How B2B Sellers Can Use Community to Build Pipeline

Build a community and they will come… right?

In today's noisy scales landscape, trust is everything. Cold outreach is seemingly impossible, but smart sellers are tapping into a new kind of pipeline: their communities.

Whether you call it community-led growth, relationship-based selling, go-to-network, or referral pipeline generation, one thing remains true: People buy from people, sellers must invest in those relationships.

Being in a LinkedIn group, a Slack community, or hosting your own events can help you connect with potential prospects. Community engagement can be your secret tool for finding warm leads and speeding up deals.

In this blog post, I’ll share the five principles of engagement that we embrace at Commsor. These best practices will help you create an environment where members are giving and getting value from your brand and each other.

What is community engagement?

Community engagement is the act of member-to-member contributions. When a member engages, they complete activities that demonstrate participation in your brand’s space and programs. These contributions could include asking a question, writing a comment, or posting a reaction (like a thumbs up) in your online space. Offline, engagement activities could include attending a meetup or speaking at an event.

How your brand measures engagement may differ based on what activities and programs you offer. You can define community engagement as the number of posts, comments, reactions, badges, and events attended. When building efforts to increase engagement, we focus on tactics to encourage and facilitate member-to-member conversations.

5 principles of community engagement for B2B Sellers

Great engagement is all about building value and connections among members. Here are five principles of community engagement for B2B sellers to build trust with their audience.

1. Don't Sound Like A Seller

To drive engagement, you’ve got to understand who your members are and how they want to engage in your community.

Authentic engagement is where you can build credibility as a seller. Sales-y comments or trying to force your product or service on to community members is how you turn people off.

At Commsor, we say that desperate sales reps have a bad case of commission breath.

Not "sounding like a seller" starts with understanding your audience.

If you're new to launching a community, start by researching your customer base. Work cross-functionally with your friends across the organization and learn about any established customer personas. Personas are profiles that help you and the business understand users' needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.

Beyond personas, one tactic you might use are community surveys. Surveys help you learn about members' job titles. They show what motivates them to join and participate. You can also find out their values and needs.

Gathering this data is key to uncovering the value that your community brings to its users. Ask yourself — what is the glue that binds our group together? Why should these individuals value each other? The clearer you can get on your ‘why’, the more intentional you can be about the value you're providing.

And don't forget, you might be a seller in the community, but build personal relationships with your peers. Actually get to know other members of the community. The more you get to know your peers personally, the stronger your community will be. Connecting one on one helps build this foundation.

Maybe you can try to DM members to introduce yourself and set up calls to get to know each other better. Find out what motivates your potential prospects.

What do they need to be more successful at their jobs? What areas of our product do they feel  confident with? How can we help?

2. Make your peers the star

In a community, the focus should be on the people and their connections. You want to invite participation from everyone, not just the loudest in the room.

And the sellers that are the best at community engagement? They spark conversations not just attention. You can try:

• Starting discussions
• Asking for opinions
• Inviting customers to share wins

Every interaction you have creates more surface area for warm intros, referrals, or future deals.

The power of community is being around people just like you — people that are having similar experiences, going through the same issues and challenges, want the same information, etc. Our mission with engagement should be to bring those people together and help them find the connections and answers they need.

Focus on empowering and elevating the members with everything you do. When making opportunities for engagement, think about this question:

“Does this help our community members? Does it empower them? Does it help them connect with one another?”

If the answer is yes, then you’ve got a great idea for engagement!

3. Lead with Value

We like to say that the best sellers have a "Give First-attitude."

Sellers who share helpful articles, insights, referrals, or new ideas are more likely to gain trust and referrals. Community isn't just a support channel to answer questions about your product. It is a stage. Use that audience to educate, connect others, and appear as a partner—not just someone looking to hit quota.

Maybe your company recently released a guide that would be helpful to community members. Or maybe you know two members in the community that could profoundly benefit from knowing each other.

Share the resource. Introduce them. Be valuable.

When brainstorming tactics to encourage engagement, start small. A great hack for spurring conversation is to begin by offering discussion prompts in your online community spaces. These prompts should be fun questions that any member can answer regardless of their expertise level.

Engagement opportunities don’t have to be time-intensive for your community. Some members may not have time to participate in an hour-long webinar, but do want to contribute to a simple group question. The nature of your community will guide your prompts.

4. You have to participate, too

If you want your members to be engaged, you must be engaged.

If you're in the community to sell, you must be in the community to engage authentically as well.

Being a visible presence in the community will help invite others to be active with you. Especially when first practicing community engagement, it is important to be extra active in your spaces. This means that you should read and engage with the majority of posts that people share, even if you only give a like or reaction.

Your contributions should be supportive, welcoming, and helpful. Saying “thank you” and recognizing good questions and answers are simple ways to support your members.

Don’t be afraid to let your personality come through. In sales, people buy from people — not pitch decks. When you show up as your authentic self, you create a space where trust and connection can grow. The more real you are, the more likely others are to engage, respond, and eventually buy — not just from your company, but from you.

5. Be consistent and be thoughtful

You have to be present to stay top of mind. If you're not selling to your prospects, you should be thinking about bringing them into your sphere of influence.

Buyers don't trust strangers—they trust familiar faces. By being present in your community, like on LinkedIn, in a Slack group, or at events, you create familiarity. This makes your outreach feel like a natural part of a relationship, not just a cold pitch.

To make engagement part of your community’s DNA, you need a plan. This is not something you want to wing or try to accomplish on the fly. Make life easier on yourself (and your team) with a content calendar of thoughtful, well-crafted engagement touchpoints.

We recommend building out an engagement plan 2-3 weeks ahead of time.

Within your plan, it’s important to also track and measure results. Is the community interacting with your discussion prompts? Is webinar attendance dropping? Checking the performance data from your activities can help you see what is working and what isn’t.

From here, you can test and learn. We won’t know if something works unless we try it. If your GIF Wednesday posts consistently get low engagement, that’s OK. Go back to the drawing board with these five principles and try something new.

And finally, give your engagement initiatives time to work. Not everything is going to be a smash hit the first time you try it. Sometimes it can take a while to build momentum and give members experiences they can consistently expect.

You need to be intentional when connecting with prospects and potential customers.

Sellers who win today aren’t cold calling — they’re community building. Want to map your network and start making warm intros your go-to motion? Commsor can help.