Ep#78: Building Communities & Revenue Generation ft. Jared Robin (CO-Founder, RevGenius)

Taylor Kenerson 0:02 Hey, Hi, HyperEngage. It's so nice to see you back here. We're here with a Taylor and my co host Adil and a beautiful guest today, Jared from RevGenius, Jared, thanks so much for joining us today. Jared Robin 0:16 Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Taylor Kenerson 0:18 We're excited as well. So talk to us, you've had a really diverse range of experiences up until this point in your life. So from being VP of sales at JUICE to co founding a digital fashion publication. Talk to us a little bit about how these different roles and industries influenced your perspective on revenue generation and community building as a whole. Jared Robin 0:45 Yeah, it's a great question because I have an eclectic background starting i mean. I worked seven years for FedEx prior in a sales capacity, the fashion magazine all this, it was really important to my journey and to building community because I understood many different types of folks. In many walks of life, got really connected with culture and a lot like in the SAAS world, you're so far away from culture, like, like music, entertainment, diversity, right like, and umm having spent time in the fashion world, like right on the pulse of it, and with a massive network of people that are engulfed in it. And FedEx, we were, we were kind of far away from it too. But the not true SAAS to the SAAS and seeing like, all different walks of life, helped me empathise with the world a little better, and, and understand the space and how it all helped with revenue. It helped more with creativity, because I think the SAAS world is very, like, pretty well structured in regards to the revenue side of things, and it's improving all the time. It's improving its gaps, and aligning, and it moves fast. And all of this. So didn't necessarily learn more about revenue from the other spaces that I'm learning now. But learned how to think outside the box to create something creatively. And then yeah, brought it to software as a service space. Taylor Kenerson 2:40 I think you mentioned a really important point too, is the diversity of where, what your, what your information is, what kind of information you're on top of and what you're informed on. And like the world outside of your little niche, like SAAS is a little sliver of things, you have so many different industries and niches that you can take ideas from and build on top of and implement. And it's really about creating that mixture of all these different things that you could put into one to then make a thriving thing. So kind of fast forward. Now to you being the founder of RevGenius, which is a thriving community of sales, marketing, Reb ops and CS professionals. Talk a little bit about how you've seen community and the perspective of community evolve, and shift and transform to where we are today. Jared Robin 3:34 Yeah, and I think it has to, I think it still has to shift more. But when we started RevGenius, there is a few communities today there's quite a bit more. Community has been around since we grew up in the truest form, right like if you're religious, whatever your religious groups are associated outside of church, synagogue, what have temple, what have you. If you play baseball, recreationally growing up, you've had a community of folks, you know, that play pickup, whatever. It's the Taylor Kenerson 4:16 community that you're the small community that you had playing street ball and stuff like that. And yeah, Jared Robin 4:21 I mean, we'll see you have a group of friends but like but but but they tied to other groups and there might be a little bit of organisation behind there to have like a softball league or something. So that's been around the evolution of communities really happened into like a business model of late, a place where we're where people could make a living and help support others professionally and that's been around in the gaming space for a little bit gamers are run some of the best communities, Reddit, being one of them. It's kind of like a social and community platform mixed and social media has been well documented. The rise of community and like Slack groups and discord, this has happened over the past few years. Decade, tops pretty much and so it's evolved into a place to go from social into a safe third party network where there's no algorithms all of this. And it's thrive there. Like at the beginning COVID People like really leaned into RevGenius and other communities and got a lot out of it. I will say, community has become nebulous. Since communicating and yeah, people are creating audiences now, like people are really, really hot on building their brands. And I have nothing against this hack. I think it's I think it's a smart strategy, but really hot on building their brands, building newsletters, building subscriptions, building courses, all of this and they're saying, my community of followers on LinkedIn, well, if they're a follower, it's not a community, that's your audience, my community of subscribers. If they're subscribers, that's conflict like conflating, like, that's what follows is right like that, that's, so I think this and you know, there's, there's even more like, with ego coming out with personal brand, like, let's just call it what it is, people aren't really putting that out there, like, like, like blatantly, but it's their, like narcissism, ego, all of this and built. So, community in its truest form, in a business world now where people could become influencers and creators. And again, these are all wonderful things is getting conflated. And it's getting, and it's getting lost. And so what we need to do is go back in RevGenius is still building community as it is, and it's, you know, I want to show folks that the idea of collaboration with one another, like not having an expert on the top, and there's very much benefits of doing that, don't get me wrong. But building true community is about collaborative growth. And collaborative growth, since the beginning of time, has helped society move forward. Not help us move forward individually get our own incomes. And again, there's nothing wrong with that I'm speaking a bigger picture thing, how we can lift the ceiling higher, have abundance for all, including ourselves and go on. Taylor Kenerson 7:56 Yeah, that's interesting. Adil Saleh 8:00 Yes, and one thing that I was also thinking by looking at, you know, your community page, and some of the members, of course, we we knew about RevGenius long before the first pass, which is really good. So we've seen communities that, you know, that have customers look like customers in one segment grouped together, they collaborate on certain use cases, they share knowledge information, so that way, companies like Heap companies like Gainsight, all these companies, they have their internal community of customers. So how do you think like, RevGenius has an open community that that has, like GTM leaders, DevOp teams, Customer Success leaders, Sales, you know, sales leaders as well. So how do you see all of them having one focal point where they can share knowledge across one perspective? Like, how does that work in your community? I'm just leaving it open question. Jared Robin 8:55 Yeah, so we through different events for folks. For different personas to learn. We're now rolling out like member introductions to meet other members. We have different channels around different topics, we