Episode Description

On this episode of The Marketer’s Journey, I interview Archana Agrawal, CMO at Airtable, a San Francisco-based cloud service. With a background in data science and analytics, Archana applies her experience to her new role to leverage data and gain a deeper understanding of the marketing team’s needs. During the episode, we discuss tips for how marketing teams can stay nimble, agile and organized for success.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Play to your strengths. Archana mentioned that one lesson she took away from the transition from her role at IBM to the Ladders was to recognize where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and double down on your strong points to leverage them as much as possible. Ultimately, this will help you build resilience so you can overcome your weaknesses.
• Focus on operational excellence. Bringing together people, processes, systems and tactics into one place has been a gamechanger for Archana and her team, especially during big launches. She mentioned that with such a high volume of campaigns, content and requests happening at once, a strong focus on operational efficiency is the key to developing the kind of agility marketers need today.
• Building a positive team culture is a must. Archana shared that the marketing team at Airtable often engages in interactive, team-building activities like contributing to a crowdsourced newsletter or even a virtual Airbnb tour through the streets of Paris. Creating a strong team culture increases collaboration and communication, which in turn, makes the chaos a little more manageable.