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Membership vs. Subscription: What Actually Builds Community · Sales Pipeline Radio

• 0:16
  Matt Heinz: All right, we're back here on the show floor here, Forrester B2B Summit,
• 0:20
  Phoenix, Arizona, next to the giant boot.
• 0:23
  The boot has been here the entire time.
• 0:25
  It's been the subject of many selfies in the last couple
• 0:29
  days since we've been here.
• 0:30
  And actually, the front of the boot is a nice little stool as
• 0:32
  well — it's actually very comfortable to sit on the front of the boot.
• 0:35
  I know this from experience, having sat over there a little earlier today.
• 0:39
  Very excited to be here.
• 0:41
  We are wrapping up our series of conversations with analysts, with
• 0:46
  award winners, with marketers, with influencers, just what we're seeing
• 0:50
  and hearing on the show floor, and how that represents what we're seeing and
• 0:52
  hearing back at our organizations, and what we're taking back to be successful.
• 0:56
  Very excited to have with us in this episode Kathleen Booth.
• 0:59
  She's the VP of Marketing at Sequel.io.
• 1:01
  Kathleen, thank you so much for being here.
• 1:03
  Kathleen Booth: Thanks for having me, Matt.
• 1:04
  I gotta be honest, I walked by the booth — or the boot — ten times
• 1:07
  already and didn't even notice it.
• 1:08
  Matt Heinz: You didn't notice the boot?
• 1:09
  Now, how did you… it's, like, 20 feet tall.
• 1:11
  Kathleen Booth: Now that you've pointed it out to me, I feel like
• 1:13
  an idiot, and I am also going to go over and get a selfie in front of it.
• 1:16
  Matt Heinz: Well, I guess if it were, like, yellow, that'd be one thing.
• 1:19
  But it is legitimately — it is a legitimately colored boot, trying
• 1:24
  to be authentic, other than the fact that it's 20 foot tall.
• 1:26
  Kathleen Booth: Yes.
• 1:28
  Matt Heinz: All right.
• 1:28
  I appreciate you — I know how busy you are.
• 1:30
  I appreciate you being here.
• 1:32
  There's a bunch of places we could go, but I think you are uniquely
• 1:34
  positioned to talk about community, given the work you've done in
• 1:38
  communities, given your role at Pavilion, helping to grow that business.
• 1:43
  And I think, like, you see so many people say, "I want community. I
• 1:47
  want it. I wanna build one, I wanna maintain one." What is a community?
• 1:52
  Let's start at the bottom.
• 1:53
  Kathleen Booth: Oh, this is such a good question, and here's a fun fact.
• 1:56
  My experience with community started actually quite a bit before Pavilion,
• 2:00
  because I owned an agency which I sold to a company called Impact,
• 2:04
  and back in — from 2017 to 2019 — we built a 5,000-member community
• 2:09
  of marketers in a Facebook group.
• 2:11
  Facebook — not to date myself here.
• 2:14
  But anyway, what is a community?
• 2:16
  It's such an interesting question, and I will start by saying what it is not.
• 2:20
  It is not a Slack group.
• 2:21
  It is not a chat group.
• 2:23
  Community — this is just one person's opinion, right?
• 2:26
  And I want to acknowledge, like, the concept of community has
• 2:30
  existed since the beginning of time.
• 2:32
  Like, archeologists study community, and there are definitions of
• 2:35
  it in the world of archeology.
• 2:36
  I'm gonna put a little twist on it.
• 2:38
  I think in the world of go-to-market, community — you have to distinguish
• 2:44
  it from audience, right?
• 2:45
  An audience — we talked about this a bit earlier — is a list.
• 2:48
  An audience is a list of people that you talk to.
• 2:51
  Matt Heinz: Right.
• 2:52
  Kathleen Booth: A community is a group of people that you talk to, but who also talk
• 2:57
  to each other and who talk back to you.
• 3:00
  It is a circular conversation.
• 3:03
  And the people within your community need to be able to communicate with
• 3:06
  each other, and it's a relationship that forms as a result of that communication.
• 3:11
  So that's why I say it's not a Slack group, because that talking, that
• 3:14
  communicating, can happen over a variety of mediums, over a variety of events.
