It's PLG, it's Sales-led, no! It's Champion Led Growth!
Everything you need to know about champion led growth with Shani Taylor.
At some point in the last 2-3 years we in tech got totally high on our own supply regarding one particular growth motion: PLG. I’m not here to say anything bad about PLG — if you can achieve product led growth, that’s fantastic and you know it. BUT I am here to say that in the last couple of years I’ve seen a lot of startups hard-assume that they are “PLG companies” when they, in fact, are not.
How this usually goes: after spending a lot of money and time attempting to drive product-led growth someone pokes around the customer data and realizes, Aha! Our growth is in fact sales-led, or at least, someone from our company talks to the customers who buy our product! The whole team proceeds to do an about-face to the sales-led growth playbook…
Now, the tricky thing about B2D is that your growth model is usually a blended. The ability for developers to use your product without having a conversation is essential, but if you’re trying to sell a product of import any customer that isn’t a tiny startup usually wants to have a conversation. So! Where does that leave us?
It leaves us with more than we’ll cover in today’s newsletter! But I reached out to the amazing Shani Taylor because I was thinking about just this topic. Today we’re diving into Champion Led Growth, which I would map as a flavor of sales-led or even really customer success led growth, with one of tech’s leading experts on the subject.
Shani was one of the key team members who helped uncover Airtable’s champion-led growth model which accounted for a majority of the company’s early success. She was at Airtable for just under six years where she led customer success. Today Shani runs Customer Experience and Solutions at Figma and also advises a number of startups. She is incredibly articulate and knows the champion led growth motion cold. Please enjoy a primer on champion-led-growth covering the following:
How to define champion led growth
Metrics for identifying champions and measuring success overall in this model
How to scale this very hands-on growth model
Cross functional integration in a champion led growth model
Tips for running top tier customer success organizations
We’re spending time today covering “champion led growth” which is a term many readers will not have heard of - so to start, can you help us understand what champion lead growth is and how it works?
Champion led growth is a synergistic model where you support your champions and they, in turn, feed context, content, and guidance into their organization which drives adoption. The goal is for your champions to accelerate product adoption by creating a community of motivated, knowledgeable, and influential end users for you.
How did you uncover this growth model at Airtable? What were the indicators that led you there? What operating assumptions did the team have to drop in order to understand how growth was really working?
It fell in our lap early on! When you’re a smaller organization you do a lot of unscalable things - including spending a lot of time with customers going on site. Being present and getting really deeply ingrained in their environment is critical for early stage learning as a company.
It turned out, our customers loved having us on site with them. They would bring pockets of users to our lunch and learn sessions. For instance, we worked with one large, global retailer and our first lunch and learn had seven attendees, but over time there were over 150 people showing up, ready to share about what they had built, learn from each other, and hear about our roadmap. This natural affinity, or enthusiasm, to meet with our team became a major vehicle for us to disseminate product knowledge, collect feedback and help people within larger organizations connect with each other.
There were a couple of assumptions that we had wrong and had to let go of:
The idea that every end user is the same - this is simply not the case, especially with a horizontal product like Airtable. We had to eventually distinguish between builders and collaborators. Builders have an extra level of enthusiasm for the product and are ready to socialize the product and push more people to use it. The collaborator, on the other hand, consumed the product that was set up by other people. It became critical for us to distinguish who we were connecting with and where we should focus supportive efforts.
We also had to stop thinking that champions had to be very senior or in positions of significant authority. We worked with a large streaming service and had strong pickup with some folks in operations who didn’t manage a team - these people ended up being some of our best champions- they were excellent at corralling teammates to use the product. Champions don’t have to have VP or senior titles in order to be very influential within an organization.
How did you get people to start to identify with Airtable so deeply that it became part of their core job remit at work?
This started organically and then we tried to harness it. One of the most important things we did for our champions was to help them with visibility by surfacing the moments in their day to day where they could elevate themselves.
Again, champion led growth is synergistic. Everything that we did as a success team is mutually beneficial for the customer and for Airtable. For instance - when we would do onsites we focused on how we could elevate the champion: how can we make sure they have this platform to showcase what they’re doing in the product? What impact have they been able to drive (we’d help them articulate it if it wasn’t obvious already). Our customer success managers would actively think about how we could improve the visibility of our champion within their organization so that they would look really good and this would, in turn, help us drive more adoption throughout the company.
On top of these benefits, running this process would help us discover new use cases and better articulate the value our product was creating. In the end, everyone benefits and you end up with a much more efficient operation.
How did you eventually scale these efforts?
Our tactical solution to scale was giving champions something as simple as a template to socialize - we called it an internal case study. Our champions were eager to quantify their impact, so we’d help them frame up the amount of time saved using Airtable, etc, and they would then share that throughout their organization. It built an excellent case for why they should be using our solution.
One of the other surprising things we’d find is how incredibly silo’d teams at large organizations are. We could also support and magnify champions by identifying and even introducing them to other people at their organization who were also Airtable users. They’d then share their internal case studies and help spark more use cases and ideas for the other internal Airtable users.
Once you recognized that champion led growth was your core model, what changes did you make? Are there any changes you wish you had made earlier, or any adjustments that actually set you back?
