The Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal

I've always followed products that I love. Airtable had a very similar calling. I think software is entering a new phase with its own version of creators. People don't want to buy one-size-fits-all solutions. They'll want to make it themselves. I think that's the space Airtable fills. The product obsession that comes from within the company, it transfers to outside. When you invest in your users, users and let them connect with each other. To your leaders, you give them a voice. We are so inspired by what we see our customers build. It is almost remarkably easy to get lost in the noise that we find around us today. How do you get the core out to the audience in a more creative way? I need something that's flexible and can move with me and can change with me. Things are always, always changing, but the part The trick there is to stay ahead of the game. Good morning, everyone. I'm Archana Agrawal, Chief Marketing Officer of Airtable. It's such a privilege to be here today. Some of you in the audience are probably starting off with product-market fit. Others are operating at really large scale. And I'm here today to share my perspectives and learnings on how to modernize your marketing machine. You know, I started off as a developer. And in my route to marketing, I learned the role marketing can play in building buying processes at scale. This is decidedly different from marketing facilitating sales selling, or marketing facilitating product launching features. This is truly the role of the modern marketing team, driving buying processes at scale. I've had the privilege to join Airtable and really build the marketing team from ground up. We started from scratch, but we also operate at scale, serving over 300,000 organizations of all shapes and sizes, including 80% of the Fortune 100. Before this, I ran the— I was the head of enterprise and cloud marketing at Atlassian. And I also serve on the boards of Zendesk and MongoDB, all great companies operating at scale. And what better way to share that with you than maybe start off with the metrics that I look at. And you'll see here a sort of a difference here in the number of the types of metrics that we follow. As a marketer, one of the things that I do often enough is bring new products to market, right? And One of the ways I figure out whether we are ready to launch our products is actually understanding the customer feedback we've received even before the product is generally available through our beta programs. And that's what you see here. For our most recent launch, which was the Airtable interface designer, we had 43 creators in our beta program. And their, their conversations, their language, the ability to speak to them is what helped shape that launch. And during the course of that launch, I had zero status meetings, and I'm really proud of that. And it's— of course, we met on a weekly basis. Cross-functional teams came together and we shared the big picture of what our priorities were. But, you know, for each and every work stream, sort of the day-to-day, what needs to happen, how are we pacing for the launch date, Everybody, every day, all day had that information at their fingertips. And then of course Kleenex escalation paths were required. And once we bring these products and content into the market, just like you would try to understand product adoption, usage, in the same way we try to understand content consumption. Is it helping? Is it moving the needle? And those are the kind of metrics that we follow across all of our channel and our content. And here's what you see, an example of that, which is the increase in the YouTube watch time, which is just one of those kind of metrics. I'd love to dig into these and more as we talk about what does modernization of marketing mean. You know, marketing needs today to be the interface between the customer and the company. And that customer centricity needs to be now at the core of marketing. And we're constantly evolving with the business needs. Tell me, how many times have things had to change because, I don't know, product dates moved or a new channel or a new platform, new competitor, new geo that you had to manage? Things move and marketing moves. And in order to be able to do that effectively, agility and operational excellence needs to be part of the core of our DNA. And when there's so much to do, the volume, velocity, the variety of the things that you're doing is increasing all the time, the best way to be able to know that you're focusing on the right things at the right time is to really use a very, very data-informed approach. There's so many customer touchpoints today. So many different ways to go to market. I feel just sort of in my span, in my career in marketing, I've seen companies move from one predominant sales motion to being sales-led, product-led, developer-led, marketplaces, partner-led, and most companies now blend these different go-to-market motions. And this requires marketing to always be at the forefront and keep changing as the customer buying behaviors change. And really to be able to have all of these different motions, to be able to be present in an omnichannel way, customer first, and in a very service-oriented approach. To do all of that, you need to be absolutely deliberate in your customer engagement. So let's talk about what customer centricity could actually mean in that case. And I could tell you how we implemented here at Airtable as we're building the marketing team. We invested very, very heavily in a centralized research team because that research sort of forms the seed of a lot of what we do. Very deliberate customer interactions to make sure that we have the voice of the customer shaping our programs, whether this comes in the form of community or it comes in the form of CABs, whatever it might be, will be able to take the customer along in this journey. And we have our wonderful product partners that are always with us through this, including building fully fleshed out product programs that we can use in order to inform how we go to market. I'll start together with talking about how we did this at Airtable. And we could go into further discussions in the Q&A section. You know, bringing