From being terrified of posting on LinkedIn to driving impact with Common Room

Hi and Hello, 

Jared and Karthi here from Audience Haus. 

This week is an interesting and insightful conversation with Linda Leon, the Founder and CEO of Common Room. 

Linda began her journey in Finance, then moved into Product Marketing before becoming a Founder. That is super interesting to me and we asked Linda about it. And boy, did she oblige!

So, buckle in and get ready for the most adventurous Founder story ever!

Linda started off in Finance where she worked on mergers and acquisitions - all about companies coming together! And it started her thinking about the origin of companies and how they started. And she realized that she didn’t know anything about marketing and selling. Her way of looking at it is really unique! It’s all about the numbers.

You look at the numbers when considering mergers and acquisitions and you also look at numbers when you look at the sales and marketing numbers. They are different sides to the same piece. This thought process led her to Product Marketing so she could learn more about the marketing side of the business. 

After some time in Product Marketing, she felt like she was familiar with enough of the tools in the “building a company” tool chest to start her own company. And then, came the most important question. What would the company be about? What was the problem she wanted to solve with her company? What was the product she wanted to be building?

Before sharing what Linda said, we just want to put it out there that we are big fans of how the messaging and targeting of Common Room has evolved.

Linda talks about how in one of earlier companies, as a marketing leader, she could never get any insights about the customers except for what happened on their Sales call which was the only thing that was logged on Salesforce. It was very difficult to get insights into their growth, the source of their customers, their engagement metrics and so on. And that is the input you need but it can be really hard to get.

And then, when she started her company, her advisors recommended that she define her vision for the company and she felt it was hokey. How does anyone come up with a vision on Day 0 of starting their own company? (Very valid question, I’d say) And her advisors told her that the vision was very important - the vision is your North Star and it is your strategy, messaging, positioning, product and ICP that evolves with respect to how you find your way to that North Star.

So, Linda took a stab at it from a different direction than usual. Instead of thinking what will change and how the world is going to be different, she looked at what will not change and hit on her answer. No matter what changes, organizations will always want to find ways to connect and be closer to the people that matter. And that’s how she found her vision - to transform how organizations engage with people. 

Then she talked about how Common Room started with community building and was centered more around a community-led motion and then the change in how people approach go-to-market has led them to pivot towards sales-led growth and signal led outbound with a healthy side of AI application.

And even though it doesn’t seem like it, it all still ties into the vision of bringing organizations closer to the people that matter - helping the organizations bridge the gap.

And then we brought up another good question. Man! We are so good at coming up with these good questions (even if I say so myself). Why did she name her company Common Room? And why did the gap between the organizations and people exist?

Linda talked about how the villains in community led growth or sales led growth or any form of growth really are not a specific competitor but two things - the silos that exist between marketing and sales and the second one is the status quo. None of these are people but the way things are done or the structures that are set up in place. And that’s why she named her company Common Room - think Harry Potter - which would be a unified place where not just the marketing and sales teams but also prospects, customers, community members could get together without any silos and exchange all the information they have and need.

Then Linda did a really deep dive into how they started building their first customer group. She talked about how she spoke to lots of people to just hone in on her ICP and find the people who would buy what she was selling. And how all she asked people for was their time. She just asked for their time to have a conversation and pitch her idea and get their feedback. And just keep doing it again and again to help understand your ICP. 

The challenge comes when you make the jump from asking people for their time to asking people for their money. Would you pay money to buy this product or be a part of this community? And Linda shares how the first time she had to ask someone to pay money - someone on her team had to write a script for her and she had to be forced into the meeting. And then, she dropped a truth bomb. 

She talked about how getting paid customers is not the end of the road but the beginning. How asking people for their money teaches you a lot and sends you back to your drawing board multiple times after which you can ask your paying customers for the third thing - put their words where their money is, their recommendation in other words. So you build a group of customers who will go out and talk to people about your product for you.

We brought up the point about how Common Room started as a community for one kind of persona and now has extended to many many more personas. She prefers to think of it as persona expansion instead of additional personas. Linda agreed and shared how each new set of persona means going back to the notice board and thinking about what we can do differently. And sometimes it can also mean having to learn new skill sets. And then she veered into something very close to our heart.

Building an Audience…

Linda talked about her presence on LinkedIn and posting on LinkedIn was a skill she had to learn as their persona expanded. And it was kind of the demand of the audience because the newer personas like marketing leaders, sales leaders, demand gen leaders and so on who are learning and connecting on LinkedIn. So, it could be said that the Common Room had to get a new branch on LinkedIn. 

And posting on LinkedIn was again a new skill that she had to learn because she had never posted on LinkedIn before. And how her investors had to sit her down and give her tactical tips on how to find the kind of content that she wanted to post about and the information that she wanted to share. And then she shared a couple of “spicy takes” that she has about signal-based marketing and AI in the sales process. 

Then she shared something or two somethings that we would like all founders posting on LinkedIn to sit up and read. Ready for this - First, it’s easy to wish that you had started something a lot earlier when it starts working for you. Like when you start getting a lot of interaction on your LinkedIn posts or you hit the one year mark. But you need to think about the fact that you wouldn’t have had the experience, knowledge or data points that you have now if you had started doing this earlier.

And second, if you are a founder who is not really comfortable about posting on LinkedIn or you feel deeply uncomfortable about going ahead, then don’t think about it. You just have to go ahead and do it. Follow the Nike logo - Just Do It!

This Newsletter issue is becoming significantly longer than the earlier ones but it’s so not our fault. In fact, Linda shared so much more that we could write a small book on lateral growth, audience building, being a founder and a manager just based on this one podcast. But, that has to wait for another day. 

If you liked this issue, (and we are low key judging you if you didn’t) subscribe to the Audience Haus community and watch the full podcast with Linda. Every time we think we had an awesome podcast, the next one comes along and we have to reset the podcast rankings again! Stay tuned for the next podcast!

We’ll see you with another awesome podcast next week.