Episode 48: Transforming Businesses: Community to Member-Led Model | Mark Kilens

Steve Goldhaber welcomes Mark Kilens, an accomplished marketer boasting over 15 years of industry experience, to this episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast. With an impressive career spanning organizations like HubSpot, Drift, and Airmeet, Mark's insights are grounded in extensive practical experience.

In this episode, the duo delves into several riveting topics:

• The transformation process of businesses from a community-led model to a member-led model.
• The creation of a new category in a saturated B2B marketplace.
• Candid insights from Mark's time at HubSpot, focusing on its unique workplace culture.
• An exploration of future trends in inbound marketing.
• Strategic ways for B2B marketers to stand out in their field.
• The importance of adopting a CEO's mindset for successful marketing.

Tune into this engaging conversation on Apple, Spotify, and the 26 Characters website.

Stay connected with Mark Kilens and Steve Goldhaber by following them on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The transcription of our podcast episodes has been generated by a third-party AI tool. While we strive for accuracy, we cannot guarantee that all typos, errors, or misinterpretations have been corrected. So, if you come across any blunders, don't blame us. Blame the robots. (Just kidding, don't blame them either. They're doing their best.)

Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody, what's up? Welcome back to Studio 26 and the interesting B two B Marketers podcast today. I'm happy to have Mark on the show. Welcome, mark. 

Mark Kilens: Thanks for having me, Steve. It's a pleasure. 

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, awesome. Let's just jump into who you are. So give us a 60-second description of your background.

Mark Kilens: Absolutely. I'm a marketer by trade, if you will. Been in marketing for about 15 years now at fourth company. Now started at a bootstrap kind of startup back in 2008, 2009. That is when I learned about HubSpot. We were trying to, you know, save and kind of grow the company during the great recession. I was tasked with doing some marketing stuff after I joined.

Okay. Yeah, I, I can figure this out. Went to Google types and how to generate leads. HubSpot came up, was at HubSpot for about nine years. Was at Drift for three and a half years after that, and now I've been at Air meets for about 15 months. So B two B marketer, excited to be, uh, talking with you today.

Steve Goldhaber: Awesome. All right. You've done your tour duty duty at HubSpot. That's such a foundational element of the B two B world. More on the small and mid market side, but I've been on that platform. They've done some cool stuff. All right, so this isn't a HubSpot infomercial. We're not gonna, we're not gonna do that.

They have their own, their own press. Alright. We're case studies and the first one you're gonna share with us has to do with. Transforming a space from community led into more member led. So go ahead and take it away. 

Mark Kilens: Absolutely. So this company is in the technology space, been around for eight years now.

And they had a tremendous amount of engagement on LinkedIn podcasts, across the web, across social, across all these different places. And they were doing pretty good. They, they, you know, they found product market fit. They were looking to now really double down and hone in on go to market fit and become, you know, a really successful scale up.

From a startup to scale up. What they were facing was this fact around demand capture, not demand creation. They were great at demand creation. Okay? That's how I view community-led growth, demand creation. But how do you turn that demand and turn it into new business, but also convert the existing demands you have, you know, through your customer install base into more demand.

I'll add this transition to more of a member led motion, not giving up the community led, but moving into member led. So that's kinda setting the table in terms of like some of the high level problems, Steve. 

Steve Goldhaber: Okay. That sounds good. All right. So good juicy problem to have. How'd you approach it? What was kinda your thought on how to make that transition happen?

Mark Kilens: Get closer to the audience. So community's a confusing term for a lot of people. Communities say, well, it was community. It can mean so many different things. I think of it in two simple, very easy to understand ways. One is the. Unowned community. A community that you do not own is everything that surrounds your brand.

The people talking about your brand, interacting with the brand. Engaging with the brand. I mean, heck, it's the reputation, right? I mean, you don't get to decide your reputation, other people do. Then there's the owned community, a community that you have direct kind of ownership of, that you're looking to shape, not for the people, but with other people.

