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This post by François Dufour is part of our series on Product-Led Growth Playbooks. There, we share insights and advice from leaders who have built successful PLG businesses.
In many ways, Airtable follows a quintessential product-led growth (PLG) playbook. A very well-designed freemium offering coupled with popular, customizable templates gets people in the door. Once users realize the value and want access to more features, they pay to play.
Nima Asra Haghighi, VP of Marketing at Airtable and former VP of Marketing at MuleSoft, is no stranger to PLG, and he knows how a savvy combination of organic, product-driven acquisition coupled with a well-developed PQL strategy can set the stage for massive growth.
I recently got to talk to Nima about his PLG Playbook at Airtable (we previously covered his experience at MuleSoft) with a particular focus on acquisition and PQLs, as Nima is an expert at shortening the time to “a-ha.” Nima and his team understand how to guide and nudge users to get value as quickly as possible so that they’ll want to become customers in a premium tier.
Acquiring customers for a horizontal product
Airtable’s product offering is very horizontal. That is, it’s open-ended and can be used for a variety of use cases. A user could use Airtable for work, but they could also use it to create a shared schedule for their family.
The product can work for so many use cases that the possibilities are endless, forcing Nima’s team to go heavy on inbound marketing and activation, working very closely with a cross-functional Growth team that reports to the Head of Product.
The product encourages users to get more value by inviting their friends and colleagues, and the templates, in particular, are easy to share. Airtable has seen rapid growth due to the virality built into the product, though they do rely on paid ads, as well.
“At Airtable, it’s difficult to choose which keywords to go after in ads because our product is so horizontal. The challenge is not what keyword to go after, but what keyword to focus on because it will bring the highest ROI,” said Nima.
“That’s why we’ve focused on promoting some of the most popular templates, which bring people into the product.”
A freemium offering + templates get users interested
Airtable’s PLG strategy begins with a freemium product lineup. This freemium offering gets users of all stripes in the door, even though some never become paying customers.
Fortunately, the product comes with a strong virality as users get the most out of the tool when they invite others to collaborate. That invite loop and the strong referral traffic and the SEO power of many templates feed the top of the funnel. The templates play an essential role and the marketing team is committed to learning which templates help users realize the most value.
“Many of our templates are great for product awareness and adoption, but not all of them convert traffic to customers,” said Nima. “That’s why not only we look at the volume, but also at the impact the templates have on sales.”
Focusing efforts on specific templates
To create Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), Nima and his team focus on those who come in through templates that are optimized for the enterprise. For example, their content calendar template is useful to any company launching a marketing campaign.
Not only is the use of the content calendar a good indication that someone is using Airtable for business purposes, but it’s also something that is typically used in collaboration with others on a greater marketing team. When someone starts using the content calendar template, it’s a good signal that they are a candidate for a multi-user account.
Once users are inside specific templates, the Airtable team can nudge them towards becoming PQLs by encouraging them to take action– they can be nudged to fill out the template, sync it with a database, and invite their colleagues via the right nudges and education at the right time.
See this article for best practices on creating PQLs featuring Slack, Atlassian, and Zendesk.
What is the moment when a user derives enough value from the product that they’re hooked? Nima calls this the “a-ha moment.” Others call that first strike. When Nima used Airtable for the first time, his personal a-ha moment was when he used the sync feature, as it showed how powerful Airtable’s database capabilities are.
“Seeing sync was my ‘a-ha’ moment with Airtable– I understood how powerful it was and how it was different from anything else,” said Nima. “I knew Airtable was a database product at its core, but I couldn’t connect the dots until I saw that feature. Then I understood the product’s power.”
For Nima, PLG is all about understanding users’ a-ha moments and using those moments to nudge the user forward. Here’s how the team at Airtable shortens the time to a-ha, nudges users into PQL, and then ultimately sell them on the product.
Determining critical actions & thresholds that signal “a-ha” moments
Airtable’s expert data science team analyzes user actions to learn user behavior. Even more critically, they can identify what should be the next best action for a user given where they are in their journey to get them to their a-ha moment. From there, they can be guided to the next product tier.
“Ultimately, we’re asking ‘what are the 3 - 5 critical actions people take on their path to becoming a customer?’ These critical actions become a hypothesis for where the a-ha moments are,” said Nima. “It then becomes your job to think about how you can optimize the experience to drive more people into those paths.”
These critical actions are only one indication, however. Nima also recommends focusing on thresholds. For example, if you have a certain number of people using the product from the same team, that’s an indication that they may be ready for the next tier. You need to determine what that threshold is, then develop a strategy to get more groups to that threshold.
“Once a user has undertaken your critical actions and/or reached a particular threshold, they become a PQL and you can then follow up to try to sell the product.”
“Once a user has undertaken your critical actions and/or reached a particular threshold, they become a PQL and you can then follow up to try to sell the product,” said Nima.
Providing education alongside the product to nudge users forward
Some people will get to their a-ha moment on their own, simply by playing around with the product. Other times, people need more guidance, which is where education can help.
The Airtable team has been investing in Youtube to provide this guidance, but the team understands that each user might prefer a different type of content. “Some people might prefer to read, while others might prefer video,” said Nima. “We are always looking to strike a balance with the types of educational content that we’re creating.”
The goal of this education is to help users become more sophisticated in their usage of the product. Users who are more sophisticated are the ones who end up inviting others and selling the product internally, so it’s essential to provide educational content to this group.
Using a consultative approach to sell the product
Once a user is a PQL, it’s time to reach out and connect. The Airtable does not take a hard sales approach with product users. Instead, it’s consultative. The team of implementation specialists help users understand how they can get the most out of the product.
“For the product users, we take a consultative approach with the goal of helping them be more successful with Airtable,” said Nima. “We hold their hand and give them a high touch approach so they see the value in the product.
We covered a number of tips for BDRs in a previous post from Twilio– the post covers why and how technical BDRs can play a key role in PLG.
Capture a lot of info in the product
Nima recommends making sure that you capture a lot of information in the product, especially how each user is using it. This not only helps with improving the product, but also gives you access to a lot of data that you can use for sales and marketing.
“My suggestion is to not only capture the data, but also make sure that you’ve made the data available. We believed that everything we built needed an API so that data could be surfaced and used elsewhere. That’s the mindset we used for everything.”
At MuleSoft, Nima saw the value in having well-integrated systems. The marketing team used Marketo, and the team ensured that data was fed right in. This made it relatively easy to deploy marketing campaigns and lifecycle advertising programs.
Build for scale and automate
When Nima was building out the marketing tech stack, ability to scale was always top of mind. He reminded his team that whatever they built would still be there after the company grew by 10x, so they needed to build it with the intention of scaling.
“Rather than building something to solve an immediate problem, we needed to think about if what we were building would still stand after 10 years or if we grew by 10x.”
For example, if you’re building out landing pages in Marketo, you need to step back and make sure that the process is scalable. Do you need to recreate a landing page every time, or is there a template or an automation that makes creating landing pages seamless and easy?
Orchestrate tasks and move faster
Today’s companies have a variety of sophisticated technologies at their fingertips, but what sets great companies apart is their orchestration. For example, Nima recommends building a workflow for orchestrating processes, such as for when new product features roll out, using a platform such as Airtable of course. Each time, the team should know every single step that has to happen for that product to come to market and orchestrate accordingly and who was supposed to do what, when.
“When you release a new feature, you want to feel as though you’re part of a machine. Everyone knew the tasks that needed to happen for this asset to be released. Not only that, but they understand who the owners are and the sequence of events.”
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