Positioning, building communities and sales enablement

Businesses revolve around user communities. These users later translate into early adopters, brand champions, member engagement gurus, and repeat customers of course! But how do even start a community in the first place? I went on to chat with Anthony Pierri, Product Marketer, Headway who shared with me his way of handling a community, positioning, and sales enablement.

Building Communities for your brand, from scratch

Nischala: What are your first few steps that you would have to create a community from scratch?

Anthony: My first step is to align everyone on WHY the community is being created — is it to drive acquisition? Support customer service? Increase retention? I follow the SPACES model by David Spinks.

Nischala: Mine is more tactical. This is like an MVP of community creation and testing. It helps in identifying how many of these community members are going to stick around for a shared purpose.

Step 1: Create a free resource hub with an actionable calendar that is available for public access.

Step 2: Create a Whatsapp or Signal group invitation link.

Step 3: Set up a weekly goal and start observing how they behave.

Positioning framework for Early Stage Startups

Nischala: How to go about positioning as an exercise? Any models that you use?

Anthony: My partner and I use a framework for positioning that we’ve been developing for early stage startups. I’ve had a few posts about it if you want to check them out (there’s a good one on Butter Payments “featured” on my profile.)

Nischala: Personally, I loved this framework. This helps us set an entire narrative for sales teams using that single positioning for each product that we ought to sell.

Create Sales Enablement content

Nischala: Any tips to create better sales enablement material?

Anthony: I follow the Jobs to be done (JTBD) framework for sales enablement and encourage sales to segment their decks based on the buyer’s journey (basically, there should be a deck for those in the awareness stage, one for the consideration stage, and one for the decision stage)

Nischala: I have used JTBD framework to create content for websites in the past. This framework fulfills the job that a customer wants to accomplish, and at the same time what the brand wants to complete using sales and marketing teams. Even for my website www.nischalagnihotri.com you will notice that the navigation on top is designed using JTBD to fulfill some of the high priority needs of visitors to this website.

Additional Resources

More about Anthony Pierri, Headway