Both are. You're building it with people and you're growing it with people, but the second kind of community is the one you own, and I like to refer that. Refer to that as a member led motion where you're gathering up the members who've opted into having a more direct relationship with your brand into this community.

And that's member led. So that comes with a lot of benefits because you get a lot of first party data. You get even zero party data, you can do a lot of personalization, you get a lot more information about people, their motivations, their problems, what they're consuming. That can of course help you with the demand capture and the convert demand motion.

That is the thing that follows creating demand. So that's how, uh, I think about it. And I think there's a lot of companies kind of wanting to do this, but they're trying to figure out what this all means. First, it's recognizing that, you know, you don't own your community, but you can have an owned community if you take a more, you say thoughtful approach.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So how do you do that? I mean, are you, is it you're creating content, are you giving them access to things that they're not getting elsewhere? How do you get that ultimately, like the stickiness of that member driven community? 

Mark Kilens: Both. I mean, the simplest way that we did it in this case study example is around, I.

Transforming what you would normally think as a resource center into a membership experience. And I believe that's the future of many websites, especially in B two B. These days. You have these resource centers, that's all this great content, all these great resources, whatever, but they're actually filled with friction, filled with annoyances, not personalized.

It's actually not easy for the marketer to get collect data about people consuming that stuff. 'cause you have like, You know, dozens if not hundreds of landing pages. You have all these forms. It's disjointed. There's a lot of old material. No one can curate or create their own resource list. So for this example, we're like, look, what are the primary benefits of becoming a member?

You can get all of our resources and some exclusive resources, resources and contents in this membership. Yes, we'll keep a lot of them ungated because that's how you acquire members organically. That's how you get great s e o benefits. That's fine. But the fact of the matter is you can still convert and download these resources one by one if you so choose.

Or better yet, you know what, if you just opt in and become a member, you get everything at once. We'll give you more personalized resources and you get custom stuff and you'll get other benefits outside of just content. And that's what we started seeing happening. You know, it, it, it grew from zero to 66,000 members.

In just about three and a half years. 

Steve Goldhaber: Wow. So is that, are you bundling the membership price with what they're are paying for the regular software, or is this a separate thing where they've got a, it's a separate package that they're paying for or, you know, it's just free. Anyone can sign up, they just have to authenticate.

Mark Kilens: It should be free. It's always free. I mean, you could maybe have a, a premium version and we did for a little bit, which ended up not really panning out too, too much. But, um, it's free, just like a resource center is free. And this is where it gets confusing with like, people not even really understanding the idea of member-led or own community.

No, it's, it's mostly free. I mean, there's, there's some business models where I think you can justify a cost, but I, I would even say if you do have a monthly cost or annual cost to it, which is still offer either a free seven 30 day trial or just a free, that'd be point view. That will help you convert more of that demand, right?

Yeah. Capture, convert more of that demand long term. So I see it as a marketing asset, not so much as a revenue generating asset. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Tell me about, you know, you said you got it up to over 50,000 people. What's the behind the scenes team that is needed to run that? So how did you have to scale up on, on your own team to figure out, hey, if we're gonna do this, we've gotta make it a great experience?

Mark Kilens: Designers, video producers. Content marketers and web developers, and then you had like, if you really wanna take it to the next level, you have some, someone focused on creating educational experiences that aren't just, that isn't just content, but it's it's content packaged in a way that's helping someone get to an outcome, which is at the end of the day, what good education does.

Yeah. So you don't have to go to that length initially. That's a lot of investment upfront. You could have your existing team and they have the skillset to do this. Even a team that's not full-time, you might be working with an agency or, or whatever freelancers who can build this because everyone, actually, most B two B companies already have this in place.

Going back to the resource center to membership experience idea. They just have not innovated their resource center in years, if ever. And this is something that you can do, right? And it's just, it's a re-imagination. Of that customer experience, yes, it's gonna require some software. So you're either gonna have to build some stuff using WordPress plugins or you know, other things that that can be there.