customers together that can connect over shared interests, shared themes and topics. We learn from them, they learn from each other and how they're operating their business, but they also then can provide a lot of input into our roadmap once you see what's coming along. In fact, in one of our last CABS, we used what we call the dollar bill exercise where we gave our customers fake dollars and asked them to help invest in our roadmap? How much would they invest in various features? Those are the kind of decisions we anyways have to make. Why not make it with our customers and take some of their input? And once they help shape some of that and those features start coming together, then we can actually bring them again together to try to understand, you know, really what does an MVP look like? What does scoping look like? How do we shape this launch? How do we bring it to market and get feedback from them and make it one-fifth part of their workflow. And so that brings us to the kind of metrics then we look at, right? Which is, can we get customers to give us this feedback? Now think about what it would actually entail. Well, it's a lot of pitch conversations initially to get customers as part of the beta program. Those pitches teach us. Product marketers learn what's resonating with the customers, what works, right? And then we take this, Pitchers, we help improve them as we're fine-tuning our go-to-market messages. And we allow folks to participate in whatever format works for them. So that's easy and low friction. Think about form submissions or Zoom meetings where there's screen sharing, Slack channels with these customers. And so there's a constant dialogue between the teams so that we can help take their feedback and get these improvements into our product before we make it generally available. But when you think about doing so many different things, then you really want to go deep on these initiatives. You want to keep up with your marketing capabilities. You realize that there's a lot of complexity in the process. And candidly, the pandemic has further exacerbated it, right? Because it's just changed the way we work completely. And I don't know about you, but I have an instinct that while all of these new things that we need to do come to bear, teams don't have the commensurate additional resources to go and tackle it. So for example, even in that launch, when you add so much to a launch team's plate, it becomes a lot to manage. And so operational marketing has become absolutely essential for modern marketing. And the reality is, you know, unless your website is optimized and you have your demand gen engine running effectively, your self-serve conversion rates are at industry benchmarks, you have great social engagement, you're running great events, you know, when all of those things are being done on budget, then and only then does marketing get to move out of block and tackle mode and then get to part— evolve strategically. And so it is absolutely imperative that we take sort of operations to the next level and work through the variety of things a marketer needs to do. The fun part of the job, of course, is that we have such diverse functions in marketing, right? But it also means that everyone has their own tools and their own systems that they're working through. What ends up happening is that teams get preoccupied in the minutiae of how to make work happen rather than focusing on what they need to, which is the customer. We ran a recent survey that showed marketing leaders spend about a day and a half in manual tasks and moving different data from different places to get the visibility that they need, that the average marketing team uses 23 tools. When you think about the implication of that, you realize what ends up happening is data is siloed. Different teams don't have the visibility into what the other team is doing. And it's really hard for them to show their impact, but also really hard for leaders to actually get the visibility to make the decisions that they need to do. And so in order to be able to do that, we at Airtable have made sort of operational excellence an absolute must-have for our teams. And I really recommend taking a very progressive stance towards how you think about your teams should work. Very simple things, but whatever can be automated, do that. Do not have teams do manual tasks, or simply try to reduce your dependency on other teams to the extent that you can operate with low-code tools or no-code tools, and you can change them and flex them with your needs. That's super important. Invest in your tech stack so that it grows with you while you scale. And I can show you what we do at Airtable. Of course, in Airtable, we would use Airtable. But regardless of whatever tool you use, you can use some of these principles and make them yours. An example— that's very important to us is everyone should operate off of the same underlying data. And you can see that here, right? The product teams may have their own interface, but they're looking at the same data to understand customer feedback. And the marketing team's looking at that same feedback in order to be able to turn around and come through with positioning. And every morning as I get in to be able to look at what is it on my deck to approve, I go to a single interface that tells me what teams are waiting on from me in order to approve so that they can move on to the next step and I can provide feedback right there. And that is that same data that is powering the dashboards I share with my peers so that they understand how the launch is progressing, and the same data that's still underlying the performance metrics that we look at today. And no matter whether you're doing it in marketing, but really Today's scaling companies need to do it across all teams, right? And we've seen large customers like Netflix take that same approach and use it across all of their teams. Think about, I don't know, your facilities team, right? And in today's on-again, off-again hybrid remote in-office world, they're constantly moving plans, changing with the external environment. Being able to do that in a centralized fashion, looking at the same data is hugely important. Think about the Collaboration between your PR teams and content teams