3 CRM Features to Make Community Building Easier

I’ve spent a good amount of time in various Customer Relationship Management (better known as CRM) tools during my career. Most notably, of course, is Salesforce, both as an end user, an admin, and then working at Salesforce on the Trailblazer Community Team where I both implemented it and used it heavily on a daily basis. Prior to that I’ve used Zoho and SugarCRM, and now at Talkbase, we use HubSpot. As a Community Operations gal, I think there’s immense value in a CRM that’s operationally set up to not only manage your digital rolodex, but do so much more.

As one of the main features of Talkbase, I have to say the Community CRM can make a huge impact in helping you not only run your community better, but track attributes and data for your members as well. It’s not looking to replace your company’s main CRM - the Salesforce or HubSpot instance that your sales and marketing teams use. Rather, it’s more specific to help you with your day-to-day community management. You can then use the integrations to sync the Talkbase Community CRM data with your company’s CRM.

The Talkbase Community CRM has the basic features of a CRM - being able to track basic things like name, email, company, role, create custom attributes, etc. But…  there are a few unique features, what I’d call “tiny things” that you wouldn’t normally think of, that actually add not-so-tiny of impact in saving you time and ensuring you have data integrity. I’ll be going over three of them here.

Request profile details

Maintaining data integrity for your CRM is a never-ending feat. People are constantly moving, changing jobs, getting promoted, and attending events, and it’s impossible to rely on having them reach out to you when they’ve had a life event so that you can update their new information in your CRM. Additionally, when new people join your community, they may fill out some initial details, but you most likely don’t include all of the details you’re hoping to know about a person when they first sign up for your community - it makes the barrier to entry too high and frankly may scare them off if your form is too long.

Talkbase’s “Request profile details” feature is a button on a member’s profile page within the CRM. By simply clicking on the button, you can select which information you’re missing or would like to collect.

‍

Talkbase will then send an email to the member letting them know that you’ve requested some information. They’ll be guided through a flow to fill in the missing details, and when they’re done, their updated information is automatically updated in your Community CRM.

‍

‍

Doing regular data audits is important and should still continue to be done, but keeping your data integrity is a lot easier with this feature.

Public profile

With many community programs, there’s a need to be able to highlight or publish information about various community members. For example:

• A speaker directory of people who are interested and capable of speaking at user group meetings
• Speaker profiles for a community event
• Highlighting super users

With Talkbase’s “Public profile” feature, you can automatically turn a community member’s CRM profile into a public profile, complete with photo, bio, and other relevant information. All it takes is a click of a button.

The really cool feature is that you can also prompt the community member to claim their profile, allowing them to add or edit any of the information on the page. Talkbase simply sends an email to them, letting them know that you’ve requested they create and claim their public profile page. It’ll prompt them to create an account so that they can edit and maintain the information displayed on the public profile page.

‍

‍

From there, the community member is able to share this webpage with anyone else in their network or use it for their own personal usage. You are also able to use it for the community work like highlighting them on your community page or adding them as a speaker to an upcoming event.

Static & Dynamic Lists

It’s important to be able to segment, label, and categorize various cohorts of your community. Who are your super users? Who’s joined the community recently and is still onboarding? Who attends the most events? Who has spoken at an event before?

Aside from features like custom tags and custom attributes on the contact profile page, Talkbase also has the Static and Dynamic Lists feature. Static Lists allow you to manually add contacts, whereas Dynamic Lists allow you to use filters to create a list that will automatically update as contacts match and un-match with the filter criteria.

Say, for example, you want to track all of the members in your community who are on Customer Success (CS) or Customer Experience (CX) teams. You simply have to create custom tags and add them to the relevant contacts, then create a Dynamic List filtering for those tags. This list will stay updated as more members in CS or CX are added.

‍

‍

Static and Dynamic Lists are helpful beyond just organizing your members. You can use the lists throughout Talkbase to, for example, invite to events, highlight on your community page, push to your company CRM or marketing automation tool via an integration, or even export into an Excel file. The lists allow you to more easily action upon and run initiatives for your community.

Interested in learning more?

If you are currently struggling with organizing and managing your members, ensuring you have the proper information on them, the data integrity, or using your members to properly segment and run community initiatives, we’d love to help you. Please feel free to email us at hi@talkbase.io or you can sign up for a free trial at https://talkbase.io/.

‍