Growth Conversations - Saptarshi Nath, Airboxr

Welcome to our new series on growth leaders from around the world of B2B Sales. We will be interviewing leaders from our PLG Index, both Public and Private companies on how they are driving growth in their organizations with a focus specifically on how their GTM model is changing as they use Variance and Customer Data in their sales motion. 

Why are we doing these interviews? Because we believe the companies in our PLG Index represent the future for all B2B companies and the future of selling. The numbers also speak to how the public market also sees this type of GTM as the future: 

1. PLG companies have 23% more ARR
2. PLG companies are growing ARR Y/Y 30% faster
3. PLG companies have 8% higher Net Dollar Retention
4. PLG companies have 22% higher ARR/Headcount
5. PLG companies are 44% off their 52 week high, Non-PLG companies are 58% off their 52 week high

Todays interview is with Saptarshi Nath, Co-Founder and CEO at Airboxr. Airboxr is ranked 402 on the PLG Index and is growing rapidly. You can check out their profile here. 

What is Airboxr?

Airboxr is the easiest way for business analysts to query data across multiple sources, through an intuitive sidebar within their spreadsheets.

Founded: 2020

Airboxr Pricing

Airboxr Signup

Questions for Saptarshi Nath: 

How does Customer Data and PLG drive your revenue motion?

We are in the early stages of getting customer feedback to build a product that users love (and eventually pay for). But we know customers don't always like to get on Zoom calls to discuss your product. So customer data and PLG insights are critical to understanding what customers actually do with our product. Identifying key milestones that show engagement and then focusing our bandwidth on those engaged users has served us well. 

What are your favorite tools in your revenue tech stack (you don’t have to name them all, just the ones that are indispensable!)?

We currently use a combination of Variance and Hubspot to manage our customer identification and communication. We also use Slack Connect with high-value users to be more embedded into their workflow. We use Intercom and Activecampaign to run automations and onboarding with our users. 

What are your biggest challenges to using customer data in your sales motion? 

There is always the risk that we are focusing on the wrong parts of the data. We identify milestone actions that users do on our website to prioritize them. However, we don't know if we're selecting the right milestones. E.g., we think that anyone who imports data thrice might have found the tool useful. But we don't have a way to confirm this hypothesis yet—maybe it is two imports or five! A research-backed way to suggest to users what those milestones should be will be incredibly useful.

Would you say moving to use more product data in the sales motion is mostly a people, process or tools challenge?  

It is mostly a people and tools challenge. It's better to indoctrinate product-led thinking in the team early—I'm not very confident that trying to pivot a sales-led team into a product-led team is going to turn out well. Tools have kept up with the transition, but people haven't always.

What is your best Customer Data/PLG selling story?

A few months back, we launched a feature targeted at sales users to help them find prospects at scale. But turns out recruiters were using this feature to find candidates instead. We simply changed the positioning of the feature to speak directly to recruiters. This helped us get more recruiting users without any change in the feature itself.

Thank you Saptarshi!