How Marqii shortens sales cycles & multithreads deals with Dock

Learn how Marqii’s mid-market sales team uses Dock to keep multiple buyer stakeholders educated and aligned over a long sales cycle.

Overview

Here’s the TL;DR:

‍Challenge: Marqii’s mid-market sales team has a long 6-12 month sales cycle that requires sharing many resources with several cross-functional buying teams and C-level stakeholders. When follow-up happened over email and file attachments, things got lost. Not only was it hard to keep the buying team aligned over a long deal cycle, but it was just as hard to pass off all the information to their Account Management team once the deal finally closed.

‍Solution: Marqii uses Dock to consolidate all of their sales follow-up materials in one place. Starting from a template, they create personalized customer workspaces that can be shared with the entire buying team as a single link. The workspace is referenced throughout the entire customer relationship—from sales through to onboarding and renewal. 

‍Results: The ability to quickly personalize follow-up at scale has helped Marqii shorten their sales cycle and keep large buying groups aligned. Dock’s workspace analytics have also made it possible to track which buyers and stakeholders are most engaged. Having a single source of truth for what was discussed during the sales process has also enabled a smoother Sales-to-Success handoff and quicker wins for their customers.

“My aha moment using Dock was when you were actually able to see what someone was clicking on, and who came in and clicked.

“I remember the exact client. It was a hospitality group here in Texas, where you could see that so and so opened the resources page to look at the listing errors, and then they watched the tour walkthrough, and then they forwarded it to somebody else, I assume, because another email came in and was clicking around.

“It’s really helpful to see that type of activity, and also gauge: are they interested? Are they not? It answers that question for me, too.” - Helen Ralowicz-Chapman, Mid-Market Sales at Marqii

The Challenge

Marqii is a digital hospitality platform that helps restaurants and hospitality businesses manage their online presence through through easy-to-use listings, menu, and review management.

At the time of this interview, Helen Ralowicz-Chapman was part of Marqii’s mid-market sales team. She’s since been promoted to Strategic Growth Partner. 

“Our customers are anyone from the mom-and-pop pizza shop down the street to 500-location restaurant groups that are nationwide,” explained Helen. “I work on the mid-market sales team, which means I'm typically talking to a hospitality or franchise group with anywhere from 50 to 1000 locations.”

Helen said there are two main challenges that come up with mid-market customers.

“One is education slash misinformation.”

Helen spends a lot of time re-educating the market, because many groups have been burned by past vendors.

“A lot of people used listing management in the past and said, ‘Oh, it only does my name, address, phone number, and hours. It's not on the sites that matter to me. It's not putting out the information that matters to me.’ And so they got rid of it,” explained Helen. “Or they’ve been using the same type of legacy system for a long time and are stuck in the status quo.”

“Where Marqii really stands out is we are hospitality focused. I'm not selling to a car dealership. I'm not selling to a lawyer's office. We only work with restaurants and in that hospitality space. That's definitely sets us apart, but you've got to get that foot in the door to let them hear it.”

Helen likes to get her foot in the door by taking the role of educator.

“A lot of what I do is just educating people in the space,” said Helen. She’ll tell customers, “This is the information that is online [about your business], whether you like it or not. And so whether we assist you or whether you want to do it yourself, let's make sure it's doing the most work for you.” 

“The other challenge is definitely multiple stakeholders.”

“I am typically selling to CMOs, CEOs, COOs. If we're talking about a franchise, we're usually selling to the corporate team. Every franchise has a different structure.”

Helen says selling to these larger groups requires aligning multiple cross-functional teams.

“When I'm talking to hospitality groups, I'm typically either starting with the Marketing team or the Operations team, because our service at Marqii crosses over into both worlds.”

“It links back to education, right? If the Marketing team understands why they need it, but Operations has never heard of listing management, but we need part of Operations' budget to make this happen, then we need to get all of those people in the room. And that can be difficult sometimes”

“I've had some people where it takes a month and a half to schedule a meeting with the right people. Anything we can do to speed up that sales cycle is definitely helpful.”

Here’s how Marqii speeds up their sales cycle with Dock.

1. Centralizing resources in one place for buyers 

Marqii uses Dock to create buyer-friendly workspaces that can be referenced throughout the entire customer relationship.

“There's a number resources and tips that we provide people with on a regular basis, even if they aren't actually signing up with Marqii.”

For example, Helen will send prospects:

• screenshots of business listing errors,
• templates for responding to reviews, and
• tools in their existing tech stack that Marqii integrates with.

Before Dock, Helen shared these resources over email.

