How Carta Healthcare brought visibility to a long sales cycle with Dock

Learn how Greg Miller, VP of Marketing & Business Development at Carta Healthcare, uses Dock to create personalized, trackable buyer experiences across a long, multi-stakeholder sale—with a marketing team of two.

Overview

Challenge: Carta Healthcare sells AI-powered clinical data abstraction to hospitals and health systems. It's a complex, highly regulated sale that takes nine to 18 months and involves anywhere from five to 50 stakeholders. When communication across that cycle happened over email, content disappeared into a black hole—with no way to know who read what, or whether the buying group was engaged at all.

Solution: Carta Healthcare's lean Marketing team manages Dock on behalf of Sales, building curated workspaces for every prospect from a set of templates. Each workspace consolidates demos, recordings, case studies, and a full stack of security and compliance documentation into one link—and tracks exactly who engages with it.

Results: Carta Healthcare's sales team adopted Dock quickly, and prospects love the curated experience. Marketing can finally see how the buying group engages with content. And what started as a sales tool has spread well beyond it—into marketing landing pages, board updates, and investor outreach.

"Dock eliminates this black hole during the selling process where you just don't know what's happening, especially when you have a sales cycle that goes nine to 18 months."
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— Greg Miller, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Carta Healthcare

The Challenge

Greg Miller is the VP of Marketing & Business Development at Carta Healthcare. 

"We solve a very unique problem in healthcare, which is called clinical data abstraction," said Greg. "It's a highly manual process today in every single hospital, and we automate that process through AI and clinical expertise."

Selling into hospitals and health systems is a long, complicated process. A typical deal runs nine to 18 months—packed with meetings, demos, documents, security reviews, and contracting.

"In a typical sales process, there are anywhere between five and 50 influencers. There's rarely one decision-maker. You'll have chief quality officers, physicians, nurses that do the abstraction work, sometimes the CEO of the hospital," said Greg. 

"So that's really five or 50 individual sales you have to make, because you have to get everybody on board, and everybody has their own interests and desires and wish lists.

"There's such a breadth of content that needs to satisfy all those personas."

That job falls to Carta Healthcare’s Marketing team. 

Before Dock, they had no good way to pull that content together in one place for buyers. Reps lost time hunting for the right things to send each prospect.

"We wanted to be able to support the sales team with the correct messaging, the current messaging, and all the content that we publish, rather than them having to find it themselves," said Greg.

Here's how Carta Healthcare solved that challenge with Dock.

1. Curating a personalized buyer experience

The Carta Healthcare team had always envisioned creating hyper-personalized experiences for every prospective customer.

"The way that we communicate with our customers is highly transparent," said Greg. "We want our customers to always feel really good about working with Carta Healthcare. That starts way upstream from the first interaction they have with us."

They had previously tried to build personalized landing pages into their website, but it never quite worked out. After hearing about digital sales rooms from a colleague, Greg found Dock.

"Dock was the only company that I talked to, quite honestly," said Greg. "A big part of that was Christian, our sales representative. He was super helpful, very knowledgeable, and quick to show us how to use Dock. We moved to contract fairly quickly—for an organization like us. We were under contract in less than 45 days."

Carta Healthcare's marketing team quickly got to work, building a set of sales room templates that can be easily personalized for each prospect.

"We have a template of information the sales team has to fill out—who's the customer, what are they specifically interested in—and we can very dynamically spin up a workspace they can get out to the potential customer," said Greg. 

"If somebody hits us on our Contact Us page, there's going to be a workspace fired up for them within 24 hours, and the next communication is, 'Here's a link to some curated information specifically for you.' That starts the personalized journey.

“Whereas everybody else in the market—and don't tell any of our competitors about Dock, please—they're going to do the traditional thing. They're going to pound them on the phone, pound them on email, send them a bunch of documents and hope they read them."

2. Educating buyers about AI

A long sales cycle creates a second problem: what messaging a buyer needs to hear can shift completely over 18 months.

Carta Healthcare is trying to define a new category—hybrid intelligence, which Greg describes as the combination of clinical subject-matter expertise and AI—so the education never really stops.

"Our messaging is nuanced and shifts as we go based upon the market's reaction," said Greg. "Go back 12 months, and people were really afraid of AI, so we had to educate the market on the power of AI and leverage external sources like the New England Journal of Medicine.

“Fast-forward to today, where we're a little bit beyond the hump of 'can this AI thing work?'—now it's about proof. So now I focus on case studies and thought leadership and white papers and technical documents."

Before Dock, keeping a shifting message current across every open deal was nearly impossible. Now Marketing can push new and updated content to every prospect at once.

"We can control the type of content that's being distributed, the message specifically, and the experience for the potential new customer. That's really what I'm after—a highly curated, personalized experience for existing customers as well as net-new ones."

