Rooted in Purpose: Can We Find Our True North Again?

Community isn’t a marketing channel. It’s a heartbeat. And when you ignore a heartbeat long enough...well, we all know what happens.”

There was a time when being part of this community meant something special.

🚫Not because of swag.

🚫Not because of titles.

🚫Not because of leaderboards.

It meant something because it was rooted in purpose. 💪🏾

And no one captured that purpose better than Erica Kuhl👑 — the original architect of the Salesforce community — when she said:

"When I was teaching I recognized that these were the change makers that we needed to surround with success using the product and to come on this movement to cloud computing with us. I wanted to create a trusted and authentic place to keep learning once outside the classroom. What happened was far more than I ever dreamed. It became more than a place to learn and succeed, but a place where people paid it forward and helped others succeed alongside them." "It was always about peer-to-peer growth and about listening and co-creating Salesforce along with the community. The culture was a blend of professional and silly. We didn’t take each other too seriously and it was mostly built for the community with the community. It was your house, and the culture was that you invited us in when you needed us. We wanted to always be welcomed in but we knew we had to earn your trust by listening, providing great connections, great content, learning, and access. Built for the community, with the community.

Read that again. 🔀

How Did We Get Here?

🤑Transaction over Trust.

😒Optics over Impact.

😔Programs over People.

👎🏾Community became a budget line item.

👎🏾Engagement became a KPI.

And the humans — the heartbeat — slowly got lost in the noise.

This isn’t about one leader or one decision. It’s about what happens when purpose gets replaced by process. When connection gets replaced by campaigns.

And yes, I get it — business is business. Revenue matters. Efficiency matters.

But you don’t build legendary communities on dashboards alone.

📢 You build them with trust. With listening. With showing up even when there’s nothing to sell‼️

So Where Do We Go From Here?

This isn’t a rant. (Well maybe to you it is....)

This is a call to remember who we are.

To ask hard questions like:

👂🏾Are we listening?

👷🏾‍♀️Are we building with or for?

🙏🏾Are we treating people like partners or data points?

Because here’s the truth no one’s really saying out loud:

Salesforce used to be proactive in its approach to community.

Intentional. Welcoming. Human.💞

Back then, you didn’t have to fight to feel seen.

You didn’t have to chase down leadership to feel heard.

They showed up first.

They built with us, not around us.

They trusted us — long before there were dashboards to measure us.

But somewhere along the way, things changed. The approach became reactive.

Transactional. Process-driven. Community started to feel like a PR strategy — not a shared purpose.

And layered on top of that? Leadership changed. There has been a complete shift in the people responsible for the heart and soul of this community — and most of us have never even met them.

Think about that. A community built on trust... doesn’t know the people leading it.

The faces we knew are gone. The voices we trusted are quiet. And the new faces? They feel distant. Unfamiliar. Absent. 🤔

‼️That’s not just a gap — that’s a fracture. You can’t build community from behind a conference room door.

You build it in the comments section. In the DMs. In the messy, human moments of showing up. Because as Marc Benioff once said:

“My inspiration comes from all of you, our Trailblazers. You are the innovators, the disruptors, the shapers. You are shaping the future, and you are going to make it great.”

That was the promise.🤞🏾

🚮But inspiration without connection?

🚮Leadership without presence?

🚮Strategy without heart?

🚮That’s how communities fade.

My Call to Action 📢

To the dreamers, the builders, the believers (The Kuhl Kids)— this is your reminder:

💓We are the heartbeat.

🫂We are the legacy.

🔮We are the future — if we choose to be.

Let’s get back to messy, human, purpose-driven community. Let’s find our True North again. And right now — that starts with using your voice.

Salesforce has put out a community survey — and if you’ve ever cared about this community, if you’ve ever felt its power, its magic, or even its frustration — I urge you to take 5 minutes and let your voice be heard.

This is your moment to be seen. This is your moment to be counted. Complete the survey by midnight PST on April 11, 2025:

🔗 https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Z9ZPYWX

Because silence never sparked a movement. But community always has.

Let’s find our True North again.

Together.