The Origin Story
After becoming well acquainted with Airtable, it started to make its way into my life. House hunting? Sure! Make a base. Searching for a new job? I made a base for it! So when I was hired by a fast-growing lead generation start-up it was a no brainer for solving challenges. I kept track of my tasks, completed and new, and ran everything through Airtable.
Our bread and butter was business-to-business cold calling. We'd be hired by clients and then we'd learn everything we could about them - their company, the industry, their competitors and the persona of their target title. In order to successfully cold call and generate leads, the prospect list has to be quality. We could be experts in what our clients did but it didn't mean much if we didn't have phone numbers or the names were incorrect.
We didn't have a way of tracking it, though. In fact, unless we were working in a client's CRM, we were entirely working out of Google sheets. For a smaller start-up that might have worked fine, but we were growing. We needed a solution.
How do we securely store data while maintaining control of it through data validation while also making it easy for reps to call through their lists? For our purposes, CRMs like SalesForce were too slow and cumbersome. Our reps needed to make a minimum of 31 dials during a call session. That's why we were using Google sheets - it was a solution that allowed us to respond fast and fly through lists, but we were quickly outgrowing it. That's where Airtable comes into play once again.
The initial vision was just to host lists, but it became a lot bigger (and cooler) than I had anticipated.
How It’s Made
I knew the basic wants and needs of my company and set out to meet them.
We needed to be able to dial quickly,
We needed to be able to keep track of data added and changed,
We needed to streamline our pipeline populating process, and
We needed a way to quickly analyze our lists.
For the first few test runs I cloned the set-up that we had in Google sheets, making small edits to improve the experience and to increase our efficiency. Since we needed to be able to dial quickly, Airtable was great - it was similar enough to Google sheets that our reps wouldn't need much training and the learning curve would be shallow.
One of the big issues we were facing as we considered transition was the state of our old lists. Call programs had been shifted from rep to rep and each one had their own way of taking notes and organizing their list in Google sheets.
If we were going to create a reporting system or do quick list analyses, the data needed to be consistent. We needed to standardize. We needed to make sure each list had fields for call results, prospect name, phone number, company name - and that the data within those fields had the same formatting (for the most part).
I set our call results fields to be drop-downs with pre-populated choices to keep everything standard. They were the same call results, in the same order, with the same color coding, in every single list.
We needed a way to populate data to our pipelines instead of having the reps enter their call result data into one spreadsheet and then navigating to another (if they remembered) to fill in the corresponding information. I set the Airtable base up to filter certain records out of the active call list based on specific call results, and to filter into new views set up to be our pipeline. That way the only information we had to fill out was new data - what time and date was the appointment we had set, or when we sent information to a prospect and when were we supposed to follow up.
And from there?
From there it continued to evolve. As Airtable added features we added new functionality. We set up reporting blocks, we experimented with coloring records and different formulas, and eventually we transitiond everything to Airtable. Marketing materials, onboarding documents, call recordings, a workflow base for the operations team - I modified the client bases to fit all the material and recordings we were migrating over and I created new bases to fit the needs of our operations team. As of March 2019, nearly everything runs through Airtable. In under a year I had managed to completely overhaul the entire way our company ran its operations. The company's motto is to make a positive impact and I am proud to have made mine.
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