“I'm the type of person who I used to have an email with 10 bullet points and two or three attachments. Or I’d put stuff into a PowerPoint presentation and send that off in an email.”

“And yeah…stuff gets lost.”

“When my team first started using Dock, I was most excited about the ease of follow-up. I would have this place where I could put all of the information that we had talked about.”

“I really like you're able to put in not just text, but I can drop in a picture, put in a link, and make it really visual and easy to click on. And then it's all just in one spot. It's so much better than sorting through 6 months of emails and searching for attachments.”

Helen says she shares a Dock workspace with a customer after their first discovery conversation.

“Whether it's on an initial discovery call, or if I've met someone at a conference or trade show, I will say, ‘Hey, I'm going to send you a Dock workspace that has XYZ in it. All you have to do is put in your email address. It's not going to create an account for you or anything, but you'll be able to see everything we're talking about in one spot.’”

“So I will introduce Dock to them before I ever send them the link. I found that when I do that, people tend to actually click on their link.”

"Probably 9 out of 10 people I send a Dock to actually open it at least once.

"Every once in a while, you have that person who never opens it. But that's helpful, too, right? Because if they're not really engaged and don't really care, I know that I'm not going to spend as much time on that lead."

2. Personalizing their sales pitch at scale

Helen says the ability to personalize what information gets shared with buyers is a critical part of Marqii’s months-long sales process. 

“It's definitely about building that relationship and understanding first how they work and then what they need help with. Because our solution's really modular. We can really customize it.”

“We've found over the years—especially in bigger groups—if we can sync up our solution with how you're already working, how your general manager is already running the restaurant, how you're already getting that customer feedback and disseminating it through the company, adoption happens at a much, much higher rate than if we just say, ‘Here is a box of Marqii.’”

“I don't want to tell you how to use Marqii.”

Helen says that Dock has helped them quickly tailor what content gets shared with each prospect.

“I love that Dock allows me to customize what was important to people and what wasn't important to people. Each project is different, so the ability to easily customize almost every aspect is helpful.”

"The templates were great and saved me a ton of time—versus I used to go back and copy and paste an email with 10 standard bullet points and then just customize and change stuff out. The integrations with platforms like Loom and Google are also great."

“Dock has transformed so much since I started using it in 2021. They are always improving. The Pages feature that just got released is one we've been looking forward to for a while, and it was worth the wait.”

“Assets can be hidden until needed and the workspace can be passed along to the customer experience team, so it's good for the whole sales lifecycle.”

3. Selling to and tracking multiple stakeholders

Helen says Dock has also been great for multithreading and enabling their buyer champions to sell Marqii internally.

“When I'm trying to get, say, someone on the Marketing team to help sell it internally to Operations or the CEO, or justify it to Procurement, I am a big fan of putting together resources.”

Dock has allowed Helen to track whether or not those resources are getting shared internally with the buying team.

“My aha moment using Dock was when you were actually able to see what someone was clicking on, and who came in and clicked.”

“I remember the exact client. It was a hospitality group here in Texas, where you could see that so and so opened the resources page to look at the listing errors, and then they watched the tour walkthrough, and then they forwarded it to somebody else, I assume, because another email came in and was clicking around.”

“It’s really helpful to see that type of activity, and also gauge: are they interested? Are they not? It answers that question for me, too.”

Helen says looking at a customer’s Dock workspace engagement has become an essential buying signal.

“When I'm like, ‘Hey, did you look at the links I sent over?’ Well, if you didn't open the Dock, I know that you didn't. I know that you maybe aren't as engaged. So I need to do something else to either make it more relevant to you or make it easier for you to access.”

“On the flip side, when someone is really clicking around, when I can see the CMO has forwarded it to the COO and there's some new person clicking around in there too, that is a signal to me that that person's actually really engaged. They care about what's online. And they want to fix it. And so then if they want to fix it, I am all here for that.”

Helen says you could theoretically track buyer activity with email tracker tools, but sending over a Dock workspace link is much more buyer-friendly.

“I really like that Dock makes it a little less obvious to the client, right? You're not seeing that big, long email tracking link. I can also see specifically where there was interest, where things seem to be resonating and update that for future clients too.”

4. Delivering a smooth sales-to-success handoff

“We also use Dock on the onboarding side—especially with more of our larger clients to help make sure it's a really smooth transition process,” said Helen.

“Before Dock…there was no process.”

“Depending on the sales rep, our Onboarding team may or may not get as much information as they could. I was the type of person who would forward emails and have notes in Salesforce. But there really wasn't a process.”