Or you have to buy something that helps you create this membership experience. But even the cost of that is so insignificant. Given the benefits that you'll get from this, just the data alone in terms of how much someone's consuming, what are they consuming, and then giving that to your sales team and giving it to them in a more digestible manner so they can do more personalized and timely follow up.

And then having them be able to use the membership experience as the carrots at the end of the stick to educate the, the buyer to keep them, you know, in the market or move them from outta market into the market. Like for the solution you sell, it's it, there's too many benefits. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So the thing I like about these communities is like it's the members who are interacting with each other.

They're contributing, they're adding value. Sometimes they're even answering like q and a that the company might normally do, but then the members just kind of resolve that. But the one thing that's always interesting to see play out is when there's like a mutiny among the members and something's happening at the company who's hosting that community and they're upset whether it's bugs or whether it's feature functionality.

So, Did you ever experience that where there was just a, an organic movement of members kind of demanding something, get fixed or something, be reprioritized? How did, how did that go for you? 

Mark Kilens: I mean, yeah, you definitely, I, I wouldn't say like it was the full membership, but I mean, the, the best membership experiences you can create are an intersection of your customers, prospects, and even like partners or channel, whatever, right?

It's a blend of all these people, and there'll always be louder voices than others, but like, The reason why this this motion is so good is it puts the people at the center of the experience. You know, I'm a big advocate of people first GoTo market. We talk about it in the club that we have. We have a club called Club pf.

You can sign up for it and your club pf is all about how do you create a people first go to market? And that means every experience puts the person at the center of the experience. So the question you asked is around, well, you have people that are super passionate or want something maybe fixed or approved.

That's great. Fix it with them in public. Do it in a way that helps you build a better, more trusted reputation. So as long as the company is listening and there's someone there, or a group of people there to help respond and engage with that feedback, engage with those people. I have not seen any downsides.

I've only seen upsides. 'cause it shows that you're, you're a authentic, honest brand that cares about. The things that matter to, to its customers matter, to its potential customers. I think it's only a good thing. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right, cool. Thanks for sharing the first case study. I wanna jump into the second one.

Now. This one is all about creating a category in a crowded marketplace. Something that a ton of B two B marketers are probably just faced with all the time. So number two, let's go jump into number two. Take it away. 

Mark Kilens: So first off, there's a ton of different types of categories. You can think of them in two different levels, though thought leadership versus product.

First thing people get wrong. Everyone thinks, you know, not everyone, but a lot of people, I should say, think about, hmm, gotta create a category. Well, why would I create a category with that? Because it doesn't make any sense. Well, actually it makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a thought leadership brand standpoint versus a very product specific category that they would talk about in Gartner, Forrester, et cetera.

So that's just something to recognize. So in this example, this company, Had a problem. Very crowded markets, dozens of competitors needed a way to stand out and decided that they needed to create a thought leadership type of category. And one of the best ways to create a thought leadership type of category is to associate it with something already in the minds people.

So the association principle, and that's what this company did. So they, they took this idea and applied it to this kind of discipline, in this case of marketing. It's a technology company again. And they were able to, Re have people reimagine and rethink what this solution meant to a business and made it so that other competitors and other people in the marketplace, no matter if it's competitors, there's other people would buy into it as well.

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So you mentioned a lot of companies who were competing in, was this a defensive thing, meaning like, was the business declining and they needed to turn it around? Were, was this more of like a proactive. Offensive move to gain market share. Like help us understand what was going on, proactive within the marketplace.

Mark Kilens: Offensive move to create brand awareness, brand recognition for the brand a little bit, but more for this, this new way, this new point of view, point of view story education, about how do you use this, this solution in new and better ways. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. Okay. How long did it, I'm gonna break this. A two part question here.

So one is how long did it take for you to get to that clarity around this is how we're gonna position ourselves, and then the second part is the execution. How did, how long does it 

take? 