and legal teams, all of them being able to look at the same information at the same time, hugely, hugely important. Now, when you think about we have so many things to do and all of those priorities, teams moving at the same pace, trying to get the same, towards the same destination, then you think that, wow, there are all of these options. We need to use data to help us make very informed decisions on where should we invest and where can we pull back, where do we double down, right? Because there's just too much to do. It's extremely hard to be at all of these places. And the best way I can think about sharing that is maybe again, a very tactical example as we were building from ground up, how did you use data to inform what you do? So Airtable is a new way of working. We need our customers to sort of understand the product, the product usage, but also best practices. And so we invest in education. We know we want to do this. We've had an ask, but how do we go about doing it? You can take data to help inform that entire journey. First, using the research team, we had large qualitative surveys to understand How do people like to consume this data? Where do people like to consume this data? Then using some of our own analytics, we understand where are people getting stuck in the process and what powerful features can we give them access to that will actually deepen their usage of the product. Putting all of that together, we can effectively come up with a plan that ends up prioritizing what content, What format, what parts of the journey do we expose all of this content in, right? And then comes to life YouTube and live video streams, webinars, in-product videos, in-context help, support articles, guides on the web, so many ways to do it. But understanding where in the journey we can introduce these things for different segments becomes very important. And then it's not just about using that data in in the beginning to come and develop that curriculum and a plan, then using it at a constant basis to iterate and improve, knowing where you should double down and what's working, right? And that spoke to sort of like the YouTube stats or understanding how people are making progress in product with contextual help. But when you wrap it all up, it might seem like very simple principles, right? But I'd urge you to create it for yourself. How is the customer part of your day-to-day operation? How are they part of your creation process? And when you need to move fast, are your teams able to move with that level of agility? When you need to make changes and you need to expand programs, are you able to do that quickly? Sure, when you start an experimental sort of project process, you can run it in an unscalable way, but then You need to be able to bring in that rigor to be able to move fast. And last but not the least, do you have data-backed conviction on what your teams are working on? And do they have that visibility so that they know that they're empowered to scale programs? And with that, thank you again for sharing some of these, but I will open it for questions. So I'll take the questions from that are coming in. So the first one here, outside of Airtable, what marketing teams in SaaS do you look up to? There's so many wonderful examples and so many that we follow honestly, just from a learning perspective. I mentioned a few in the beginning. I think Atlassian's had an excellent and amazing sort of roadmap with respect to self-serve marketing, but we have great companies like Salesforce to look up to. As an example, that's been able to take up a leading message to market and being able to inspire really a SaaS transition. And so there are a number of different companies, different maybe formats that companies have followed, whether it be community sort of formats. You could look at, again, Salesforce is a great example there, right? And so some part of it is looking at how companies have explored different channels and some how they've led the way to do marketing differently. The next question, what is the most difficult part when you grow Airtable? And there's sort of, as you're scaling the company, there are so many different dimensions. If I took a personal story, I would tell you perhaps I joined during the transition in March 2020. And I call that a transition because it was a transition in the way we work. And I'd say that just adjusting to a new dynamic was honestly difficult, but also growing teams and scaling, building new processes in this very remote environment becomes hard. And not only are you trying to form internal connections, but truly also trying to form the external connections with the external world and understand a market that is in transition tends to be quite challenging. I think we've all sort of settled into the new ways of working, which are also always evolving. But I'd say that just that part in getting that cadence right takes some iteration. From Kenneth, you mentioned involving your customers in your product interviews. How do you differentiate a nice to have and a must have? Couple ways, Kenneth. One is not only having to speak with one customer, but some part of that was being able to speak to customers from different industries or whichever— however you might look at your target market, right? Different industries, different sizes, to be able to understand exactly how frequent are some of these things coming up. Understand the use cases. The reasons for which these requests might be coming up. And you can have not only depend on that customer research, but there's a lot of survey-based research as well that you can use to inform how teams might accomplish a task in an alternate way or a jobs to be done in an alternate way. And that can help you then decide what's a nice to have versus a must have. But honestly, even sort of like the game that I spoke about earlier, which is like the dollar exercise, having customers voting. So many other signals that you can get. It's usually very multi-threaded in the approach to figure out how do you go ahead and prioritize different things. A question from Kurt. Can you elaborate on how and when you layered on sales-enabled on top of self-serve motion? How do you map out the customer journey? Reconciling free end-user signup and