Now, Marqii uses Dock in two ways to ensure consistency for the customer during the sales-to-success handoff:

1. Internally: Sales shares the customer workspace with Marqii’s account management team as a record of everything that was discussed during the sales process.
2. Externally: Their account management team shares an onboarding workspace for the customer.

“Once the prospect is ready to become a client, we typically share that Dock with our account management team that handles the onboarding.”

“[Dock] is very, very helpful, in bringing on an initial client, especially just to go back and reference things that we talked about sometimes 6, 8 months ago and make sure that we're still delivering that to the client.”

“Then they will send out an onboarding Dock where we're referencing a lot of that initial information, right? ‘This was what was wrong. Here's where we need to fix stuff first,’” explained Helen. “That onboarding Dock will also have information on how to integrate your POS system, different timelines for certain locations coming on board, and that type of thing.”

This has created far more consistency across Marqii’s sales and onboarding process.

"It's really easy because we're all in the same workspace. Even if I forget to pass along a note, our onboarding and account management team can still go back and reference the initial Dock and see those error messages or those different inconsistencies that we talked about and sold the client on."

Helen says she’s grateful their Account Management team doesn’t have to decode her Salesforce notes anymore.

“It is really helpful to have one place for the information that's also easy to read. For anyone who's ever logged into Salesforce and seen all of the different fields…you get what I'm talking about. It can be a little bit overwhelming.”

Results

Since adopting Dock, Marqii has been able to:

• Consolidate resources in one place for their buyers
• Speed up the sales follow-up process
• Align multiple buyer stakeholders
• Track buyer engagement
• Deliver a smooth sales-to-success handoff

Helen says it’s hard to quantify Dock’s impact because it’s used to ubiquitously across their entire customer lifecycle.

“I don't have exact numbers on how much that has increased sales or how much it has sped up our sales timeline,” said Helen. “But when there's a month or two or three in between meetings, it's helpful to be able to refer back to that one page and say, ‘Here's everything we talked about.’ It definitely shortens some of that sales cycle."

Helen said Dock has also helped them deliver on their promise of best-in-class customer service.

“We take a ton of pride in our customer service. That's one of the reasons a lot of companies decide to go with us versus some competitors is they get a dedicated account manager. They get a lot of benefits from us being in the hospitality space and really taking customer service to heart.”

“Anecdotally speaking, Marqii has always had a really low churn rate. Every month we send out customer surveys and it's almost always 100 percent satisfaction.”

“We never really tried to measure how [Dock] was affecting our retention rates. But every client I've signed on in the last year has gotten a Dock. So all of our clients are using it.”

“When you see people clicking into it, and you’re able to transition those notes to our account management team, and they're able to fix those things right away and deliver that to a customer—we know we did a good job.”

“It’s really helpful to go back and have those archives of what the initial problems and pain points were, and what we can do for them now.”

Helen says Dock has made it easier to prove the value they’re providing to their customers.

“We can go back and reference it for case studies. ‘This used to be your rating on Google, and by changing how you've responded to your reviews and that strategy, you've gone from a 3.8 to a 4.1-star rating.’”

“Those are the types of things that we ultimately look for for our clients to show them some of their success.”

Two Dock Tips

We always ask our customer story participants to share a tip for using Dock. Helen was generous enough to share two.

First, Helen shared advice for getting customers to open your Dock workspaces. 

“I wouldn't ever just send someone a Dock with no context.”

“If you tell them that you're sending it and you explain that everything's going to be in one easy spot, they're much more likely to click into it and start using it. They're curious about what it is.”

Helen also recommends updating a prospect’s Dock workspace to always keep the most relevant information front and center.

“I also recommend adjusting the pages to show what's most relevant to them. In our world, that's the errors that they have on their different business listings, broken menu links, and other stuff they have online.”

“But then later on in the sales cycle, you might put the proposal tab front and center when you're ready to send them pricing.”

“So feel free to introduce it initially and move stuff around as you progress throughout the lifecycle of the deal.”

One Sales Tip

“My one piece of sales advice for folks right now is to simply follow up.”

“Every couple of months I see the same statistic come across my screen. It’s something like, ‘44 percent of sales reps give up after the first follow-up.’”

“But then there's also a statistic that usually quickly follows it saying that it takes an average of about eight connection attempts to win someone's attention, right? So there's a big gap there.”

“If you just follow up with someone—on a polite cadence, of course—and not a generic, ‘just following up here.’ Send them relevant information. See if they might be at trade shows coming up. Look for their name in the headlines. Celebrate those wins with them.”

“When you really are genuinely engaging with them, they're much more likely to actually respond to you.”

“That response might not always be what you want, but at least you don't spend any more time there. So always follow up until you get a response.”