• 3:19
  The venue isn't so important as the nature of the communication and
• 3:24
  relationships that are being built.
• 3:26
  Matt Heinz: I agree with you.
• 3:27
  I think a community is how people feel about that community.
• 3:30
  It's about what that community does for each other.
• 3:32
  Whoever runs it or facilitates it needs to be in the background, 'cause
• 3:35
  the community is about the community members, them leaning into each other,
• 3:39
  the way that they support each other, the way that they show up for each other.
• 3:42
  It allows you to be seen, right?
• 3:44
  I mean, the reason why community — you mentioned communities exist since
• 3:46
  the beginning of all time — is that we are social animals.
• 3:48
  Even those of us that are introverts are social animals.
• 3:51
  Kathleen Booth: I'm raising my hand.
• 3:52
  I'm an introvert.
• 3:53
  Matt Heinz: Same.
• 3:53
  And so, to say, like, I crave being part of a community — otherwise
• 3:58
  it's a very lonely world, right?
• 4:00
  And I think, in go-to-market land and B2B land, especially for those of us
• 4:04
  that aren't working in offices every day anymore, it can be very lonely.
• 4:08
  And having a community of people that isn't just a list, isn't
• 4:11
  just a place you show up, but a place of people that see you.
• 4:15
  Kathleen Booth: It's true, and I wanna add one more thing to my definition earlier,
• 4:17
  'cause I think this is really important.
• 4:20
  Community is about two other things in addition to the conversation and the
• 4:24
  relationships: it's a sense of shared identity, and — so I talked about the
• 4:30
  difference between audience and community.
• 4:31
  There's also a difference between membership and subscription.
• 4:35
  Matt Heinz: Mm.
• 4:35
  Kathleen Booth: You know, I've worked at Pavilion, which is a paid community.
• 4:40
  And you could think of it as a subscription model, or you could
• 4:42
  think of it as a membership model.
• 4:44
  And the key difference between the two is: with subscription, you — as the buyer,
• 4:51
  the person joining — are expecting to regularly get value as you regularly pay.
• 4:57
  So a subscription model is much like a newspaper subscription, a magazine
• 5:00
  subscription — you get it every month or every week or every day.
• 5:03
  And if you're not reading it each time you're paying for it, you're probably
• 5:09
  going to end your subscription, because you're not regularly getting value.
• 5:13
  A membership model is about becoming a part of something
• 5:16
  that's bigger than yourself.
• 5:18
  And in membership, you don't need to regularly get value,
• 5:21
  because you are attaching your identity, your sense of self, to
• 5:29
  the identity of the community.
• 5:31
  So those are some important differences, and that goes back to this notion
• 5:34
  of relationships and communication.
• 5:36
  It's a part of: we all share this identity, we're all part of this
• 5:39
  thing that's bigger than ourselves, and bigger than us collectively.
• 5:42
  And, to your point, we want to stay a part of it.
• 5:45
  So I don't need to get value today, or tomorrow, or this week, but over the
• 5:49
  course of time, I'm getting emotional value, I'm getting relationship value.
• 5:55
  That's really when you have community.
• 5:56
  And when the members, to your point, start to take ownership, that's when
• 5:59
  you really have a functioning community.
• 6:01
  Matt Heinz: Well, and when you can activate that community, as you
• 6:04
  said, it's not on Facebook, it's not in Slack, it's really in people's
• 6:07
  hearts and minds at that point
• 6:08
  — Kathleen Booth: 100%.
• 6:08
  Matt Heinz: It's how people feel about that community, and whether people feel
• 6:13
  like they're part of that community.
• 6:14
  Kathleen Booth: Yes.
• 6:15
  Matt Heinz: And that can manifest in countless ways.
• 6:18
  Talk about some of the ways you're doing that at Sequel now, 'cause you guys
• 6:21
  are doing some really special things.
• 6:22
  Kathleen Booth: Yeah.
• 6:22
  So it's interesting.
• 6:24
  I left Pavilion, which I am such a Pavilion fan — I wanna
• 6:28
  just start by saying that.
• 6:29
  I once and always will be a Pavilionaire, which is what we used to call ourselves.
• 6:35
  I will be a lifetime member.
• 6:38
  It was an incredible three years.