signing in a larger enterprise contract within the same company? Sure, Likert. So first and foremost, I think in many cases, or the cases I've experienced, the customer takes you there, right? In some ways, you see, if you have started off with self-service motion, you actually see inbound interest and requirements for things that may come in more of an enterprise feature. And sometimes just handling that inbound teaches you so much more about the customer journey, as well as customer success teaches you so much about the customer journey, which is what is the opportunity that people aren't able to avail of in the self-serve world? How can we make our customers more successful? So some part is with that customer centricity would be good signals on, hey, there's a TAM out there that's growing. Our customers need this. We have it. Actually enable it better, and you might find that a sales-led motion might help more in that regard. So that might be a signal that you look at. And then when it comes to reconciling free end-user sign-up versus large enterprise contracts, that is the beauty of sort of product-led growth, which is in many different cases you'll find a lot of different teams that are using your product all within the same domain. Frankly, that sometimes places where the conversation can actually help because sometimes you can be that connective tissue for the different teams and help bring them together. Sometimes that's the benefit of having a cross-functional workflow on the same platform, but it might also be for other reasons that might deal with federation or aggregation of data or sources for the teams. And so those are some of the ways where you can actually use a lot of the data that that candidly we've not had access to in sort of this non-SaaS world, but we have that advantage to be able to bring that to the market and to the customers and, and be a partner to them to help inform how they can be more successful on the platform. So then the next question: What are some of the points of feedback that you're gathering from customers? What types of questions are asked. So there's a multitude, right, depending on the phase of the project. When it's simply in the ideation phase or trying to understand how they would use the product, it's very use case-oriented questions and trying to understand the depth of functionality that could be required. But let's say the product is actually ready and you're working and literally screen sharing with the customer, you're trying to understand how are they able to sort of accomplish their tasks, how are they able to get from point A to point B, point B? Is it intuitive for them to use? Are they able to discover all of the sort of features and functionality that you're bringing to them? And you can ask them questions around that as well. And so that's what a lot of our feedback that we receive from customers was. Very often it's about, hey, I love this, what's next? How do we take it to the next level? Those would be other questions that would also come through. Who, who performs these customer feedback surveys? Are they anonymous or one-on-one conversations? Both. The research team performs some of the feedback surveys, which works very closely with product and marketing. It's just an amazing partnership to be able to get the information flowing across all of these teams. But also we could even have our customer success teams participate and our product teams participate. Our product marketing teams participate in one-on-one conversations. And that's the beauty of having a beta program and people sort of opting into it is that you have these conversations and you can get more in-depth knowledge from them. I'll take next question, which is, what are some things that didn't work for Airtable when you were scaling your marketing engine? I should sort of maybe give you the context and I'll answer a question in another way. But I'll give you the context that Airtable's been a product that's been in market for a while, and the marketing team is relatively new. So I feel like we had so much of foundational work to set up all of these processes, and fortunately have been seeing some very good results from them. But I think the things that often you sort of work through when you're trying to scale is when you're trying to scale new channels, it's never, well, in my experience, it's never been that, you know, the first time you're able to know exactly the right formula format and velocity and cadence at which you can scale the channel. And often, it's almost very, very often a matter of experimentation and iteration. If you have confidence, you must power through and find out how to make it work for you, right? And I think I would say that that experience has sort of gone through across all of our channels that we've worked through. It's a matter of constant iteration versus saying it didn't work, but rather how do we actually improve it? Prove it. The next question, how do you buy, wearing the customer's hat, tech for your org? Would love to know a product that you purchased from a startup recently. What worked discovery to closure? So I buy almost entirely from both experience and community-based sort feedback, testimonials, or rather than testimonials, I'd say evidence that companies of Airtable size and scale have been able to be successful with that product. And on a personal level, when I'm trying something, it's much easier for me to turn around and buy a product. I'll tell you, I use a tool called Workflowy to take my notes. It was something that— it's a startup. I was able to sort of get on the platform and start using the product, and it works well for me. But on an organizational level, when I'm buying a product, I tend to rely very deeply on being able to understand both either through my own experience or through sort of similar-sized companies or where we want to be, how exactly we're able to implement the product and bring it to scale and see results from it, which then starts an evaluation process. Purchase process, and then leads into effectively buying the product. With so much noise across so many channels, how can marketers break through and reach their target audience? That's a great one too. So I think it's hard to not be differentiated, right? Because