Mark Kilens: A couple months of clarity to build and implement a couple? Then execution never ends. It's always, so with category creation, you never stop executing it until it's exhausted and you move out of the next kind of category, which is usually years, if not decade plus away.

The most important thing though, when you're creating any type of category, product, thought leadership, or both. You have to get the entire company behind it. And that's been a little bit of a struggle, I think, you know, for this company as well, like where everyone needs to understand it, believe in it, get it, and evangelize it.

Because if, if not everyone of the company's doing it, that then having everyone that you try to, you know, interact with in the market around this category becomes harder, right? So it's like, That is a thing that I've seen firsthand be one of the most important things when it comes to category creation.

But this was, this is something that never stops in terms of execution. You're only trying to build more momentum as you continue to, to bring it into the minds of new people, and hopefully get them to believe in it so much that it becomes part of like their hearts, right, the mind, the heart, the soul. At the end of the day, a good category becomes the soul of the business in many ways, where it's almost, you know, It's really kind of part of the ethos of that brand and the brand archetype, if you will, is there to Yep.

You know, bring it forward in a way that is very value centric, meaning the category ist here to talk so much about us, and us, and us. It's about how we together can make this thing, this problem, this whatever opportunity, you know, be valuable for whomever. Cares about it. So it's like, it's like that give, get, it's like give, give, give.

And that's what good category designers do. And what they get back at some point in return is revenue and profits. But um, it's a give mindset first. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. All right. That makes sense. So, fast forward, you know, a year or later after a year you've developed this. What's going on in the marketplace? Are, are other companies being acquired?

Are they divesting? Tell us what happened. 

Mark Kilens: Alpha companies have definitely picked up on it and you know, I think with many categories, competitors don't have to talk about it because it, well is not mine, but like you actually want competitors to talk about it. And some are talking about it. The key is, are your customers talking about it?

And if your customers are talking about it and other like neutral, non-competitive and just non-customers talk about it, then you, you start to see these momentum and that's what's happening. It's starting to gain a lot of steam. One of the easiest ways to judge how well it's going is just search traffic.

The ranking and traffic to these keywords that are related to the category. How often is it being talked about and used in conversations with customers and buyers? How is it resonating in the marketplace across, you know, social communities? Just that, that community that surrounds the brands, you know, how many people, people are talking about it there and then, so yeah, it's definitely going well and I, I really believe it's been validated now.

It's about, about just continuing the drum beats. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yep. I like that. Continuing the drum beat. It's good. It's a good metaphor for, for knowing that you're never done playing music. Uh, you can have your greatest hits and all that. Mm-hmm. But like, you just gotta keep on, keep on inventing new stuff. Alright, cool.

Let's go jump into q and a. I want you to tell us about chaotic marketing session.

Mark Kilens: I mean, I wasn't even a, uh, I mean, I wasn't even a marketer, right? I typically was doing research at this company. I guess I transitioned to full-time marketing for a little bit. HubSpot taught me a lot about what I know about marketing.

Early days, I was very much an inbound focused type of marketer. I've become much, I'd say much more horizontal and broader than that now. Yeah, so I had a huge play in this, but like so, so that's a mindset that I'll, I'll never let go of where the more you can market with people and not for people, that is the mindset you need to have.

Steve Goldhaber: All right, I'm gonna jump into your time at HubSpot. I've used the platform for a long time. I've been to Inbound, which is their, you know, big annual conference, which is really good. They, they spend a ton of, ton of, uh, money on inbound to get some great speakers. Um, so I've always enjoyed that event. Um, give us like an inside the, the, the look at culturally what it's like.

To work there. You know, like, what are you, what were you doing there? 

Mark Kilens: I mean, what was it like to be on I the company's incredible. Can't say different teams. It goes right from leadership down. So Dharmesh and Brian, the co-founders are incredibly thoughtful and caring leaders that have set a and have created, purposefully created a culture with the, with the employees that tries to truly embody what inbound means.