• 6:40
  Coming to Sequel, it's such a different situation, 'cause we're a small — like,
• 6:44
  early stage but growing fast — company.
• 6:46
  And so we have ambition.
• 6:48
  I'm very fortunate to work for a founder who is a marketer, so she understands
• 6:53
  and believes in the value of community.
• 6:54
  But we also have to be realistic about what we can do as a small company.
• 6:57
  And I have seen so many different flavors of community over my career,
• 7:01
  and I've seen a lot of mistakes made.
• 7:03
  One of the biggest ones is everyone thinking they have to build their own
• 7:06
  community, but then not dedicating the resources to do it right, and not
• 7:10
  having the correct expectations for, like, ROI and the timeline around it.
• 7:15
  So at Sequel, what we're doing is we are building what we call
• 7:18
  a Gamechangers community, and it has a couple of components.
• 7:23
  We have two different live content series.
• 7:27
  One is called Gamechangers CMO Series, where we interview CMOs, and the
• 7:32
  other is Gamechangers Masterclass, where we interview, like, director and
• 7:35
  manager level marketers who are, you know, sleeves rolled up in the work.
• 7:39
  And those are live interactive sessions where members of the
• 7:43
  Gamechangers community can come and ask questions and interact.
• 7:48
  And then we take it into
• 7:55
  real life — we're doing a series of events, Gamechangers in Real Life.
• 7:57
  One of those is we interview and meet with members of the community
• 8:00
  at events like this one, much like you're doing here with me.
• 8:04
  We also do a series of dinners for our CMOs.
• 8:07
  We have a series of workshops for our Masterclass Gamechangers,
• 8:12
  and it's that bridge between live virtual and live in person that is
• 8:18
  where the magic starts to happen.
• 8:20
  Because a lot of these people come to the virtual events, and you start
• 8:23
  to have that conversation I described earlier, but it isn't until we get these
• 8:26
  people in person together in a room where the relationships really form,
• 8:30
  and you start to feel a part of that thing that is bigger than yourself.
• 8:33
  Matt Heinz: That's right.
• 8:34
  Kathleen Booth: So that's how we're thinking about it right now.
• 8:35
  We're not starting a Slack group.
• 8:37
  We're not charging admission.
• 8:39
  There's no official membership.
• 8:40
  It's pretty loose, but once you come to one of those entry points, if you
• 8:45
  will, you're a part of the community.
• 8:47
  Matt Heinz: I love that.
• 8:47
  I think that's so smart, the way you think about it.
• 8:49
  And I think about, like, friendship sometimes, right?
• 8:51
  Like, there's people in my life that I consider friends.
• 8:54
  I don't see them all on the same frequency.
• 8:56
  We don't get together every Friday morning.
• 8:59
  There's one group of friends that I really only see during college football season.
• 9:03
  And so it's frequent then, and then you take eight months off.
• 9:07
  But, you know, sometimes you say a good friend is someone that — if
• 9:10
  you don't see them for a while and you get back together, you're
• 9:11
  like, this is why we're friends.
• 9:13
  Kathleen Booth: You pick up right where you left off.
• 9:14
  Matt Heinz: And I think there's an element of community that's like that.
• 9:16
  If you feel seen, and if you feel like you're a part of something, it's not
• 9:20
  about the frequency, it's not about the format, it's about the connection.
• 9:24
  It's about how you feel as a member of that community.
• 9:27
  Kathleen Booth: Well, and it's funny, 'cause I kind of define brand that way.
• 9:29
  When people say, "What is brand?" I always — and I don't know if this
• 9:32
  is right or wrong, it's just what I say — I always say brand is the
• 9:35
  emotional relationship that someone forms with your product or company.
• 9:40
  It is the emotion, and I think that's very much at the heart of community as well,
• 9:43
  which might be why a lot of companies think of community as a brand play.
• 9:47
  I do think it can be a demand play, done well — I think they're one and the same.
• 9:51
  And I actually think brand and demand are becoming the same
• 9:54
  thing in this world of AI.
• 9:56
  It's all merging.
• 9:57
  Matt Heinz: In episode 304 of Sales Pipeline Radio,
• 10:01
  in December 2021, you said—
• 10:04
  Kathleen Booth: Oh my gosh.
