How Airtable use their website to enable buyers
Helping your customers to learn for themselves is more important than selling to them.
Let’s look at an example of what good can look like.
Airtable is a decacorn (valued over $10bn) success story.
Founded in 2012 and with around 1,100 employees they have re-defined enterprise collaboration, providing companies with a valid alternative to coding internal and even external applications.
As a potential user or buyer of Airtable you might come from an IT background and have some development experience, but more likely you will come from a functional background and low to no IT experience.
So how does Airtable get you onboard?
When we click on the Resources navigation we get a lot more than a link to the blog!
We get an entire “Learn” section where it is clear that I can educate myself on the problem and the solution.
I see a range of formats depending on whether I like to read or watch, whether I want to self serve, or have a guided experience.
The use of “Popular” and “New” tags shows that this is an actively used section and I’m not going to view stale content.
Webinars
When I click on the webinars button I get presented with a number of upcoming live webinars, as well as historical on demand webinars.
Live webinars like “Getting started in Airtable” give me confidence that I’ll be able to follow along and ask questions.
On demand webinars mean that if I’m trying to educate myself right now, I can dive in.
Demos
Sometimes (most times) you just want to see what the thing looks like.
I could describe a car to you all day long - but you need to see it to understand what I mean.
Airtable put demos front and centre and make it clear that you can see the system without having to wait four weeks for a salesperson to be available.
Even better, instead of just providing a generic “Get a demo” they focus them on specific use cases for specific personas.
As a marketer or product leader I know exactly which demo to sign up for, and I know I’m going to see my own business challenges discussed making this a valuable use of my time.
Getting started guides
Airtable provides a free full access trial licence, which means that potential buyers can be guided through their first use of the platform with simple follow along guides.
Airtable know the common use cases that drive adoption - building a workflow, collaborating with colleagues - and these guides help users complete these critical activities.
Customer Community
Instead of hiding their customer community away, Airtable put it front and centre (it is linked on the main Resources navigation).
You don’t need to be a paying customer to use it, so as you work through the self-paced guides and have questions you can help yourself.
I love the visual indicator that there are 52,252 members, and 553 online right now. This shows me it is active and current.
Enterprise offerings
Airtable started with a Product Led Growth motion, signing up individuals and teams, but now they are raising their focus up to Enterprise customers, who have additional questions about how a platform like this would get implemented and supported in their organisation.
Airtable have an Enterprise section, also off that main Resources page, where they address some common questions from Enterprise teams.
In this graphic they describe some of their packaged service offerings, demonstrating that they’ve been down this road with similar sized companies.
Buyer-centric content
These are just some examples of how Airtable has thought about their potential buyer and the questions and challenges those individuals are facing.
None of this content is about selling Airtable, or why you should buy Airtable over another collaboration platform.
It is about coaching, educating, inspiring the buyer.
Having gone through all of this content, watched a webinar, set up a free trial, installed a template, built out their first app - this customer is very likely ready to buy.
So many companies do not provide this information to their buyers.
“What if our competitors see it?”
“We provide it to them when they are customers”
“We don’t have this type of content”
These are not good excuses - providing this level of content is what buyers expect today, and if they can’t find it on your website, they’ll find it somewhere else!
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are two ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.