How to Align Your Community Strategy with GTM: Lifecycle mapping exercise

If go-to-market is how you take your resources and demonstrate the value your product delivers to customers, then community is the glue that makes this work cohesively.

Community is a cross-functional force multiplier that enables you to level up your marketing, customer success, sales, and product development. For that to work well, you all must be aligned.

I’ve found that a great way to start aligning community with GTM is through a customer lifecycle journey mapping exercise.

Going through that process with leaders of the GTM teams you’ll be working with, either as a group or individually, forces you to think through the specifics of who does what. As well as where community can have the most impact and align you with each team on the outcomes you’re looking to deliver.

In a mature organization, such a map likely already exists, which you can augment with community. However, in a startup, you’ll probably need to put the map together first. That process itself can be hugely valuable—highlighting gaps in your current GTM activities.

Before diving into the steps, let's look at a worked example for Notion.

Notion leverages community throughout the customer lifecycle. They have ambassador, influencer, and affiliate programs that drive awareness. They then use their online groups, meetups, and templates to create content that helps users to activate and convert into paying customers. Lastly, they use their consultant and champions programs to drive expansion revenue. This is cyclical—the ambassadors who advocate for the brand bring in new people to the cycle, and so it continues.

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Mapping this out looks like this:

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Notion has a relatively mature process at this point. If you’re early in establishing your community program, then it’s often best you don’t try to impact all stages of the customer lifecycle unless you’re well-resourced. Instead, focus your limited resources on the areas where you can be most impactful. This exercise can help you decide where that might be.

Here’s a blank to start from:

Start by mapping out your customer lifecycle stages. Which stages to include will depend on your GTM strategy, whether product-led or sales-led, etc. But common ones include:

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• Awareness
• Trial
• Pilot
• Onboarding
• Purchase
• Expansion
• Retention
• Advocate

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Once done, it’ll look something like the following, which is for a product-led GTM that includes a trial:

The next step is to work with each GTM team and understand who owns each stage. Then, for each stage, list activities they undertake to encourage customers from that stage to the next. In doing so, discuss what’s working and what’s not and where you can help.

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For instance, you might have a Customer Success (CS) team that owns retention, and they have existing programs in play. So here you’re picking the thing that community can best help CS to impact its retention number. What’s an activity or program community can do that delivers a unique advantage? In the case of CS, it might be scale. Your CS folks can only make so many calls a day. So community could help by scaling their current initiatives.

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Based on those conversations, identify the best opportunities at each stage for community to deliver value to members that will help them get to the next stage. For example, what is it that members need most to go from awareness to trial? Or from onboarding to purchase?

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Here are just some of the ways community can create value for members:

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• Career opportunities
• Client referrals
• Professional connection
• Contribute to mission
• Financial benefits
• Product education
• Product training
• Product inspiration
• Promotion or marketing support
• Skills development
• Product support
• Social status
• Swag

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For this exercise, some of the most popular options are product education, inspiration, support, and skills development. Once you’ve added these in, you’ll have something like this:

Now, you can start to think about specific programs and activities that will help you deliver those member benefits while helping GTM move the customer through the stages.

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In the map below, I’ve added some example programs and marked the lifecycle stages that align with them. To understand how a typical member might navigate those stages within your community, I’ve noted some potential milestones that a member might reach. You might find it helpful to add some to your map as a way of thinking through how your plan might work in reality.

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And there you have it. The result is a community strategy that is aligned to GTM teams’ needs and delivers value to members, too.

What I like about this exercise is that it enables you to discuss how community works holistically. It also ensures you’re laser-focused on the specific outcomes that the teams you’re working with care about.

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