Episode 69 – Building Community: Heather Wendt
Why do some applications have a large following and their revenues soar, while others are struggling with making a sale and are virtually unknown? Or why do you struggle with building internal acceptance for your program?
One reason might be that the former companies were able to build a community that includes not only users (and ends up being a glorified help desk), but also people who are convinced that your program is the best in its market (“superfans” – there is a whole concept around this, but I don’t want to go too far here). But now the question is: How do you build such a community?
The guest in this episode is Heather Wendt, the community manager for Gain, Grow, Retain, and she has a lot of experience in customer success and community building. She also worked extensively in the learning field, which is another area to increase adoption in organizations
In this episode of the podcast we are talking about:
- Heather’s background
- How “community” goes hand-in-hand with customer success
- Functions of communities – help, concepts, nerding out, learning/teaching
- Why should an organization stand up a community? How to pitch the idea to senior management?
- Find and involve super users
- Where to find “your people” – examples of good community
- How to stand up and manage a community
- Measuring the success
Heather can be reached via LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hmwendt/, and her community can be found here: https://gaingrowretain.com/.
Please reach out to us by either sending an email to hello@whatsyourbaseline.com or leaving us a voice message by clicking here.
Ep. 69 – Building Community: Heather Wendt – What's Your Baseline? Enterprise Architecture & Business Process Management Demystified
Additional information
- Some examples of communities that “do it right”:
- KNIME (knime.com)
- Gong (gong.io)
- Monday (monday.com)
- Creative Mornings (creativemornings.com)
- The “Meet The Maker” series here on What’s Your Baseline?: https://www.whatsyourbaseline.com/?s=meet+the+maker
- We spoke about Gamification in Episode 46: https://www.whatsyourbaseline.com/2023/05/episode-46-gamification-and-performance-management/
Credits
Music by Jeremy Voltz, www.jeremyvoltzmusic.com
- CP1 (Welcome)
- Wind Will Blow (Interlude 1)
- Love Won’t Let You Down (Interlude 2)
- South Wing (Outro)
Roland Woldt is a well-rounded executive with 25+ years of Business Transformation consulting and software development/system implementation experience, in addition to leadership positions within the German Armed Forces (11 years).
He has worked as Team Lead, Engagement/Program Manager, and Enterprise/Solution Architect for many projects. Within these projects, he was responsible for the full project life cycle, from shaping a solution and selling it, to setting up a methodological approach through design, implementation, and testing, up to the rollout of solutions.
In addition to this, Roland has managed consulting offerings during their lifecycle from the definition, delivery to update, and had revenue responsibility for them.
Roland has had many roles: VP of Global Consulting at iGrafx, Head of Software AG’s Global Process Mining CoE, Director in KPMG’s Advisory (running the EA offering for the US firm), and other leadership positions at Software AG/IDS Scheer and Accenture. Before that, he served as an active-duty and reserve officer in the German Armed Forces.
