Today’s interview is with Liat Bycel, the VP of Sales at Airtable, the no code collaboration platform, and the person responsible for building the customer engagement organization which comprises team members from sales, customers success, support, support ops, sales ops and strategy. Liat joins me to today to talk about the ‘messy middle’ syndrome, being well-prepared when the pandemic hit, how she built their customer engagement organization, adopting a new hybrid work pattern and why we need to consider onboarding for everyone again.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Ineffective communication is a silent killer of customer service performance – Interview with Dorian Stone of Grammarly Business — and is number 396 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Liat:

• Airtable enables anyone to build their own powerful custom applications that fit their needs without needing to know how to code.
• It serves as a powerful single source of truth that empowers teams to work on the same structured set of data making team collaboration easier.
• Liat scaled the team from a handful of people 2.5 years ago to about 80 folks across the sales organization today.
• They were pretty well equipped when the pandemic hit as they were leveraging there own platform.
• As Liat describes it, they were drinking their own champagne 🙂
• A platform like Airtable can help eliminate many of the ‘messy middle’ scenarios that organizations encounter and that we have highlighted on the podcast before.
• They have hired over 130 new people in the customer engagement organization since the pandemic started.
• Liat created the customer engagement organization within Airtable to break down silos and align the sales, service and marketing teams, their objectives and incentives to create a seamless customer experience across the entire customer journey.
• Everyone reports up into the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and that ensures there is alignment across teams and the broader organization around priorities.
• We need to make sure that everyone has access to the data that they need to do their jobs well.
• With a hybrid approach to work making sense for many organizations going forward there will be an increased emphasis on the tools that the organizations are using.
• As they approach a new hybrid way of working, organizations will also have to think through whether or not they will need to onboard all of their staff and not just new hires to a new way of working that reflects how ways of working and culture have changed.
• SoulCycle, historically a business entirely based on in-person interactions, had to completely pivot when the pandemic hit to become a content and virtual class company overnight. They used Airtable to help them collaborate, launch a new platform, work in lockstep, understand what each teammate was working on and really provide visibility to all collaborators without being together in person.
• GitHub uses Airtable to help manage GitHub Stars, one of the largest developer relations and awards programs in the world.They use it to manage the nomination process, manage and review over 2000 nominations each year, send out invitations to exclusive events, tracking swag shipments etc .
• Customer expectations will continue to rise. Customers will continue to want fast answers and their specific issues addressed but in real-time. That is going to mean the need for faster response times, more real time conversations and increased personalization to solve their specific needs.
• Liat’s best advice to experience leaders:
  • Embrace change and use tools that help you manage that change.
  • Adopt tools that evolve with your organization.
  • Build and develop your adaptability and agility.
  • Create a culture around transparency and visibility across the whole organization.
  • Automate reporting because business leaders and other stakeholders need real time insights and you will save so much time and allow your teams to work on really high impact customer facing work.
• Punk word(s): Bold, courageous, rejecting old ways.
• Punk brand: Pair of Thieves

About Liat

Liat Bycel is the VP of Sales at Airtable, the no code collaboration platform democratizing software creation for more than 250,000 organizations, including over half of the Fortune 1000. She is also the person responsible for building the customer engagement organization which comprises team members from sales, customers success, support, support ops, sales ops and strategy.

Before Airtable, Liat served as the Chief Revenue Officer at Assist, was the first manager hired for the sales organization at Twitter, and spent 7 years in the education industry. Liat studied psychology at the University of California, Davis.

Check out Airtable, say Hi to Airtable and Liat on Twitter @airtable and @LiatBycel and feel free to connect with Liat on LinkedIn here.

Image by Couleur from Pixabay