• 10:05
  Matt Heinz: You redefined brand as — this'll sound familiar — how the
• 10:08
  individual thinks about themselves in connection with your brand.
• 10:11
  Kathleen Booth: Look at that.
• 10:11
  So I'm consistent.
• 10:12
  Matt Heinz: You're very consistent.
• 10:13
  So it's not about the brand, it's how they feel when they're with you.
• 10:17
  And, if you're listening, Brent Adamson, we're talking about confidence again.
• 10:21
  You see, what's your confidence in yourself?
• 10:24
  It's not how do I feel about you, it's how do I feel when I'm with you?
• 10:27
  Kathleen Booth: Yeah.
• 10:28
  Matt Heinz: And I think about that a lot, with regard to — we've
• 10:30
  all been to the 6sense Club6.
• 10:33
  And, initially I'm thinking, "Wow, this is a little over the top" — all
• 10:35
  interior designers and chandeliers.
• 10:37
  But how does that make you feel?
• 10:39
  Kathleen Booth: Oh, I mean, first of all, hat tip to the entire 6sense Events team.
• 10:43
  They are just goals, right?
• 10:46
  Marketer goals.
• 10:47
  You develop a brand loyalty, without a doubt.
• 10:50
  You feel like they have rolled out the red carpet for me.
• 10:52
  I feel special.
• 10:53
  I feel like a VIP, and that is a feeling that lasts after the event ends.
• 10:57
  Matt Heinz: Yeah, it does, for sure.
• 10:59
  Talking here at the Forrester B2B Summit — it's getting a little noisy, you can hear
• 11:04
  the sponsor stage behind us a little bit.
• 11:06
  Kathleen Booth, she's the VP of Marketing at Sequel — very on brand.
• 11:10
  We only do this as audio, but she's got a neon green Sequel jacket.
• 11:14
  Kathleen Booth: Members only jacket.
• 11:16
  Matt Heinz: It is a members only jacket.
• 11:17
  Kathleen Booth: It is a members only jacket.
• 11:18
  Matt Heinz: It literally is a members only jacket.
• 11:19
  I haven't seen that for — I love that.
• 11:21
  Are there parachute pants down there somewhere too?
• 11:23
  Kathleen Booth: I should have some.
• 11:25
  Matt Heinz: That's all right.
• 11:26
  So, can I pivot quite a bit?
• 11:28
  Can I ask you — I'm always curious about where people come from and,
• 11:31
  like, what those experiences, how that makes you who you are today,
• 11:35
  as a person and a professional.
• 11:37
  Could we talk about water utility reform?
• 11:40
  Kathleen Booth: Oh my God.
• 11:42
  Matt Heinz: I'm fascinated by this.
• 11:43
  So earlier in Kathleen's career — is this true?
• 11:46
  You were in over 53 countries.
• 11:48
  Kathleen Booth: Yeah, I think it was 54.
• 11:49
  Yeah, for the first 10 years of my career, I worked in international
• 11:54
  development consulting.
• 11:55
  I was a USAID contractor, so, you know, may it rest in peace.
• 11:59
  I have a lot of nostalgia for that.
• 12:04
  And my specialization was helping developing-country governments contract
• 12:09
  out to the private sector the management of their water and wastewater systems.
• 12:12
  Because in many cases, these are countries where they don't have water
• 12:16
  supply 24 hours a day, let alone 12.
• 12:19
  And so solving that problem is huge — it has massive ripple effects.
• 12:22
  It's things like girls won't go to school without good water, because of
• 12:25
  hygiene reasons — they have to stay home and fetch it for their families.
• 12:28
  I could go on and on.
• 12:29
  It was an amazing time in my life.
• 12:30
  I was young and single, and someone paid me to travel all over the world.
• 12:33
  Matt Heinz: Heck yeah.
• 12:34
  Kathleen Booth: It was fabulous.
• 12:35
  Matt Heinz: That's amazing.
• 12:36
  Kathleen Booth: But then I wanted to get married and have children,
• 12:38
  and that did not work so well.
• 12:39
  So I had actually done an MBA in marketing alongside my master's
• 12:44
  in international politics.
• 12:45
  And in the latter part of my career working in water, I started to see these
• 12:50
  projects fall apart because of poor strategic communications on the front end.