3. Tracking buyer engagement

Dock has also given Carta Healthcare something email never could: visibility into who's actually engaged.

"Before Dock, we communicated during the sales process mostly via email," said Greg. "Email's difficult in that you really never know… Did they really consume the content? Did they really read it? When you have multiple people involved in the sales cycle on the hospital side, you have no visibility into who's communicating what to whom."

Now Carta Healthcare's sales and marketing teams can see which prospects are most engaged and exactly which content is driving that engagement—and the sales team has latched onto it. 

"They love tracking the activity," said Greg.

That visibility is already surfacing sales conversations that wouldn't have happened before.

"I had a phone call with a very large health system CIO a couple of months ago—an existing customer. Instead of just sending him a document, I put together a [Dock] workspace with additional content to bolster our position. I sent him an email, and a month goes by, no response whatsoever," said Greg.

"And then lo and behold, about a week ago, I see him pop onto Dock. And then a day later, I see two other executives from this organization pop onto Dock."

For a rep, that's the signal to reach back out at exactly the right moment.

"Just having that information, for somebody in sales, is like a breath of fresh air. Because you go into this black hole—this abyss—and you have no idea what's happening on the hospital side."

4. Consolidating compliance documentation

Selling AI into hospitals means clearing a wall of security and regulatory review. Carta Healthcare uses Dock to put it all in one place.

"We deal with personal health information, and that is protected under a law called HIPAA," said Greg. "In the sales process specifically, we have to undergo reviews by a lot of different committees."

"That's another thing Dock helps us with—to curate all the technical details on one page in a workspace, so they can see the integration guide, the implementation guide, our SOC 2 report, our HITRUST certification. It expedites the communication process."

It also spares Greg's team a real operational headache. 

"We'd been under contract with a big academic medical center for months and months. There were multiple IT committees. I kept getting requests to fill out the same documents over and over, and had no visibility if anybody's actually reading these documents," said Greg.

"I was able to consolidate about 50 different documents into one Dock workspace. Now, when I send the information out to the procurement people, I can see that they actually visited the workspace. I can see how much time they spent on which document. It eliminates the black hole."

And that value carries on post-sale. Carta Healthcare's customers tend to land and expand, so the workspace becomes a system of record once a deal closes.

"We continuously add things [post-sale]," said Greg. "Maybe there's an RFP we had to respond to, all the technical documentation, the contracts, the statements of work, the MSA. It's one place for the customer to see all the historical information—you don't lose the history of what happened during the sales process. From a liability perspective, that's another great thing about Dock: we know who's looked at what, and we have all the current documentation in the right place."

Results

Carta Healthcare has only been live on Dock for a few months, so it's too soon to see the impact on their sales cycle, but the early signals are strong:

• Fast, enthusiastic adoption across the sales team
• Clearer visibility into which buyers are engaged and what they’re engaging with
• Better-timed, better-informed sales outreach
• A positive response from prospects
• Expanded use beyond sales into investor and board communications

The clearest sign of success was internal adoption: the sales team took to Dock right away—something you can’t always say for all enablement tools.

"The adoption has gone very, very well because they see the value and they love the experience. They want to create personalized experiences for their customers too," said Greg.

"Even our CEO thinks this is the best marketing-slash-sales expense that he's ever seen,” added Greg. “For the exact same reason—it creates these personalized experiences, and that's how we're trying to differentiate ourselves."

The feedback from buyers has been just as encouraging. "Anecdotally, the potential customers love it," said Greg. "I've heard anything from 'you are so professional,' to 'this is awesome,' to 'thank you for consolidating all the information for me.’”

And what started as a sales tool has become the way Carta Healthcare communicates across many channels—from marketing campaign landing pages to board updates to investor outreach. 

"Our CFO wanted to send investors a brochure. I said, 'How about if I put together a workspace for them?' We curated specific information from the investor point of view, sent it, and it was just pure fun watching them get all over it," said Greg.

Dock Tips

We always ask customers for their best Dock advice. Greg offered two tips.

Tip #1: Have a clear vision for what should go in your workspaces before you build.

"For anybody considering Dock, you need to come into it with the right viewpoint of what you're trying to achieve. You're not trying to replicate your website.

"The hard part is not learning the tool—that's the super easy part. The hard part is the art of the possible: being able to think creatively about how you're trying to communicate to this potential customer, and what vehicles you want to use to say it. Is it a video? Is it a PDF? Is it text? Is it a slide deck?"

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Tip #2: Let Marketing own your sales template. At first, Greg gave Sales reps free rein to build their own Dock workspace templates, but that quickly turned into a free-for-all when consistency was the goal. So ownership now lives with Marketing.

"Marketing builds the templates, the sales team fills out who the customer is and what they care about, and we spin up the workspace. That way, the messaging stays current and consistent—and the rep still gets to put a personalized experience in front of their buyer."

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