The Business Impact of Dock

Alex Kracov
Published
February 6, 2023
Updated
September 19, 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTs
TABLE OF CONTENT

How does Dock positively impact your revenue? In this article, we'll break down Dock's business impact, team by team.

Dock is a revenue enablement platform that helps Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing work together to drive revenue. 

Dock also makes it easier to collaborate with your buyers and customers throughout the customer lifecycle. You can use it as a sales deal room, an onboarding platform, and an ongoing client portal.

A look at the big picture of Dock

Dock also helps revenue teams collaborate internally thanks to backend tools like content management, security profiles, and deal desk tools.

We’ve intentionally split Dock into several products and pricing options so that companies can choose their entry point into Dock. You can start with the entire Dock platform or focus on a specific use case like customer onboarding or digital sales rooms

This means there are many ways that Dock can impact your business’s bottom line. Here's how we think about impact, team by team.

Sales Impact

By using Dock as a digital sales room, sales teams can simplify the buying experience—leading to increased close rates, shorter sales cycles, and more accurate sales forecasting.

Increase close rates & shorten sales cycles

By giving buyers everything they need to make a purchasing decision in one place, Dock improves close rates and shortens sales cycles.

Nectar’s Director of Sales reported a 31% increase in win rate since using Dock for sales follow-up. 

Here’s why:

Gartner research says the median B2B buying group involves six to 10 decision-makers. The key to winning deals is giving buyer champions everything they need to influence decision-makers at the company.

Dock supports buyers’ internal conversations by showcasing your product’s value to the buying committee. Everything from product demos to pricing information to mutual action plans is available in one place.

“We've actually had customers that are doing a business case to their CFO, pull up the Dock and just scroll through it,” said Champify Co-Founder Stephen Ruff.

Another challenge for sellers: Gartner analysis shows that buyers only spend 17% of the buying process talking to Sales. And that's across all competitors, not just your sales team. 

Sales teams have a minimal window of opportunity to impact a deal. Using resources like digital sales rooms (DSRs), you can create a buyer experience that informs the buyer while making your company look good.

The shift to DSRs is an industry-wide phenomenon—Gartner predicts that by 2026, 30% of all sales deals will involve a digital sales room.

Dock has taken the DSR concept further than other vendors by focusing more on enabling collaboration between buyers and sellers. 

For example, with Dock’s Security Profiles, you can help the buyer streamline the security review process and shorten the time needed for security reviews. 

Take Dock’s Order Forms as another example. They make it easier to close a deal by allowing you to create a price quote and sign an order form directly from the digital sales room.

Dock's signable Order Forms

Improve sales forecasting

Dock’s mutual action plans and workspace analytics provide valuable inputs into Sales leadership’s forecast model. 

You get a more refined forecast beyond opportunity stages by tracking how buyers and sellers progress through a mutual action plan.

And while the sales rep can check tasks off in Dock's action plans, champions are also empowered to update their own next steps, further increasing the accuracy of your forecasts. 

Dock also provides detailed analytics around buyer engagement, from engaging with content to viewing security documentation, to sharing an order form. 

You can pass all these mutual action plan signals to Salesforce or Hubspot to inform your sales forecast and create a more sophisticated model around predictable revenue. 

“If they're looking at Dock a lot, it's a huge sign they're going to buy. If I had a prospect go over 12 views on my Dock, they had like a 97% chance of closing. It was ridiculous.” said Nectar’s Director of Sales, Andrew Hollis.

Buyer engagement notifications can also help resurface deals you may have thought were lost.

“We were in a conversation a couple months ago, and we saw a few more people go back and look at the Dock,” said Stephen Ruff. “And it was people we hadn't spoken with, so that means it must have resurfaced in conversations on their side. “Were like, ‘Hey, this is a good time to reengage.’”

Customer Onboarding & Success Impact

Customer success (CS) teams use Dock to onboard new customers and manage existing client relationships. This speeds up time to value, reduces churn, and drives more renewals.

Reduce time to value

Time to value (TTV) is how long it takes customers to see the value of your product or service. The shorter the TTV, the quicker the customer feels like they got a return on investment, ultimately increasing the customer’s happiness and reducing the likelihood of churn. 

Customers who experience a long TTV period or never get to the product’s value will feel frustrated and look elsewhere when it comes time to renew. 

Dock reduces TTV by giving companies the tools to create onboarding experiences that feel high touch but in reality, take fewer resources from your CS team.

With Dock, CS teams can easily organize action items, key resources, and training videos in one place for customers (here’s an example). Instead of being lost after purchase, new customers know what they need to do to get value from your product.

Sample customer onboarding workspace

CS teams can also get analytics around a customer’s engagement with the onboarding process. For example, you can see how far along customers are in the implementation plan and whether they have taken key steps toward a successful implementation. 

If the customer looks lost, CS teams can nudge them back toward the onboarding plan to get them back on track.

Reduce churn & streamline renewals

Dock also helps CS teams improve relationships with customers post-onboarding. 

