Nelson Wang: How Airtable Partners Are Powering Enterprise Growth

Chip Rodgers   0:00  
Hey everyone, okay, day three, and everything's wrapping up. It's just had the closing session, and I think people are starting to wind down here. And it's been a great event. Nelson, yeah,

Nelson Wang  0:13  
it's been so cool. Finally meeting people in real life that we've been interacting with on LinkedIn and slack, and so that's been like a huge joy to do that. It's been awesome. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers   0:22  
yeah, it's amazing. So I'm excited to to be here with Nelson Wang. And Nelson is head of partnerships for airtable, which is just taken off like crazy. And your partner program has done terrifically Well, I think. And you were, you were previously with, with Miro and with box and Cisco prior to that, so have a lot of experience in technology and partnerships. So welcome.

Nelson Wang  0:51  
Oh, thank you. Yeah, glad to be doing this. I've watched a lot of the content, so just happy to try to contribute, share some lessons, and hopefully help people out. That's

Chip Rodgers   0:59  
fantastic. So why don't we start? Start here, you know, with your the your team at at airtable, and what are you doing? We talked a little bit before amazing, amazing things, just the your customers are really responding well, to the partner, you know, to the partner ecosystem that you have, and you've built it up a lot in the last two years. So tell us,

Nelson Wang  1:21  
yeah, it's been a lot of fun. So we work with resellers, ISP integration partners, and then services partners. And one of our big core focus areas has been with the services partners. And this was really driven by the customer interviews that we did, and during that assessment process, when we found is a lot of our customers were telling us they wanted help around services for design, implementation, change management, ongoing support, training and so forth and so the customer centric approach really led us to focusing on services partners to ramp up, and it's been a lot of fun. We've gone from nine partners to 91 accredited airtable services partners. Today, they've done incredible enterprise engagements. CSAT with their customers of 4.82 that's incredible. And it's just been incredible watching many of them go from single person businesses to teams of 1228, and just really build these amazing companies from the ground up. It's been a lot of fun. That's

Chip Rodgers   2:14  
fantastic. And so it's really interesting that your partner ecosystem has grown sort of almost organically with with air table, as as as you've grown, right? And there were just, it started out as just people trying to help, help other people, you know, get get started, you know, build their tech, their solutions with air table. And then it just now it's as as air table has gone from sort of into classic plg, right? From individuals to now, enterprise sales, your partner ecosystem is growing with them, with you,

Nelson Wang  2:47  
right? Absolutely. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. And it's been really incredible to watch these partners with their deep passions around airtable as a platform, and seeing how it can help customers, and then bringing that to life across all segments of the business, from SMB to now the enterprise, and it's just been driven by the fact that they're incredibly passionate about how they can help the customer with this platform, with their table. So it's been incredible joy to do because the partners I work with, they just have this deep, rooted passion. They're fired up about it. They want to help out. And you know when they're actually doing the work. And I know this because I've done this with the partners, I can see like they find joy in building the solutions. And so for me personally, and that's been one of the most fun parts of this, is the incredible amount of passion from our partners in the community.

Chip Rodgers   3:35  
So how do you how did you do that? I mean, those are incredible numbers, going from nine to 90 in two years, right? So you brought on a ton of a lot of partners, but at the same time, you're also they're achieving 4.8 CSAT score. So you're doing it in a way that's maintaining the quality. That's not easy to do. So what are some things that you did?

Nelson Wang  3:58  
One really big thing that we did is a long customer assessment process to be really crystal clear on our ICP, the customer journey, the pain and challenges they're going through, so that we could identify who are the right partners to go solve for that pain and really tie it back to business impact and prioritize against that. That allows us to then understand what the ideal partner profile should look like, because if you really understand the customer, then you'll know what type of partner to recruit to go solve for that pain. And what we did is we had a specific list of partners that we wanted to onboard based on this profile, but also on the inbound basis. When partners apply, and we have over 1300 applications, we're able to look at the criteria and determine is this a really good fit based on the profile we, as an example, accept about 6.5% of applicants today for our partner program, and that's rooted in just really ensuring that it's a customer centric, driven decision, and not just a gut feeling on this might be a great partner, but more so related to knowing the customer problem and. Solving for it with the right type of partnering criteria around

Chip Rodgers   5:02  
that. Yeah, yeah. So those solutions? Are they? Are they typically, you know, sort of horizontal kinds of solutions. Are they industry specific, all the above, like, what? How are you identifying some of those, some of those solutions.

Nelson Wang  5:19  
Two of our biggest personas that leverage airtable are marketing operations, and marketing is a function, and then also on the product side and product operations. And so those are the two biggest but airtable is really unique in that it's a horizontal right across all functions, no code platform, driven by AI that can basically help in many different areas, and you can build the app that you're looking for in a no code fashion that has tremendous time to value. It gives you the flexibility to build what you want truly customized without necessarily having to go through, like, a three month, you know, it sprint process that is involving a lot of other cross functional team members. And so I think that's really where the magic is in terms of serving our customers in a way that delights them, get some time to value and also gives them the customization. They need to build the apps that they're looking for to drive the business

Chip Rodgers   6:06  
outcome. That's terrific. Well, Nelson, that's this event been fantastic. Thank you really for sharing, sharing some of your insights. I know you just got off stage, and that was well received, full packed house. So congrats on that. And yeah, thanks for thanks for stopping by and sharing a few minutes with us.

Nelson Wang  6:26  
Thank you for having me on. I love the content. I really love the spirit of what you're doing. I've seen quite a few of the interviews, and I just, I'm really appreciated. So thank you chip,

Chip Rodgers   6:35  
thank you Nelson, and thank you all for joining and we'll see you. See you next time. Thanks everybody. Bye.

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