there is a lot of noise, but then you ask, how do you actually sort of increase that differentiation is also by increasing relevance. And so the way I think about it is really being able to personalize your content, your value prop for the audience that you are able to reach out to. And then once you do that, it's also of course, and this is part of the complexity of the marketing machine, right? Which is being able to reach out to the right audience, many different touchpoints to be able to get your message across. Being able to use data to personalize that touchpoint so that it— to increase the relevance, but then to also focus and invest in the simplicity of that customer journey so that when you do have them come through to experience the product or whatever you're trying to— service that you're trying to give them, that it is a very simple journey and you don't lose them in that process. The next question, how do you handle customer unsatisfaction? Some part with through that research itself, right? Because what you want to understand is sort of the widespread nature of it, the reason for it, deeply understand whether it's a specific circumstance or whether it's something that's more generalizable, and that truly does become sort of part of the prioritization process then, right? Because if there's something that's a pain point that's relevant for you as a business to be able to talk through it, if it's really hindering a specific customer for a specific use case, you're going to be able to handle it for that specific customer depending on what the issue is. And so I'll talk about the various touchpoints we have to take that input and be able to understand it. Support channels are available, but also customer success channels are available. If someone's actually using the product, they have a partner that they can get in touch with and help convey that feedback. We're doing constant outreach to our customers to be able to get that feedback, and hopefully those channels are also well utilized. And then there's so many other sort of sales conversations, or even when they come to a sort of expansion and renewal that they could— that they're able to convey feedback if something is not working for them. And some part of being able to handle this honestly is being able to build delight into the product and into the interaction with the brand, which is extremely important. It's extremely important in the SaaS world, but it's also extremely important to build that championship and the loyalty. The next question, how do you maintain customer centricity as your business scales? It's slightly related to the prior question in that how does one sort of increase the touchpoints and make it part of your process in order to be able to get this feedback, right? So when I talked about things like beta programs, they become part of our process. They become part of the language of the marketing team to be able to take that and incorporate that in the metrics that we follow and in the way we develop our positioning. That becomes some focus of it. But also to increase the number of channels at which we're able to take this feedback, right? You have wonderful community motions where you can do things like have conversations like this with your customer, or you can ensure that your cross-functional teams are very tightly connected, like customer success teams or customer support teams that are able to meet the customer often enough and can convey that feedback to your product. And those should be constantly constant input into both your marketing and your product motions. But you might also have partners that you work with who would also be wonderful input into, and another sort of view into the customer and the customer experience with your brand. The next question, how do you design your org to be able to operate with speed and data centricity? So org design is sort of something that is always evolving with the size and the scale and the priorities of your team, right? And so I'll answer this question a little bit less about how the org is designed because I think different teams can sit in different places, but it doesn't matter where the teams sit if you follow some of those very simple principles, like one being, you know, the data inform— being data informed in your approach. When you take that, it means close partnership with the data team, whether the data team is part of the marketing team or a centralized team. Both, I've seen both work wonderfully, but make sure that their input is what everyone in the marketing team is using. And our marketing stacks are extremely complicated today, so when you can invest in marketing operations and allow them to be empowered to be able to change and move things fast. Another sort of organize— it's not less organizational design, but the rituals that you set, the communication patterns that you have, whether they're all hands. We have a weekly newsletter for the marketing team, but there are different rituals that you can put together to be able to ensure that your organization's is always moving in the same direction and is able to operate with speed. The next question: What metrics do you consider when evaluating the performance of each channel? Different channels operate sort of for different purposes, right? There might be some channels that you're looking at and utilizing for the, for being able to increase the awareness of your brand, and then you might look at metrics like the aided and unaided awareness. There are other channels that you might be using to drive acquisition, in which case you want to make sure that you have usage post-interaction with that channel, right? And that might be one way to look at it. There are other channels like the community that you might be using to understand or get feedback, but also increase engagement, and then you'd have engagement engagement-oriented metrics or even some of the metrics that I showed around, hey, how much feedback are we able to get? Are we able to interact with our customers, right? And so there are sort of these variety of ways depending on where in the journey you're activating that channel that you try to use metrics that are very specific to how you want to have the channel operate as well.