There's a set of principles named heart, I believe it still still stands for humble, empathetic, adaptable. Remarkable and transparent. That last one was super key, transparent. I've never seen a more transparent culture. I've worked at two companies after that. Not even, you know, one, one was close, like, you know, but nothing even compares to the level of hotspot transparency that I saw.

I witnessed, I joke, I, I got like two masters in business administration at times about one pre going public, going post going public because, Just the amount of context they would give to the, the employees. And I still think they do this today in order of information and open dialogue that they encourage through the Wiki, which is a huge piece of the HubSpot culture.

I know that's still kicking today in a big way is incredible. So communication is everything for a company, both internally and externally, and they just excel at that. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. You know what I really enjoyed about HubSpot is they, what they did and said on their site and on their product, they, I felt at least like they were doing it in real life.

One of the funniest things I remember is filling out, you know, I wanted to buy a ticket to, to HubSpot's conference, and as part of that registration process, they gave me access to the letter that I could give my boss to request money to go. And it just was a great piece of content marketing where they wrote it for me and they were like the two page letter on hey.

Steve here, I'm looking to go to this conference because this is how it's gonna help meet my goals at this company. And I wanna learn X, Y, and Z and this is a good way for you to support me. And I just, I've never seen anything that specific and it's, you know, the reality is the conference was gonna be approved, right?

Like I knew I had the budget to go to it, but the fact that they were showing me through content or inbound marketing, look, we help you. Get what you want through, through this philosophy. And I've, I've always looked at that as such a great example of like, yep, this is a company that isn't just selling software.

They've, they've transformed their, yeah, it's a great example. Entire company to, to believe it. What are some things in the spirit of inbound that you see changing over the next couple years? AI is obviously the obvious one, and, and. HubSpot's been starting to play around with how do they, you know, integrate that into some of the content creation tools.

Mark Kilens: But besides ai, whatcha seeing as I see five things as a trend? This goes back to my notion around, around people first. And that's definitely inspired by some of the inbound stuff. Absolutely. So one is content explosion. It's only gonna get worse with AI now. And, and Yeah. You know, you know, it's, it's probably, it's, right now I would say it's like a necessary evil, like, right, like it's.

It is what it is. Then you have channel saturation. There's way less new channels being built than in the last 10 to 20 years. Tough, lots of factors there. Cost of acquisitions going up, attention all this stuff. And then there's more niche channels too, kind of. So that's a, that's a good thing, but also a hard thing.

Third thing would be privacy. You know, privacy, death of cookies, legislation, all this stuff will continue to make marketing and selling and all this stuff harder. Fourth would be, The pandemic. The pandemic has forever changed. How we live and how we work has really created some interesting dispersion of not only people, but then how ideas actually become something of value.

How you connect with people, what you know, what people are willing to do and not do. Some of that might die off. I don't think a lot of it will like, I think there's just too many habits ingrained, you know, couple that with just the continued focus on. The digitalization of our lives. It's kind of a trend that's left the station.

And then the fifth is ai, the convergence of ai, you know, artificial plus human intelligence. How will all that play out? So some of those are like our. Much further along. Some are like much, you know, just kind of maybe, maybe kind of getting started the last, say, couple years, five years. But they were all are impacting people, not marketers.

People marketers are trying to react to what's impacting people in as much of a proactive way as you can. But a lot of times it's just reactive. So I always look at to see what are the things that are impacting people right now will slash could be. One of them is probably also spatial computing. That is a perfectly executed category.

Design and spatial computing will be, in my opinion, probably more significant than AI in long term because AI is just stuff you can't see. You can feel the outcomes, you can feel the effects, which is good, but you don't really, at the end of the day know if it's AI or non-ai or like all the permutations.

AI will take, well, you will be able to touch is spatial computing, so buy more Apple stock. I'm not a stock pick my opinion, but that is a brilliantly, you know, that's a, that's a thing that's gonna have an impact my opinion. 