we have people asking questions about what's top of mind are some challenges they're working up through, that are getting answered. We've also and that's an a no cost committee, we're going to be building on site a bit more. We have we have RevGenius mag, we have some phenomenal articles on the future of revenue and the future of GTM. And we are building more data repositories on site, as well as we now have Reverend for VPs and C suite who are literally collaborating on the future b2b go to market the conversations that are having are how, you know, how do we align, how do we think differently about things? How do we learn, right? Like how do I learn from somebody and And I'm a strong advocate of community led learning, like in the sense that if you have a course, to learn about something, and folks will either like it or they won't, that's fine. But there's often not a lot of chatter around it, of how to do it better, or how other things are happening. Right? So in GTM, GTM, is evolving, as fast as any space PDRs were being hired by the hundreds last year, this year, they're not next year, they might not exist. Why is that? So to create courses, you have to create them every three months to keep up, and that's not going to happen. So the conversations in the people in each room holds a lot of value to learning and collaborating like that. And also, keep in mind, this is like word of mouth marketing to this is the most potent, the least expensive marketing channel, you have. Period. Everything is going to be replaced by word of mouth in time, Adil Saleh 11:12 in time, and there's even AI is having hard time replacing, you know, we see January where, you know, having a stream of product technologies, people thinking doing more with less, putting up their, their cause may have not have team members on the content and marketing, sales operations. However, you know, we still see a huge gap in building close knit communities that are highly engaged around one topic, which means you're trying to accomplish and, you know, and my question is, like, we have more than 70% of the startups that are listening to this episode, they're in the first two years, they're trying to, they're still struggling to get their first VP of sales. You know, there they have like one dedicated advisor, that is that is expert in one domain, but it's not so much, you know, expert in a lot of different domains, challenges may not Jared Robin 12:05 be an expert that they need. Advisors their friend, right, it might be a square peg, round hole. Adil Saleh 12:14 Absolutely, absolutely. A lot of them, they are just juggling around so many things, there's so many, you know, they're overwhelmed with so many things that they don't know. And this is wider that point them in different directions. But when it comes to product led growth when it comes to community led growth, now it's moving towards community led, which you are one of the big, you know, biggest players here. So how do you see you can enable these startups, you know, taking on communities like RevGenius in the first two years, that they have, you know, look like people that they can connect, ask questions, they can hop on and a meeting, paid free doesn't matter to them, they just need to answer the question solution to their problems. How do you see from a startup perspective? Jared Robin 12:55 Great question. And we're actually launching a product, you know, we're testing it out now for the series A founder. That's got enough traction to raise the round, but really needs to take it to the next level. And it's meant so are, you know, our thoughts are leveraging community members for growth, for fast growth? I mean, early stage, you need to you need to grow, you have enough people telling you about the product and stuff, but how can how can early stage founders, like you're talking seed round or before one you got to show up, you need to align yourself and create as big of a network as you can. Communities are a great place for that social media. LinkedIn is a great place for that as well. You need to be active yourself in these networks. If you're not showing up and you're not active, and you have one friend that may or may not fit, that's all you have. Let's let's look at this very, very straightforward. It's simple. If you make a few more friends, and you have a few more friends, if you if you go into a community, now you're speaking on topics, you know, from the last jobs you've had that You've crushed it hopefully and if you haven't figured out something that you're an expert in to share that expertise. You're giving value to others more people are seeing you maybe 50 people showed up to the last one maybe 100 Your name is getting out there now people are building your network like are in your network and and now they they're okay for you asking for advice. I think the biggest principle for early stage founders, whether you want to go into community or not, is give more than you get o wait and I need to get so much I need to get so much I need to get here. And I'm only here give even more. If that's the case. Give even what people people lack the abundance mindset, early stage sometimes. So when you have that, and you're giving so much your world's gonna be open 37,000 members, we started with four. And I just made a point to give. And that's how we grew our community. I would say the same thing for any Founder. But our product coming out soon, we're testing out building community advisory boards for companies. Adil Saleh 15:32 So excited for that. Taylor Kenerson 15:35 You might have touched a little more on that Jared. Just before we wrap Jared Robin 15:38 excited about that already. Taylor Kenerson 15:40 It's no more. Jared Robin 15:43 Yeah, it's the idea of us building a senior board for folks helping leverage these folks to amplify the brand on social, leveraging these folks to get top level feedback, you know, at a regular cadence about the direction leveraging these folks. Leveraging advisors and advisors, leveraging the company, right? To create content, to get that content out to the masses, lift up the advisors, and also help with deal flow. Not cold deal flow. Don't ask anybody for help with cold deal flow that gives no value to anybody. Can you get me into this account? Your they might do that one favour, they're not going to do it again. The conversation needs to be I'm working on these five accounts, were in negotiation stage with all of them. Do you know anybody there? It's a whole different conversation. That's giving value? Because then they could they could call their friend and say, Hey, I saw you're already speaking to Taylor. Taylor is one of my BFFs. Do you have five minutes, I'm going to tell you, I've used the product. I'm going to tell you why this product is the best in the space. And now the person that they're telling is getting value from them. It's making that decision easier. Always give value. Adil Saleh 17:25 Yes. It's the values the Kenyan. Yeah. Jared Robin 17:30 Maybe if you need somebody else to get you into all your accounts. Do you have product market fit? Do you have? I mean, you got it? Taylor Kenerson 17:38 It's a it's a question for for all to reflect on. Jared, we can't thank you enough. Thank you so much for sharing all of your invaluable insights. And we're so excited for this to launch to the audience and community. Thank you so much. Jared Robin 17:53 Thanks for having me. Y'all are awesome. Thank you very much for sharing the time.