Stop Sleeping on Community: The Hidden Engine Behind Retention and Revenue

Keep calling it warm fuzzies while your competitors turn it into pipeline, expansion, and retention.

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For years, community teams have been stuck in a frustrating cycle. Executives love seeing happy, engaged members—smiling faces at events, active forums, glowing testimonials. It feels good. It looks good. But when it’s time to allocate budget or headcount, those “warm fuzzies” rarely hold up. Why? Because good feelings don’t close deals—or at least, that’s the perception.

The problem isn’t the work—it’s the metrics. Community drives real outcomes across acquisition, retention, expansion, advocacy, and more. But without the right KPIs, its impact stays invisible to dashboards and decision-makers.

Traditional go-to-market (GTM) metrics like MQLs and CAC prioritize short-term, trackable outputs. They reward linear funnels and fast conversions. But community doesn’t work like that. It creates value across the entire customer journey—strengthening acquisition, deepening engagement, driving retention, and fueling advocacy. But that impact is often invisible to the dashboards that drive GTM decisions.

If you're a GTM leader, that’s a missed opportunity.

When community programs are tied to business-critical outcomes like revenue, retention, and account growth, they don’t just look good—they become essential levers for sustainable growth. With the right metrics, community shifts from being a “nice to have” to a strategic multiplier.

I’m here to unpack:

• Why traditional GTM metrics fall short when it comes to community

• Which KPIs best capture community’s contribution to the business

• How to connect those KPIs to outcomes GTM leaders care about—like revenue, retention, and growth

Let’s dive in.

Why Traditional GTM Metrics Don’t Work for Community

Most GTM reporting is built around short-term, transactional, and linear metrics: CAC, MQLs, funnel velocity, win rate, etc. These are critical, but they leave out community-driven value that’s longer-term, multi-touch, and relationship-based. Communities aren’t simple channels—they’re multifaceted engines of growth, retention, and advocacy that influence results in dynamic (and sometimes indirect) ways. That mismatch hides community’s real contribution. 

Think about it: Customers helping each other solve problems. Prospects showing up to user-led events. Members swapping tips that drive feature adoption. That’s not just “engagement”—that’s free support, peer-driven enablement, product education, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Take Gradual or Discourse, popular community platforms used by SaaS companies to facilitate customer engagement, shareable resources, and peer-to-peer support. Organizations leveraging these tools reduce customer support costs as members answer one another’s questions and create reusable solutions. However, because CAC models don’t typically account for operational savings or self-service scalability, the business value generated isn’t always reflected in decision-making metrics.

Traditional GTM metrics focus on immediate outputs, not long-term results like customer loyalty or ecosystem health. To elevate the strategic importance of community programs, teams need to embrace metrics built with this multidimensional impact in mind.

The challenge? Most community platforms don’t come with built-in reporting that connects those activities to business outcomes. If GTM leaders want to operationalize the value community offers, they’ll need to resource it like other high-impact functions—with data, tooling, and cross-functional support.

A GTM Leader’s Community KPI Cheat Sheet

Community success isn’t just about engagement—it’s about solving concrete business problems. These KPIs are designed to speak the language of revenue, retention, and growth—so you can align with what GTM teams already measure. The following KPIs provide actionable insights into how community efforts directly impact core GTM priorities:

Community-Driven Leads and Pipeline Influence

Why it matters: Communities are often the first engagement touchpoint for prospects, providing them with authentic interactions and valuable experiences. By tracking how many high-quality leads originate from community interactions or how much pipeline is influenced by them, community professionals can highlight their role in sales acceleration.

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, leverages meetups and user-led events to generate high-quality leads. By integrating event attendance into its CRM, Elastic can attribute new deals to community engagement efforts—demonstrating how these programs influence pipeline growth. We’ll explore in more detail later in this post. 

How to track it: 

• Use UTM codes to track lead sources from community-hosted webinars, forums, or events.

• Add “community-driven” tags to CRM records (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) to attribute opportunities directly to community initiatives.

Adoption, Retention, and Growth of Community Members vs. Baseline Customers

Why it matters: Community members often adopt new features faster, stay engaged longer, and expand their product usage over time. By comparing these behaviors to non-community members, teams can clearly show how community participation drives key retention and expansion outcomes.

Amplitude, a product analytics company, identified that customers active in its forums had higher product adoption rates and fewer cancellations compared to non-engaged customers. These insights supported further investment in the Amplitude community as a driver of long-term customer success.

How to track it: 

• Create customer cohorts (e.g., community participants vs. non-participants) in your analytics platform to monitor adoption rates, renewal likelihood, and NPS trends.

• Partner with customer success teams to identify retention deltas between engaged and non-engaged users.

Community-Driven Upgrades and Account Growth

Why it matters: Engaged members are often your most loyal customers—and loyal customers drive account growth through expanded usage or upgraded plans. Measuring the percentage of upsell opportunities connected to community touchpoints links engagement to revenue.

Miro, the collaborative whiteboarding platform, saw that customers involved in its user groups were more likely to expand their licenses. By analyzing growth patterns tied to community participation, Miro validated its investment in workshops and user-driven forums.

How to track it: 

• Track account expansion data (e.g., new seats, larger deals) based on CRM records of community involvement.

• Use customer success platforms (e.g., Gainsight) to monitor how participation trends correlate with upgrades.

Scaled Education, Adoption and Support Case Deflection

Why it matters: A well-facilitated community reduces the workload for support teams by enabling members to solve each other’s problems and adopt solutions on their own. Quantifying ticket deflection and time savings illustrates community ROI for operational efficiency.

PostHog, an open-source analytics company, uses its GitHub and Slack communities as a direct extension of its support team. Developers troubleshoot and share best practices online, reducing inbound requests while boosting product adoption.

