Dock

?? Live training isn’t the answer to customer onboarding On this week's Grow & Tell, Rachel Provan shared with Alex Kracov why live training often fails customers: - Customers forget 90% of live training within 24 hours - Customers aren’t comfortable admitting what they’ve forgotten - It’s costly and hard to scale So what works better? Rachel suggests a “drip” approach — share training in small, accessible pieces over time, using different formats to match different learning styles: - Step-by-step guides with screenshots - Short Loom videos with transcriptions turned into SOPs (Plus, we love the idea of embedding it all in a Dock onboarding workspace. ??) The key? Make it bite-sized, and make it a quick win—frequent wins keep customers engaged, are more habit-forming, and lead to better adoption. - Catch the full episode of Grow & Tell on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for a fantastic convo, Rachel!

Customer churn doesn’t happen at renewal time. Customers decide to churn as soon as they have a negative experience with your product. I asked Rachel Provan how CS can be more proactive about renewals. Rachel shared a smart approach: treat the renewal conversation like an employee performance review — there shouldn’t be any surprises. Rachel recommends sending a verified outcomes survey around the 6-month mark. Ask a simple question: “You said you wanted to achieve X with our product. Have you achieved that? Yes or no? If no, you have 6 months to course-correct and deliver value before renewal time. If yes, awesome. You can focus more on optimization and expansion. - Rachel and I had an awesome conversation about customer success leadership. We covered things like: - When a founder should make their first CS hire - How CS can be a good partner to Sales and Product teams - Why live onboarding sessions aren’t always best Check out Grow & Tell where you get your podcasts.

Most of the conversation around buyer signals is focused on the top-of-funnel. It's all about prospecting, outbound, and building pipeline. But what about the rest of the sales process? That's where deal rooms like Dock give revenue teams unprecedented visibility into what's actually happening in the sales process. More companies need to think about how they capture intent data in the mid and bottom part of the funnel.

We’re in the Buyer 3.0 era, says Wynne Brown, so revenue teams need to be more customer-centric. Wynne has led Sales and CS teams at Monster, GitHub, Seal Software/Docusign, Fable, RocketReach, and more. On this week’s episode of Grow & Tell, Wynne argued to Alex Kracov that B2B SaaS buying/selling has gone through three eras: 1?? Buyer 1.0: SaaS was a new concept. Nobody knew how to buy it. Sellers had all the info and all the power. 2?? Buyer 2.0: The rise of word-of-mouth through G2 and social platforms meant buyers could do their own research and come to sellers 80% informed. 3?? Buyer 3.0: With PLG models, an overabundance of info online, and lots of product competitors, buyers come to sellers fully informed, already having narrowed down their choices. So how do sellers win in this new era? Wynne says it comes down to being customer-centric: - Enable buyers with personalized content that shows you understand their needs - Give value with every interaction (no spray-and-pray outbound or pitch-slapping) - Make it easy for buyers to try before they buy - Use tools like Dock to capture the value the customer is purchasing (thanks for the shout out!) – Wynne’s episode was full of fixer stories where she'd turned around revenue churn challenges with customer-centric models. Check out Grow & Tell wherever you listen to podcasts.

Loved this story from Wynne Brown: Those “just checking in” touchpoints from CSMs do more harm than good. When Wynne was Director of Customer Success at GitHub, she helped grow renewal/expansion revenue by 30% - in part by replacing those customer check-ins. Wynne said “just touching base” erodes trust because it wastes the customer’s time and doesn’t provide any additional value. GitHub replaced those check-ins with more content-driven touchpoints, like holding training sessions on topics that were hot with developers (Wynne calls this a “pull model”). For example, they offered live training sessions on disaster recovery, where they could tie in the product and leverage GitHub’s status as an industry thought leader to reinforce their value to customers. This was a much better use of 30 minutes for their customers and immediately led to more renewals and expansion. - Wynne had lots of great “revenue fixer” stories on this week’s episode of Grow and Tell from her time leading Sales and CS at a bunch of scaling companies. Definitely check it out wherever you listen to podcasts. (And thanks for being an awesome guest, Wynne.)

