Customer Communities

16Common Objections and How to Overcome Them: Answers to Nine Common Objections

As with every big change and new initiative, starting a community will bring both excitement and anxiety. While you may have read this book, have your strategy (almost) ready, and have full trust in its success, others may have doubts and questions.

For community practitioners who are exploring the idea of starting a community, our first recommendation is to get your business leaders on the same page in terms of strategic talking points. Give a copy of this book to your leadership team, your heads of support, customer success, marketing, and product. Follow up with them to make sure the central concepts are understood. This will help you to gain that broad alignment that you want and will help to avoid misalignment down the road.

Even with the best preparation and communication, however, you may get some doubts or objections regarding your initiative. Most objections are related to value, resources, time, organizational buy-in, and risks. If someone has an objection, you can, of course, ask them to read this book, but you'll also want to be able to handle the objection directly. In this chapter, we will walk through some very common objections and how we typically respond to them. Note that almost all of these objections are related to a misunderstanding of how communities work and the value they deliver, so what we're doing here is sharing information and context that everyone doesn't have but ...