The Community-Led Growth Show - Episode 13 w/ Anna Venketaraman, Head of Customer Advocacy & Community at Freshworks

The Community-Led Growth Show

In this episode of The Community-Led Growth Show, our Host Joel Primack interviews Anna Venketaraman, Head of Customer Advocacy & Community at Freshworks.

Anna leads the team responsible for building out the global community at Freshworks, a Nasdaq-listed company as of September 2021. The conversation began with learning how Freshworks developed their community strategy, given that they offer different solutions to different audiences. "Keeping it simple" should be a primary focus when building community.
Anna shares about the Refresh community, an open to all community, where there are discussions around various topics and additional ways members can connect with each other and show their "fandom" for Freshworks. Her team owns the leaderboard to reward members of their community for their positive contributions both - inside and outside - of the Refresh community.
She shares how the Freshworks team is centrally located within the organization, in order to easily connect with every other function, and that the leadership team invested in community through hiring a strong team and devoting resources to it.
To help similar companies that are multi-product building community, Anna shares that it's important to build community around your brand and create personalized experiences based on their product usage. Additionally, she highlights the importance of connecting your platforms together to show the ROI on community for the business, including product usage, cross-sell, expansions, etc.
Closing out the episode, we learn her 3 predictions for community within the B2B SaaS space in 2022 and beyond.