Dock’s revenue has grown 3x year-over-year. Here’s how we did it: 1) Expanded beyond sales to support the full customer journey Dock started as a sales tool, but we really started to gain traction as a platform to manage the full customer lifecycle. Today, customers use Dock from sales to onboarding to renewal. The ability to manage the full customer journey all in one place has been a game changer. 2) Invested into features that bigger companies want Dock’s initial average contract size was too small and we’ve made a deliberate effort to move up-market by focusing on building features that bigger companies care about. This includes a wide range of features like custom fields, automation, CRM bi-directional sync, roles & permissions, and custom dashboards. Dock is now highly customizable to fit an enterprise’s process. 3) Hired the right team Dock has added a number of folks on the GTM team who have helped Dock improve how to sell into bigger companies (?? Joey) and how we make customers successful (?? Madison). Big companies expect a certain level of service that we’re now able to provide. 4) Kept iterating on the small things We’re maniacally customer focused. I personally read every single support ticket and every piece of customer feedback in order to get a sense of what we need to improve. There are so many little things we’ve done to improve Dock and tons more improvements on the roadmap. We want to build a product that we’re proud of. 5) Increased pricing and gate kept premium features To increase our contract size, we’ve added a platform fee to our team-level packages. The platform fee allows Dock to capture the full value of our service even in circumstances where there’s a low user count. We’ve also built a system to hide premium features (CRM integration, custom domain, etc) in order to push customers to upgrade.? 6) Added a proper content management system At the high end of the market, Dock competes with legacy sales enablement systems like Highspot and Seismic. Over the past year, we’ve built the core part of what these systems offer when it comes to CMS. 7) Refined how we approach product-led growth Our GTM motion is still heavily product-led, users can just sign up and start using Dock right from our website. But we make our real money by turning this product sign up into a traditional sales-led motion. 8) Started to invest in our brand We’re working to get the word out about Dock by investing in LinkedIn, community sponsorships and Grow & Tell podcast. We’re trying to build a brand that’s valuable to all GTM operators. But more importantly, we try to do what’s right in every customer interaction, as we believe these small moments are where a brand is truly built. -- I had a bunch more lessons, but i hit my LinkedIn limit. Will keep sharing learnings in future posts. Follow me to follow along the Dock journey :)

?? Hiring Alert ?? Dock is expanding, and we’re looking to add an Account Executive to our growing sales team as we enter the next exciting phase of hypergrowth! ?? This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-paced startup and shape the future of GTM teams. From creating powerful deal rooms to empowering sales enablement and marketing with better content delivery, and helping CS teams provide world-class onboarding and customer experiences, you’ll play a critical role in our growth. You'll work closely with our stellar sales team and me, our Head of Sales, to bring in new business and drive Dock forward :) What you’ll do: ?? Convert free users into loyal, paying customers ?? Prospect into top accounts, set meetings, and sell the value of Dock ?? Help revenue teams close more deals and streamline onboarding ?? Leverage your skills to fuel our next stage of growth If you're passionate about sales, thrive in a startup, and want to make an impact, we'd love to hear from you! Apply here ?? #hiring #sales #accountexecutive #hypergrowth #startup

What’s the secret to selling to the mid-market? Chris Michelmore, mid-market sales leader at Zoom, told Alex Kracov it’s about understanding where the company is in their company lifecycle. Earlier-stage companies, for example, don’t want to add any complexity. They don’t have IT teams. They outsource as much as possible. They don’t have the capacity to add more tools. Selling to those companies is less about proving your product is/isn’t a fit, and more about showing how you’ll make their lives easier. How will you make implementation easier? How you will support their product admins? Proving that you won’t test their bandwidth is the biggest hurdle to the sale. - ?? For more sales lessons from Chris’s 9-year rise from SDR to Head of Mid-Market Acquisition at Zoom, check out the latest episode of Grow & Tell wherever you listen to podcasts.

Managing sales directors is a completely different beast than managing reps. Managing managers was a big jump for me when I became VP of Marketing at Lattice. You’re so many levels above the frontline people where the actual challenges are. On Grow & Tell, I asked Chris Michelmore, who’s moved all the way up the sales leadership ladder at Zoom, what he’s learned from leading other sales leaders. He had great advice: 1. Don’t get pulled too far from the day-to-day. Leading other leaders, you’re not pulled into as many sales calls anymore, but you have to find a way to keep your ear to the ground. Make it obvious to your team that you’re never too busy to talk or get looped into a deal. 2. Be more forward-looking. You can impact change at a greater scale, but coaching through managers won’t have the same overnight impact as coaching reps directly. Plan 6-12 months in advance for change to get adopted. 3. Manage to the numbers, but don’t lead through them. The numbers have to be your best friend. You have to foresee risk and button down your forecasting. But those numbers are for *you* — you can’t lead your team with numbers. Instead, leaders have to say, “If we do this, this is what will happen.” - Chris and I had an awesome conversation about his rise from SDR all the way to Head of Mid-Market Sales at Zoom, so check it out Grow & Tell on your podcast feeds.

What's the secret to selling through a champion? Matt Green and Alex Kracov got into it on Grow & Tell ?? Matt, who co-founded Sales Assembly's sales skills training program, says reps need to master two key skills: 1. Value articulation Specifically, how to articulate value for two different audiences: your champion and your champion's boss. 2. Business writing Every CFO only wants to read 1-2 pages max when making a business decision. It's a seller's job to write a compelling, concise business case with their champion. And here's a bonus tip #3 from our Head of Sales, Joey Wright: 3. Master the calls between the calls with your champion Between your standard major intro and demo calls, sync up with your champion on short little prep calls to ask the difficult questions and align on what the buying team really cares about. That's where deals are won or lost ??