How Merge built a seamless Sales-to-CS handoff with Dock

Learn how Merge simplified a complex proof-of-concept and implementation process with Dock—and why they chose Dock over other solutions.

Get the Sales perspective from Charlie Lynch, Director of Sales:

Get the Customer Success perspective from Tok Utsonomiya:

Overview

Here's the TL;DR:

Challenge: Merge needed a single source of truth to manage a complex POC and dual-track implementation process without losing continuity between the Sales-to-CS handoff.

Solution: With Dock, Merge’s sales team now uses structured POC workspaces for every prospect, CS uses templatized onboarding workspaces for every customer, and the handoff between them is built into the process.

Results: Prospects are engaging with POC materials faster than ever, and hidden stakeholders are surfacing earlier in the deal. CSMs are spending less time in live trainings and more time on the work that actually drives retention. And CS leadership finally has visibility into overall implementation progress that simply didn't exist before Dock.

"Of the first three Docks we launched, there was a minimum of 20 minutes spent within the first day on each of them. That told us this was probably content that people were dying for before—we just didn't make it as easy for them to actually get access and their hands on all the links and materials.”

— Charlie Lynch, Director of Sales, Merge

The Challenge

Merge is the leading provider of agentic tools and customer-facing integrations for the largest banks (U.S. Bank and Mastercard), AI companies (OpenAI and Perplexity), HR technology providers (BambooHR and Carta), and more.

Because Merge can be embedded in their customers' products, bringing on a new customer requires coordinating with engineers, product managers, GTM teams, and executive sponsors—often all at once—over an implementation that spans months.

That complexity starts in pre-sales. Merge's two- to three-week proof-of-concept (POC) requires hands-on product access before anyone buys. Before Dock, coordinating that evaluation meant ad hoc emails from reps, assets scattered across Slack threads, and constant multithreading across stakeholders—with no shared visibility into who was reviewing what.

Things only got messier post-sale. Merge’s onboarding runs on two parallel tracks—technical implementation (i.e., setting up the integrations) and strategic GTM (i.e., launching the integrations). Different client stakeholders own each track, often joining mid-process, without context on what was happening on the other side.

"It was very fragmented," said Tok Utsonomiya, Head of Customer Success. "We didn't have a central source of truth, and we spent a lot of time getting teams up to speed or trying to give them visibility into the progress happening outside of their immediate scope."

After running a thorough evaluation of Dock against other competing sales room platforms, Merge chose Dock. 

Tok says Dock’s UI was the clearest differentiator. Merge’s internal team of testers found it cleaner and more intuitive than the alternatives. "Dock came across as the most polished and just clean,” said Tok. “As we go more up-market and work with very large enterprise customers, we wanted to have that polish.”

The other deciding factor was fit: other tools felt built only for sales. Merge needed something that could run the full customer lifecycle, which made Dock the obvious choice.

Here's how Dock helped Merge solve challenges across both Sales and Customer Success.

1. A repeatable POC process

Merge's POC process is the heart of their sales cycle, but running it well requires coordinating technical resources, competitive context, and commercial details among stakeholders, each of whom needs different things. 

Before Dock, AEs had to cut down a 400-slide master deck to personalize it for each customer—a time-consuming task that reps sometimes skipped when stretched thin. 

"The effort was always there, but if a rep was in a rush, they didn't do it," said Charlie Lynch, Director of Sales.

Even when reps did the work, champions had to dig through email threads to find what they needed, and Merge had no visibility into whether key stakeholders were actually reviewing anything.

Now, the moment a prospect enters into a POC, an AE spins up a dedicated Dock workspace scoped to that company's use case—with technical resources for engineers, competitive context, personalized product details, and a commercial page for when pricing discussions begin. 

“ I just love the idea of templates when it comes to sales—the fact that you can make something so repeatable. By creating this living, breathing Dock that was specific to them, we were able to get much more prescriptive in our sales process. Now, a hundred percent of the time, we have very prescriptive sales processes being run."

— Charlie Lynch, Director of Sales, Merge

Charlie says Dock has also made it easier to multithread deals and uncover hidden stakeholders by putting pricing information in the email-gated workspace.

“All of a sudden, you'll see a request to access from someone in the executive team who obviously is part of that decision process. We've used that to uncover exactly who will be part of those final commercial negotiations. It gives us a chance to reach out, get on a call, and nail things down,” recounted Charlie.

“It allows us to sell when we're not in the room.”

2. A smooth Sales-to-CS handoff

For a team where the first 60-90 days of implementation are make-or-break for renewal, a clean Sales-to-CS handoff is vital. As Charlie put it, "There's no renewal if customers don't successfully implement and have their end customers adopt the integrations."

Tok said continuity between the sales and onboarding process is key. "When we think about our customer journey, it starts in the presales process. To have that consistency—all that knowledge transfer, even stakeholders that move across on our customer side from pre-sales to post-sales—we wanted to have that continuity.”