I would have loved to formalize champion work earlier by partnering with our marketing and community teams. It would have been great to connect champions across companies to generate even more excitement and creativity around the product. There are some hesitations around confidentiality in doing this, but there is so much upside to connecting companies in similar verticals and showcasing best practices from across a broad set of organizations.
We also could have used that moment to give champions even more perks - rolling out software is hard, bringing your champions to events or into the roadmap would have been good. We never grew a large-scale user community while I was there.
What product analytics or metrics tied together your product + marketing + sales teams to a unified lens of growth through this model? What metrics did you live or die by?
We really focused on utilization; weekly active users and monthly active users were our top two metrics for a long time. We saw both of these as a proxy for value as they helped us understand how critical our solution was to day to day work.
Eventually in customer success we also created a product sophistication score. It was a way for us to understand the level of work end users were doing in Airtable. When we identified individuals with a high sophistication score and strong active usage we knew we had found a potential champion, and went out of our way to provide them with best practices and learning resources to continue to advance their use, helping us give back to them which in turn created an even more powerful end user.
How did you grow the CSM team?
Early on we did a lot of unscalable things as we found our product’s value and product market fit, and part of that, as I mentioned, was going very deep with customers because Airtable is the kind of solution, if rolled out to an entire large organization, could have 10,000 end users with a huge variety of use cases.
There’s no way to scale yourself as a CSM and work with all 10,000 of those end users - so that’s where “champion communities” become critical. We took a “train the trainer” model and used champions as our unlock to information dissemination within an organization. We’d meet with our champions and would encourage them to be the internal trainers instead of relying heavily on our customer success managers - this in itself was a huge scaling mechanism for CSM.
In a champion model what are various internal teams accountable for? For instance - with PLG product is heavily accountable for revenue growth, and in sales led growth it’s sales. With champions, where does accountability fall, and how do the supporting teams play in?
At Airtable customer success drove the champion model. I could see a world where champion work is harnessed by marketing and community teams, as it all revolves around nurturing a community to drive outcomes.
How does product feedback work between success, sales, engineering and marketing in this set up?
It’s integral. Champions are passionate about your product, but that doesn’t mean you're perfect! It means that they’ll talk to you, though. We would much rather have someone tell us what’s not working than not talk with us at all. Product feedback was one of the ways we formalized the champion network - we used feedback as the first touch point in identifying and engaging with a champion. Bringing the product team to meet with champions is also a huge value add - many times we’d go on site or virtually would bring the product team in to speak with primary champions and this created a huge amount of goodwill.
At Airtable in the earlier days the connection between sales, success and product was very tight, in part because the organization was still small. We’d hold monthly feedback roundups, share roadmap across departments, etc. As we grew this process was operationalized and remained effective. Feedback became formally documented through voice of the customer programs, which allowed us to identify themes and editorialize so that the product team had that critical customer input.
What are the internal culture expectations around product knowledge? Airtable is a product with a lot of super advanced features. What level of depth did you expect from your team?
In the earliest days customer success and sales had to have a deep level of product knowledge. Many of the CSMs we hired were customers, the very champions we had been working with! They know Airtable very deeply and were passionate users - but beyond knowing the product well they understood its value and that’s what we do in customer success - marry the value with the how-to’s.
This high level of expertise in customer success persisted as we grew: the interview process incorporated demo’ing Airtable, the onboarding process was focused on using the product, and on an ongoing basis I wanted to make sure that my team had a high product sophistication score. It’s hard to unlock value to the end user if we are limited in our knowledge of what the product can actually do. I’m passionate about making sure that the customer success team is expert in the product.
What do you do when marketing is not caught up? This is a classic in challenge developer marketing, where sometimes your marketers can’t actually use the product for themselves.
As a company grows you move from product experts to functional experts who know their domain and functions really well - when we got to that point we would bring product and marketing into conversations with customers so that they could understand the value of the product directly from users. This also ties back to the topic of product feedback - it was essential to have the voice of the customer program running out of success and sales, because we probably had the best view of what our customers were trying to achieve with our product.
You're building out all of the post sales functions at Figma. Is there anything that feels really different from the work you did at Airtable? I ask this particularly because designers and developers have some similarities, so I’m curious how you’re adjusting things based on this audience.
There’s a big difference in working on a truly horizontal solution (Airtable) versus a more vertical solution like Figma. Figma does cater to lots of different personas, but most of them fit somewhere in the product development process. To be useful to our customers, in post sale we have to have a really deep understanding of the product development process. At Airtable, because the product was so flexible, we could draw use cases out of our customers and ask them to walk us through what they were hoping to do. At Figma we need to come in having a sense of what they’re trying to achieve already.
Airtable is a pretty technical product, but in a hypothetical scenario if you were working on a product for developers are there any ways you’d adjust your approach to the champion model?
Well - Figma semi-recently launched a developer tool so I am thinking about this! The question I’m asking is can we find that passionate developer? Having an internal advocate is huge - this is the word of mouth adoption you need to drive in order to succeed. We know that developers are busy, so hearing about a product from a peer goes a very long way. It’s finding that first person who raises their hand and then supporting them with messaging and communicating the value.
Big thanks to Shani for her insights! You can follow Shani on Linkedin and if you find this newsletter useful please share with a friend!