How to track it: 

• Use community platforms to track the percentage of resolved issues within community spaces.

• Assign a dollar value based on saved support hours and display it as cost reductions in reporting.

Product Feedback and Insights

Why it matters: Communities are the closest connection to real-world users. Measuring the pipeline of ideas and feedback sourced from the community helps tie its activities to actionable product improvements, fostering greater alignment across teams.

CircleCI, a continuous integration and delivery platform, actively monitors community forums for feature requests and bug reports. This user-driven feedback pipeline has directly shaped feature enhancements, translating community participation into product satisfaction and adoption.

How to track it: 

• Track the number of community-sourced ideas implemented in product updates.

• Measure the impact of those updates on customer satisfaction (NPS) or feature usage.

Engaged Members: The Foundational Metric

None of these KPIs are achievable without an engaged base of community members. Engaged members underpin every community outcome, whether through solving peer problems, contributing feedback, or evangelizing your products.

Communities like LottieFiles and Streamlit demonstrate the importance of cultivating active participation before focusing on operational KPIs. Without engagement as a foundation, no community can deliver measurable business value.

From Metrics to Money: Translating Community Impact into GTM Outcomes

Tracking KPIs is an essential first step, but the real power of community data emerges when you link those metrics to outcomes that directly impact business growth, especially outcomes the CRO, CMO, and CEO already prioritize: revenue, retention, and expansion. Tying community efforts to these areas not only solidifies community’s strategic value but ensures continued investment in these programs.

Why is this so important? Because without clear connections to these priorities, community work risks being perceived as "soft" or unmeasurable. By contrasting traditional GTM efforts (ads, sales enablement) with community's multi-touchpoint, long-tail value, you can demonstrate how community programs directly and indirectly support business-critical objectives.

Here’s how to make the connection:

Revenue Attribution

Why it matters: Revenue attribution is the clearest way to show leadership how community drives financial outcomes. By tracking community touchpoints—such as event participation, webinar attendance, or ambassador contributions—you can demonstrate how engagement efforts influence leads, deal velocity, and customer upgrades.

Community can play a range of roles in revenue generation, from driving top-of-funnel awareness (e.g., leads generated by a forum or workshop) to mid-funnel influence (e.g., trust built through peer testimonials or product Q&A sessions that clear objections). When properly attributed, these touchpoints showcase how community complements and amplifies direct GTM efforts.

Elastic, the creators of Elasticsearch, credits much of their pipeline growth to user community events. By tracking UTM-tagged attendee participation at Elastic meetups, they established a direct link between community engagement and new leads—particularly SMBs and mid-market accounts transitioning from open-source versions of the tool to their enterprise offerings. Elastic’s regional meetups also serve as discovery hubs, allowing local groups to learn through shared product use cases, all feeding into deal pipelines. Elastic doesn’t just track participation—they close the loop by feeding insights back into campaign targeting, leading to more efficient GTM execution.

How to tie community to revenue:

• Use UTM tags to track how leads originate or are influenced from community-hosted events or activities. Specifically tag registrations, downloads, or website visits that result from direct community referrals.

• Work with your CRM team (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot) to integrate these UTM-tagged leads into deal attribution reports, showing how those leads convert compared to other sources.

• Segment high-quality pipeline touchpoints caused by community involvement and present them alongside sales metrics (e.g., deal size uplift, shortened deal cycles).

Retention and Expansion

Why it matters: Retention and account expansion are directly tied to customer satisfaction, usage depth, and loyalty—and few things build connection like a vibrant, value-driven community. Communities provide a space where members can self-educate, connect with peers, share success stories, and develop loyalty to your brand, reducing churn and increasing lifetime value.

Additionally, communities encourage customers to adopt new features, unlocking expansion opportunities such as seat upgrades, usage tier bumps, or cross-product adoption. By embedding customers into an ecosystem of learning and collaboration, communities transform one-time customers into brand advocates.

Ahrefs, an SEO tool provider, uses its private Facebook group to create an ecosystem of collaboration and discussion among digital marketers. Members share insights, troubleshoot SEO challenges, and recommend best use cases for Ahrefs’ tools. But Ahrefs’ group isn’t just a support channel—it surfaces use case trends that inform product messaging. By allowing users to exchange ideas and deepen their connection to the tools, Ahrefs ensures continued product relevance and enhances customer retention within a competitive market. 

Paddle, a revenue delivery platform for SaaS businesses, has seen positive correlations between their founder-focused community initiatives and account expansion. By creating exclusive content, hosting panels, and facilitating founder meetups, Paddle provides SaaS entrepreneurs with resources to scale their businesses, deepening their investment in Paddle’s solutions.

How to tie community to retention and expansion:

• Define retention metrics for your community participants (e.g., renewal rate, churn rate, usage frequency). Compare these metrics to non-community participants to establish the positive retention delta.

• Track community-driven feature adoption by mapping released features back to the customers who attended related community events or discussions, tying those efforts to renewal or upsell data.

• Leverage post-event surveys to correlate attendee satisfaction with ongoing engagement or intent to expand contracts.

What These Connections Mean for GTM Teams

When you combine metrics like community-driven adoption, leads, and case deflection with broader revenue and retention data, GTM teams can:

• Quantify how much revenue the community contributes.

• Predict how improving community efforts will impact key business metrics, such as churn or deal velocity.

• Justify future investments in community programs, tying resource growth to measurable value.

Communities fill gaps that traditional GTM efforts leave behind by engaging customers at greater scale and helping them get greater long-term value from your product or service.

Community is already influencing your GTM motion—whether you’re tracking it or not.

The sooner you connect the dots, the faster you unlock scalable, sustainable growth.

It’s time to move beyond warm fuzzies—and turn community into your most powerful GTM multiplier.