this. That totally changes the relationship not only between us and our creators, but between creators and the product, and then how creators are able to show up when their audience and community members ask real questions—they can be like, “oh, I actually know this”, or “this is how I would use it”, or “this is why I would recommend it in this moment”.

Something I love about the creators we work with is how actionable and straightforward their posts are. Like, here’s the 1-2-3 of how I craft my first cold outreach.

Measuring ROI

Jared: How do you measure the success of the program and how is ROI?

Rebecca: Measuring success:

1. We measure it by having creators that love being a part of the program and want to keep creating unique content for us. If they continue to opt in, that’s a great sign.
2. Outcomes-wise, we look at number of comments, engagements, and ICP showing up in the posts (if they’re posts on social), as well as—
3. How well our SDRs can outbound off comments and generate a higher conversion rate to meetings (we see a lift in sequences that reference creator posts and engagement), and
4. Number of inbounds that drop specific creators by name as referrals or list LinkedIn or other social channels as how they heard about us.

ROI:

• Been super positive – we piloted the program as an experiment to see if it made sense for everyone and decided to keep going based on outcomes
• We started with 5 creators in December (including me, Nick Bennett, Mark Huber, Mark Kilens, Peter Ahn) and have expanded to 9 consistently and around 13 total on a month-to-month basis in the last 4 months
• More than 2-3x’d referrals mentioning LinkedIn since we started the program—that’s a testament to work of our creators/partners and the credibility they’ve built with their audiences

What’s also pretty amazing is that a lot of these GTM creators have huge devoted audiences, but there’s actually not a ton of overlap between their readers.

Everyone speaks to their own community and has a natural niche. No two people are exactly the same—we don’t want to fatigue audiences so our creators and I have ongoing conversations around protecting their people from that.

B2B Companies That Inspire

Jared: What companies out there are you getting inspiration from? And the question I said last time is, good artists borrow. Great artists steal. Who are you borrowing or stealing plays from that you really love and want to shout out?

Rebecca: I always get inspiration from Airbnb, but let’s focus on some of the B2B companies that I’m super proud to share a vision with in terms of intelligent GTM, and the role and importance of signals as the new standard in how to go-to-market intelligently, folks like: Warmly, Champify, Koala, Cabal, Discourse, Gradual, Aligned, Hightouch, Toplyne, Bevy, Discourse, DEV…so many!

I was also extremely inspired by Clay from your issue of the Collab last week! And then there’s the OG’s we can always learn from, like Asana and Salesforce—their communities and ambassador programs pretty much set the bar for peer-to-peer learning and growth, and I think today’s Creator programs borrow (or steal!) a lot from their playbooks.