SaaStr 559: Secrets to Building Your Marketing Engine To Drive Scale with Airtable CMO Archana Agrawal
People do not want to buy one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, they are looking for something flexible and adaptable to their unique needs. When marketing teams spend the bulk of their time completing manual tasks, data gets siloed, workflows break down, and leaders do not have the visibility they need to make customer-focused decisions.
Airtable's CMO Archana Agrawal shares how marketers can tackle these challenges to develop solid marketing foundations for rapid customer acquisition and growth. She reveals how customer centricity, operational rigor, and data-driven strategies drove Airtable to scale and serve over 300,000 organizations, including 80% of the Fortune 100.
Full video: https://youtu.be/2aAT8-Omcqc
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CMO Airtable, Archana Agrawal: Success Is Not a Formula
Archana Agrawal started her job as CMO of Airtable on March 18, 2020 — the same week that the US began to “shelter in place” as cases of the novel coronavirus rapidly rose. With kids who would be staying home from school and Airtable’s San Francisco office closed, everything was changing at once, so she switched into what she calls “problem-solving mode.” And, crucially, she discovered how to use family time to de-stress.
In this episode, Archana and Joubin discuss how she made her way from Africa to Asia to America; operating without a full night’s sleep; why her former coworkers made a game of trying to stump her; the secret power under the hood of Airtable; starting her current job right as “shelter in place” kicked in; whether she would stay at Airtable if the founder was no longer CEO; and how she views her responsibility on the boards of MongoDB and Zendesk.
In this episode, we cover:
Staying in place & doubling down vs. moving on to bigger things (03:03)
Moving from Liberia to India to escape civil war (07:13)
Archana’s unusual grad school roommate: Her father (11:33)
The value of breadth over depth, and following your passions (17:35)
Cold-emailing her way into a job at Atlassian and the ridiculous job title Archana almost received (21:38)
Understanding a team’s strengths and weaknesses — and her own (27:05)
Her lowest point at Atlassian, the sale of HipChat and exit from the messaging business (34:33)
Why it matters that Airtable looks like a spreadsheet, but is powered by a relational database (37:52)
Going into “problem-solving mode,” and the most important outlet for escaping from stress (42:42)
Working for founder-led companies (49:53)
Being heard as a quiet person on advisory boards full of louder people (55:27)
Links:
Connect with ArchanaLinkedIn
Email: archana@airtable.com
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm