The Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Sales and Marketing Industry

The Best Sales & Marketing Use-case Examples for Airtable

Using Airtable to Track Your Sales Pipeline

The first big use-case for using Airtable in Sales & Marketing is using the tool to track your Sales Pipelines. Airtable is a great tool for this because all data based in airtable is relational. With Airtable you are able to track and customize all your information in one place such as contacts, accounts, opportunities, and more, and then by linking tables and utilizing specific views, you can access needed information quickly and see your all your data in one place. To see a great example of this check out this template. By using the Kanban and List views you can easily analyze and assign tasks based on where your opportunities fall in your sales process. Another great simplified Sales Pipeline can be found here. Not only can you use Airtable to track and store your important sales information, but you can beautifully and visually see where you are in your sales pipeline and what next steps need to be taken in order to close your opportunity into a sale.

Creating a CRM in Airtable

Having a great CRM is key to any successful business in sales and marketing or alike. Airtable delivers on this need with its unlimited possibilities of scale and customization. Whether your team is large or small, Airtable allows you to create custom views of each individual or team with the work they need to accomplish all in one place. To see a great example of this check out this Sales CRM which provides real-time access to your accounts. Another great feature of airtable is shown here in this Sales CRM Dashboard which includes the ability to create custom metrics and visually see KPI reporting. Airtable can be your one-stop-shop for all your sales and marketing needs by keeping all your information in one place and manipulating it to fit your specific needs.

Content Marketing Campaign in Airtable

Marketing campaigns such as email, social media, Google AdWords, and Facebook, often require tons of planning and many tasks in order to be run successfully. Let Airtable do the heavy lifting for you. An Airtable base can help keep track of every email sent, see future, current, and past marketing campaigns, provide analytics to see how effective each campaign is running, and gives you a visually appealing view of your entire campaign. This base is a good example of an email marketing campaign using airtable to help track goals, results, and subscribers. To see an Airtable base focused more on Google AdWords and Facebook, check out this base. This template makes it easy to see which campaigns and platforms are running the most effectively so you can choose to spend more time there.

Another option is to utilize Airtable to create your marketing plan in order to launch your business, a new product, and reach company goals. Having a good marketing strategy is an important first step to creating or growing a business and airtable can play a crucial role all while effortlessly organizing your data. This template breaks down goals by quarters so that you can easily see initiatives and if they are being met.

Requesting and Tracking Customer Testimonials in Airtable

An often overlooked aspect of retaining business is showing off your customer testimonials. Airtable makes gathering feedback from your customers extremely easy. Using a simple form sent directly to the customer, you can collect testimonial information and store it all in your Airtable base. By going one step further, you can integrate Airtable friendly tools like Zapier and Slack to help with automated things like responses, re-tweets of the testimonial, or displaying it directly to your website. Take a look at this simple Testimonials Form base to see how easy it can be to track and store this information. The versatility of Airtable allows you to track as little or as much information as you’d like. For a more in-depth customer satisfaction form and analysis, see this template. 

Sales & Marketing Examples from Experts on the BuiltOnAir Podcast

Here at BuiltOnAir, we run a weekly podcast that focuses on Airtable users from around the world and what and how they are using the all-powerful tool. We’ve had the opportunity to speak with some incredible guests and see some truly inspiring ways to use Airtable. Below, we’ve gathered a few episodes that fit in well with the Sales and Marketing industry. Watch or listen to gain some insight on how other professionals are using Airtable in relatable ways.

• Andrew Poon, Tech Guru & Software Engineer – Andrew is a co-founder of a company called Clockworks which is focused on making complex approvals easy to set up and manage in Airtable. Andrew shows us a behind the scenes look into Clockworks and how simple tracking approvals, denials, and comments can be using his product and Airtable. 
• Sam Davyson, Airportal Creator – Sam has a passion for creating a customer-focused experience and created Airportal which allows you to design a customer portal complete with your company logo in your Airtable base. Sam walks us through the setup process and what it looks like from the end user’s point of view. 
• Nat Eliason, Founder of Growth Machine – Nat is the founder of Growth Machine whose goal is to help enable businesses to spread their message using a content story. Nat shows us his personal CRM he built to track contacts and their information such as work industry, location, and personal interests. By utilizing the filters in Airtable, Nat can find contacts for a specific job in just a few seconds.

Other uses for Airtable and Sales & Marketing:

Email Marketing – Any time you need to track mass amounts of data, we always recommend Airtable. Running your email marketing campaign in Airtable allows you to see every step of the process clearly. From planning and drafting to scheduling, to reviewing key metrics on your campaigns. By utilizing the different tables and views in an airtable base, you can be sure you won’t be missing any small detail. 

New Client Intake Form – At a sales conference or marketing event and tired of the old business card exchange? Bust out a tablet sign-in powered by Airtable. Using a simple form on the front end will help you capture all your possible new lead details that can be automatically added to your CRM. With an additional advanced option of enabling personalized follow-ups, Airtable will make sure your new connections don’t get lost. 

Sales Document Storage & Competitor Analysis – Another great use for sales and marketing and Airtable is using the tool to help keep track of sales documents and even competitor tracking. Having one place to see all your current pricing as well as what your competitor’s pricing is can really help set you up to make a deal. Adding a Gallery View to your base will make locating your current sales and marketing materials a breeze, and seeing your competitors current pricing can help give you the edge you need.

The Top Video & Written Tutorials for Using Airtable with Sales and Marketing

For this next section, we’ve rounded up some great video and written tutorials on Airtable all with the purpose of Sales and Marketing in mind. Some were created by the Airtable team and some were made by the community of Airtable users, all with the goal of helping others harness the power that Airtable offers. If you are looking for new ideas on taking your base to the next level, or looking for a specific how-to, these tutorials are a great place to start to enhance your project. Here is the list:

How to Build a Sales Process in Airtable | Gareth Pronovost

This video tutorial is from Gareth Provonost from GAP Consulting. Gareth has tons of Airtable video tutorials on his youtube channel all aimed at helping users learn tips and tricks when working with the tool. This video focuses on building a CRM and sales process in Airtable using your client information. 

At pre-step to this video can be found here to help you get your client data into airtable can be found here

• Explanation of the tables and how they are linked
• Form view overview
• How to build views and utilize filters based on your sales pipeline process
• A visual walkthrough of the entire sales process and how it flows in Airtable

Airtable Expert Creates Personal CRM | Gareth Pronovost

Another great video from Gareth Provonost, this time focuses on the basics and walks you through building a CRM for personal use in Airtable. This video is perfect for beginners because it starts from the very beginning by showing how to create your first base all the way to setting up a CRM. 

• How to create, name, and choose an icon for a new base
• Explanation of Airtable terms (Table, Fields, Primary Field, Etc.) 
• Formula How-To
• How to strategically think about setting up your base

Using Airtable or Sales Pipelines Webinar | Airtable

Made by the Airtable team themselves, this video provides a great demo on how a sales team can use Airtable to track their activity in their sales pipeline. 

• Overview of the demo base and what each table’s purpose is
• A walkthrough on how a sales team member would use this base for daily tasks
• How linking fields works between two tables
• How to use the summary bar and create new views

Track your Pipeline with a Dashboard in Airtable | Gareth Provonost

This last video tutorial is again from Gareth Pronovost. In this video, Gareth shows the two 2 most common types of blocks used to create a dashboard to get KPIs and other needed information. 

• Explains the tables in the base (Contacts, Opportunities, Payments)
• Summary Block Review and Setup
• Chart Block Review and Setup

How to build an efficient marketing asset workflow | For the Record

This is a written tutorial on how to build a marketing asset workflow. This article provides great reasons as to why and how Airtable can help. The breakdown of this guide is below. 

• Creating a uses cases, products, and marketing assets tables
•  Linking between tables 
• Using views and filters to track use cases status
• Adding collaborators

Guide to Airtable | Airtable

If you’re brand new to Airtable itself, this is the place to start. This getting started guide (published by the Airtable company) walks you through an overview of functionality, then the starting points for creating a database, setting up field types, adding records, linking between tables, using Airtable as a collaboration tool, filtering and sorting, and finally how to publish views of your database.

There is also an advanced tips and tricks section with links to keyboard shortcuts, a list of integrations, and the Airtable API. To go beyond the basics in the Guide to Airtable, use the tools and resources listed here in the Ultimate Guide to Airtable.

The Airtable power user’s guide | Airtable

This guide is exactly what it sounds like; a guide published by the Airtable team targeted at power-users. Once you’ve gone through the introductory guide and as you’re putting together your sales and marketing database schema, chances are you’ll want to dip into this guide occasionally to get additional insights on all the capability available to you during the process.

Finding the Right Service Providers to Help Your Sales and Marketing Work with Airtable Thrive

If you’ve found yourself in this section of the guide, you’ve either created your workflows and systems in Airtable and are looking to elevate or you are looking for someone to help put in place these systems from scratch. No matter where you are in your process, finding an outside service provider can be extremely helpful when creating and designing your systems or to help push projects through to completion. In this section, we’ve put together some relevant service providers with the Sales and Marketing industry in mind. At BuiltOnAir, not only do we keep an eye out for great tools that work well with Airtable, but we also love sourcing out great service providers and consultants that have proven to be experts at what they do. You can find all our favorites in our resources section here.

Below you can find a few excellent options of service providers that have been working in automation, are dedicated Airtable experts and focused on enhancing the workflows that you’ve already created. Whatever your project needs may be, the options below are great resources to help get you to your end goals.  

Based in central Utah (“Silicon Slopes” as many people refer to it), Openside is the premium provider of products and services in the Airtable space, and has an impressive history of success stories. Starting off as a scrappy team of developers and programmers doing one-off projects for smaller businesses, they quickly developed a knack for building custom integration tools and implementing them for their clients. 

With time they garnered attention for the quality of their tools as they developed them, and began offering both tools and services to the Airtable userbase, from Yoga studios to Fortune 500 companies. With their main focus today being on helping businesses (including those in sales and marketing) to make their workflows shine, Openside sets a standard for quality as the first fully dedicated service provider for Airtable.

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

Here are some relevant links to the things Openside does

• A list of products built/provided by Openside
• Services offered by Openside
• A case study on a VA loan company – the story of a Hawaii-based company using Openside’s services

Gareth Pronovost is the founder of GAP Consulting and in our minds, a true Airtable expert. When Gareth discovered Airtable, he realized that it was a game-changing solution for many of the hours wasted on trivial administrative tasks. GAP Consulting focuses on helping businesses and Airtable users hop on the automation revolution train. GAP Consultant focuses on Airtable and Zapier to help give you back the time you could be spending more focused on what you do best. From project planning and custom development to ongoing support, GAP Consulting will help get you organized and your workflows running smartly and smoothly.  

• A BuiltOnAir podcast episode Gareth was a guest on our podcast’s first season. He shares his story finding Airtable and how GAP came to be
• Youtube training channel  – New videos posted weekly full of tips and tricks on Airtable
• GAP Consulting’s Airtable-focused blog

Positive Workspace

Positive Workspace is run by Diane Elkins based out of Davison, NC. Diane helps businesses improve their systems and organize information that can become overwhelming if not managed properly. Their services include design and initial setup to a new Airtable base, helping maximize automation to better analyze your data, and training services for your team to make sure you all become Airtable experts on the systems you have in place. 

• See some sample work use cases and why Positive Workspace loves Airtable

If you’re looking for help from a freelancer or considering more options for improving your sales and marketing, consider these choices:

Where to go from here

You’ve reached the end of this Ultimate Guide to Airtable in the Sales and Marketing industry. Our hope is that you were able to find some useful information to assist and further improve your Airtable workflows. The BuiltOnAir team worked hard to create a great resource full of resources geared toward helping you in your Sales and Marketing efforts. We hope that you return to this guide as often as you need (and even bookmark it) and that it proves to be an excellent resource itself for finding relevant information on all things Airtable. Remember, we are always on the look for new and great Airtable resources, tools, and service providers and will do our best to update this guide as Airtable and the industry grow.

To make sure our guide and efforts to keep users like you in the know, please let us know if you find something that is no longer relevant or applicable anymore. Also, we’d love to connect with you! We pride ourselves in being the go-to place for all Airtable questions. The best way to stay connected to what’s happening in and around Airtable is to become a BuiltOnAir Insider by joining our newsletter updates and Slack Channel. We share tons of great content pertaining to new additions to our resource library, relevant community threads, and the latest happenings. Don’t forget, we also have a Podcast where we feature fellow Airtables users around the world. You can subscribe to our BuiltOnAir Podcase here. Our goal as a team is to provide and equip you with every possible tool you could need to make the most out of Sales and Marketing and Airtable. 

To your success!

P.S. Want to see guides for other industries (including real estate, supply chain, and web professionals)? Click here to go directly to the list!