• 12:54
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 12:54
  Kathleen Booth: And so I kind of pivoted, and I began working with multilateral
• 12:58
  development banks, like the Asian Development Bank, on how do you invest
• 13:01
  early in strategic communications to build support for projects, and that
• 13:05
  is what led me back into marketing.
• 13:07
  So when I did decide to have kids and got married, my husband and I started
• 13:11
  an agency, which we owned for 11 years.
• 13:13
  It was an incredible experience being a CEO and a founder — hard
• 13:17
  as hell, but great learning.
• 13:20
  And then, in 2017, we sold that company.
• 13:23
  I went in-house as a marketer, and it's been great.
• 13:27
  I've learned so much.
• 13:28
  I really enjoy what I do.
• 13:30
  Matt Heinz: One of the things you wrote about that experience, sort of towards
• 13:32
  the end of your time with USAID, is just what you saw in terms of not
• 13:36
  just communication, but stakeholder consensus building, and how important
• 13:39
  that was to whether deals make or break.
• 13:41
  I mean, that seems like such a strong echo to where we are now in B2B, right?
• 13:45
  Where you can get all the leads you want, but if you don't have a commitment
• 13:49
  to change and a set of confidence from that buying group — that come
• 13:53
  from different places but reach some level of consensus — that's
• 13:57
  the thing.
• 13:58
  Kathleen Booth: That's it.
• 13:58
  Well, and even more pointedly, I would actually say when I think of that, I
• 14:02
  think more about internal marketing.
• 14:05
  I think the crisis we have right now in the profession of marketing is
• 14:10
  marketers being able to own their power, and the relationships they build
• 14:15
  with the CEO, the CRO, all of their counterparts on the leadership team.
• 14:19
  And, I mean, it's something I feel like I'm still working on: how do
• 14:23
  you handle that internal marketing?
• 14:24
  How do you establish your authority, gain the confidence of the rest of the team?
• 14:29
  'Cause that's so central to our ability to keep our jobs.
• 14:31
  Matt Heinz: Yeah.
• 14:33
  Thank you for this.
• 14:34
  We've just got a few more minutes here with Kathleen.
• 14:36
  I'm fascinated by where people come from, as well as, for those of us that are
• 14:40
  getting a little later in our careers, where we choose to give back and do
• 14:45
  things, you know, to pay it forward.
• 14:47
  Can you please talk about Ignite Annapolis, and what that is and
• 14:51
  why that's important to you?
• 14:51
  Kathleen Booth: Oh, so this is a kind of a cool thing that sort of landed in my lap.
• 14:55
  Ignite is a national — and it might even be international now — program
• 15:00
  where it is lightning talks.
• 15:03
  I think they're seven minutes — I'm reaching into my memory now — seven
• 15:07
  minutes long, and there's like 15 of them.
• 15:09
  And you have a certain number of slides you can show.
• 15:13
  And people from the community, most of whom have never gotten on stage and
• 15:18
  spoken before, apply to speak, and I was on the board of that for several
• 15:23
  years in Annapolis, for the first many Ignites that we did, and it was amazing.
• 15:28
  We had people talk about, for example, the death of a parent, or something
• 15:34
  as simple as eliminating straws because of the environmental impact.
• 15:39
  Everyone has a different passion, and so it's about sharing your
• 15:41
  passion with your community.
• 15:44
  And it's just — I always left feeling better about the world, and I laughed,
• 15:47
  I cried, I got chills up my spine.
• 15:49
  It was such a feel-good experience.
• 15:53
  Matt Heinz: Well, not only the experience, but the confidence that gives people.
• 15:56
  You know?
• 15:57
  Like I was at a startup where we created a Toastmasters chapter just for our
• 16:01
  inside sales team, and so we literally would just do it in our conference room.
• 16:03
  And, you know, even though you're sort of on the phone, you're presenting, right?
• 16:07
  This is how you communicate, and how well you can persuade and communicate.
• 16:11
  That's a form of confidence as well, so I love that program.
• 16:14
  Thank you for sharing that.
• 16:15
  Kathleen Booth, VP of Marketing at Sequel.io, thanks so much for joining us.
• 16:19
  Kathleen Booth: Thanks, Matt.