CS teams can use Dock to manage business reviews and show the customer’s progress against key success metrics

CS teams can also recommend areas for further adoption, align around key next steps, and get feedback on specific deliverables. Each of these moments is important for CS teams to show the continued value of the product to make the next renewal a slam dunk. 

When it comes time for renewals, CS teams can show all the value they have been able to create over the contract period to build the case for their point of contact. Additionally, the CS team can create renewal order forms within Dock to streamline the signature and procurement process.

Marketing Impact

Marketing teams use Dock to manage, distribute, and track the content that Sales and CS teams need to drive revenue.

Get insight into content utilization & its impact

Marketing normally doesn’t really know how sales is using their content (if at all).

Dock makes it easier for marketing teams to put customer-facing content in the hands of their sales and success teams. Content can be uploaded to an internal company library or shared via workspace templates. 

Not only does this get other teams to use and distribute content at the right moment, but it also provides engagement data on what’s being used by your cross-functional teams. 

For example, you can see how often Sales has shared a specific asset.

Dock also provides analytics on how content is performing with buyers or customers. You can access engagement analytics such as:

  • views on an asset
  • time spent per PDF page
  • drop off per page

This data helps marketing teams refine their product marketing and content strategy to better serve internal teams and customers.

Dock's Content Management analytics

Revenue Team Impact

Dock helps break down silos between your Sales, Success, Marketing, and RevOps teams to compound their impact and create more revenue as a team.

Increase sales & customer success efficiency

Dock is built around templates. Admins can easily create customer-facing templates for critical processes, different segments, industry personas, and more. 

Gone are the days of searching through emails and Google Drive—trying to figure out what to share after a customer call. Sales and CS reps only have to activate a template in a few clicks to share the right content with buyers and customers. 

For example, many of Dock’s customers can create workspace templates for “enterprise customers” and “SMB customers” (or start from one of our Dock-made templates).

Alternatively, you can create templates around key moments like “customer onboarding” or “demo follow-up.”

You can create templates for an entire workspace or as sections for key moments in a customer's lifecycle. With section templates, companies can streamline how client-facing teams respond to key questions around product offerings, pricing, best practices, and more. 

Here's an example Dock workspace template

“What's really nice about templatizing these things is as you come across new competitive information, or you have a new customer story you want to share, or you have an updated demo video that includes a new feature, if you add that to the template, it then gets synced to every single template resource that your customers have access to,” said Stephen Ruff.

Dock also makes it easy to onboard new hires. Because recently hired sales and CS reps can use pre-built templates for demo follow-up or customer onboarding, they can follow the right process from day one instead of needing months of ramp time. 

“ Now that we’re adding new users, Dock is elevating the quality and shortening the time for our new reps to give A-tier follow-up,” said Andrew Hollis. “The first follow-up that a new rep gives is of the same tier as someone that's been here for two years using Dock every single day because they're copying that template.”

Improve cross-team collaboration

Dock also improves how different teams work together to drive revenue. 

The Sales-to-Success handoff is a challenge at most companies. Sales teams over-promise features, notes are messy or non-existent, and it can be hard to understand where potential customers left off with their adoption of the product. 

With Dock workspaces, companies can easily transition the customer’s experience from Sales to Success. Everything shared and promised to the customer can be organized in one workspace. There’s space for internal notes, messages, and tasks to keep everyone aligned.

This system also makes internal company turnover or account shuffling easier. Internal team members always know where to go to get the latest information on the customer.

With Dock’s Content Management platform, marketing teams have a place to organize and share customer-facing content with the rest of the company. Sales and success teams always know where to find what they need to answer a customer’s question. 

The content management system helps companies refine their product marketing efforts by sharing usage data from client-facing teams with the marketing team. This helps Marketing better understand how the content is used and how it performs with buyers and customers. 

Dock's Content Management platform

Dock also streamlines how sales teams respond to security reviews and collaborate with security ops teams. 

Security teams can create a pre-vetted list of documentation with NDA protection and create a security profile that sales teams can share with prospects. Instead of bothering security teams, Sales always has the most up-to-date version of essential security documentation to get ahead of security reviews. 

Lastly, Dock gives RevOps teams tools to control how client-facing teams work with customers. This manifests in various ways, from workspace templates to order form approvals to customer analytics that give a valuable feedback loop. 

Summary

Dock helps Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and RevOps work together to grow revenue. 

  • For Sales: Dock increases close rates, shortens sales cycles, and improves forecasting
  • For Customer Success: Dock shortens time to value, reduces churn, and streamlines renewals
  • For Marketing: Dock makes it easier to share content and gives you more analytics on its impact
  • For everyone: Dock improves cross-team collaboration and customer handoffs

By using different elements of our product suite, companies can realize a range of impacts on the business, from internal efficiency to increased close rates. 

To try Dock for free, create your first workspace now. Or, if you’d like a personalized demo, you can book a call with our sales team.

Alex Kracov

CEO and Co-Founder of Dock. Previously the 3rd employee and VP of Marketing at Lattice. Sharing insights about sales, marketing, SaaS, and startups.