Steve Goldhaber: So going, go back to the five things that you mentioned. So those are all big challenges for B two B marketers.

How do you stand out, right? Like the obvious answer is, well, let's create better content, right? Or. We can't just be writing about things and saying things we have to build, build things that are valuable. Like what are you, beyond that, what do you think are the ways that marketers can stand out given that first, like, part of people, they're Facebook, somebody first, like 

Mark Kilens: part of LED growth partner with individuals, partner with communities, companies, brands, take relationships and turn them into some type of, uh, even a lightweight or very structured partnership you have.

You enter into a partnership every time you set up a customer, they set a contract. That's a partnership. So like, use your party with your customers more, right outside of just the commercial agreement or bake it into the commercial agreement that you're gonna do things with them to support them, that's gonna support you to spin that word of mouth flywheel, but harder light is super important.

Like I would, you're doing it right now, you're partnering with me. Even though we don't have a contract per se, kind of a contract, right? You say, here's where you can expect, there's an email, there's things, some podcasts actually have contracts. So anyway, it, it's kind of in between, but. Go to market with people, not alone as a brand, if you try to do that on your own, brand spam is rampant.

Brand spam is crap in my opinion at this point because everyone does it. So make your brand have a lot more people that represent the brand and not the brand. Trying to represent itself out in the markets. And then we talked about like community led, member led, and customer, like community led is the tip of the spear, you know, but a lot of people think community led is something you do like after someone becomes a customer.

Like, no, no, no, no. That is, again, that's probably your owned community. You, you're owning a community and a portion of that audience and that own community is your customer segment. Community led is everything that happens around the brand. Uh, and lean into that. Like lean into engaging with people, lean into it, you know, training and enabling, activating your employees to be part of the community.

'cause once you have a couple of employees, they're the community. Like they are the initial force of the community and now it's on them to partner with people to grow. Yeah. So it's just this people first go to market motion that we talk a lot about inside of club PF is where I'm betting. A lot of this is gonna go to, because I always say that, you know, and you can't deny this, you know, the tide goes out, the tide comes in.

We are going through a massive title shift in B two B, go to market, and we're ge hopefully gonna get away from being so software obsessed to be more people obsessed because the software that the people have been managing is gonna manage itself soon enough. Yeah. Good way to put it. 

Steve Goldhaber: Alright. Looking back on your, uh, your marketing career, what are some things that you've learned?

Whether it's about yourself or just different ways to do good or bad marketing, like what do you, what do you see as the big type of ways that you're, man, I wish I would've known this sooner. 

Mark Kilens: Listen, like spend more time listening. Always be capturing. I learned that pretty early though. As you listen, always be capturing your ideas, thoughts, action items.

Practice your ABCs. As Google say, practice your ABCs. I learned that from Google. Be a, be a data-driven marketer, like data-driven, but then also of course have the, the art, the empathy of marketing as well. You know, data is, is very important and I wish I even earlier, like understood the data side, but like not just the marketing data, the data of the company.

What is the financial aspects of how this company makes money and retains that money that they make? If you can understand both those things and apply with a marketing lens, you're gonna be in a pretty good spot, I think. 

Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. I agree with you there. I've, I've heard that come up so many, so much on this podcast, as well as just other daily conversations I've had is the marketers that can think like a c e o, meaning they understand how the business runs, how you make money, how you lose money.

You just have more credibility at the table because you can speak the language of the business and without that you run the risk of just being perceived as a marketer who is either just doing fun things. Is or is outta touch. So that's a great lesson to wrap up with. Mark. I wanna thank you for your time.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with our audience, and thank you to the listeners for coming back again. I hope you're enjoying the show. You can listen to the show on Apple, on Spotify, and we also. Archive everything on the 26 characters website, so feel free to go there to download any previous 

Mark Kilens: Thank you Steve Podcast.

Take care. 

Steve Goldhaber: All right, thanks again, mark. Have a great day.

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