How Solarplaza Leveraged a Partner Community to Increase B2B Sales
Solarplaza helps renewable energy professionals become more effective in their business development. By offering their customers a partner community they expanded their services beyond their b2b events.
The Challenge – Why a Partner Community?
Solarplaza, has been organizing international solar energy conferences and trade missions for over 10 years. Their events see great engagement, but it can be hard for Solarplaza and their members to stay in touch between events.
Conference Connector
Paul van der Linden, COO of Solarplaza explains: “We didn’t want to lose touch with the people we care about. Simply because we weren’t having events everywhere and all of the time. We also wanted to be able to listen in on the conversations that were happening within our community. That way we could curate our content and match the interests that were most important to the movers and shakers in the industry.”
Solarplaza was looking for a partner community platform through which investors, entrepreneurs, and professionals could stay in touch.
The Solution
“We heard about CMNTY through a contact of ours who was working at a leading market research firm and used the platform for building MROCs. They had been using CMNTY for a while and were very excited about it. We were curious about how it could be used for B2B sales.”
Engagement
Paul did have a concern and that was how to keep the partner community engaged. Luckily the that platform came with a built-in reward system that encourages participation.
“The platform let our users set up a detailed profile and reach out to each other through public fora and private messages. And find each other through search, allowing them to scope possible partners and interesting contacts. We made sure the reward system encourage people to complete their profiles. That’s definitely a win-win situation.”, Paul explains.
The Results
Solarplaza received praise from their partners for setting up the community. As a nice site effect the platform generated insights from the conversations which allowed them to offer better targeted content. This further increased engagement and increased the value of the community for everyone who joins.
Paul concluded: “We are ramping up and will invite all of the people who’ve attended our events last year into the community soon. We’re excited to see what will happen!”