Before Dock, the internal handoff was, as Tok put it, "a little bit messy at times." But it wasn’t for a lack of effort. Merge had tried building handoff docs in their knowledge base. They also tried to automate fields in Salesforce. Nothing stuck.

Now, once a prospect becomes a customer, CS uses the existing POC Dock workspace to generate the customer’s onboarding workspace—carrying over the implementation scope, use cases, and stakeholder context that Sales already built out.

"It smoothed out the process of handing over—not just running the POC, but making sure everything's documented into one place so post-sales can pick it up."

— Charlie Lynch, Director of Sales, Merge

3. A consistent implementation process

Merge’s dual-track onboarding—technical implementation on one side, strategic GTM on the other—means managing stakeholders who rarely talk to each other, enter the process at different times, and see only part of the picture. 

Before Dock, keeping everyone aligned was almost entirely the CSM's responsibility, and everything was managed via a slide deck.

"In the past, we had to re-explain everything or expect people to go back through the history of the email chain or Slack thread," said Tok. "Now we have a really organized way for new stakeholders to come in and get up to speed quickly."

Now, both onboarding tracks run from a single templated workspace. Checklists, embedded resources, milestone tracking, and a live success plan all live in one place, visible to engineers, GTM teams, and executive sponsors alike.

Tok says Dock has given his team the right balance of repeatability and flexibility.

“ Although we try to make an onboarding process that's consistent, with true milestones, we also need to make it flexible for all the various use cases we support. Dock empowers that, right? We have workspace templates, but it's flexible enough for our teams to go in and adjust it if needed, given the customer.”

Tok says Dock has been especially appreciated by their customers’ technical stakeholders. “ They don't really like live enablement calls. They'd rather dig into docs and videos on their own time. Dock enables us to organize a recommended approach in viewing those assets.”

But it's not just the technical teams. Executive sponsors, who often disengage after the contract is signed, now have a place to check in on progress without needing a status call.

“There were times where there was a disconnect in terms of what they bought Merge for and what the tactical teams wanted to implement. We wanted a source of truth for the business initiative—the success plan, the main objectives they had going into this. We saw a solution like Dock as a way for those people to gain visibility so that they can understand what's happening.”

— Tok Utsonomiya, Head of Customer Success, Merge

4. Implementation visibility

Tok said visibility into a customer’s implementation status used to be a challenge for their leadership:

"We weren't really sure if the strategic onboarding aspect was really happening consistently," said Tok. "For the technical side, we can see it. But were we actually engaged with the go-to-market teams? Were we doing the enablement we expect our CSMs to do? It was inconsistent."

Now, with Dock, CS leadership can now see exactly where every customer sits in onboarding. Tok says that visibility has created greater mutual accountability on both sides of the relationship.

"With Dock, we can actually see: are our customers going through the steps we expect them to? Is our team walking customers through those steps live? It builds mutual accountability because we have a consistent framework across the team."

— Tok Utsonomiya, Head of Customer Success, Merge

“And as  we talk about more internal forecasting calls or account reviews, Dock is a really important data point that we can go back to.”

Dock’s analytics also provide Tok with an ongoing feedback loop to improve their onboarding process over time.

"I can see over time which assets are more valuable, which parts of the onboarding process customers aren't engaging with, and maybe that's something we need to tweak and make more front and center."

Tok says Dock has also created better visibility for their customers. 

5. Onboarding new sales reps

One bonus use case that Merge didn't anticipate at the start: using Dock to onboard new sales reps.

Charlie built a structured AE onboarding workspace—organized tab by tab, milestone by milestone—to replace the "here's everything we've ever written in Notion" approach that wasn't working for a highly technical product.

"Running people through a course in Dock has proven to be much more effective," said Charlie. "It's structured, it's all in one place."

Results

• Deeper client engagement with POCs and implementation
• A standardized sales process that scales
• Smoother Sales-to-CS handoffs
• Greater implementation visibility
• Less time spent in live trainings

Sales impact

Merge has only recently implemented Dock, so they don’t have definitive before-and-after metrics to report yet, but Charlie said Dock’s impact is already obvious in other ways.

"Of the first three Docks we launched, there was a minimum of 20 minutes spent within the first day on each of them," said Charlie. "That told us this was probably content that people were dying for before—we just didn't make it as easy for them to actually get access and their hands on all the links and materials."

Charlie expects the elevated buyer experience to translate into tangible results.

 ”When people are in a POC with us, I want them to be like, ‘This is a company that's gonna take care of me.’ I do feel that putting a Dock in front of them signals, ‘Hey, we really care about this process, and you are gonna be handheld.’”

“We do offer a white-glove service post-sale, but that's not something that folks are always gonna trust if you're not showing it upfront… Dock is that final piece to make people feel that we've put a lot of thought and effort into our onboarding process, and that will continue post-sale.”

"If we blow out our competitors in these POCs, I want win rates to go up and deal cycles to be compressed."

Onboarding impact

On the CS side, the most tangible early impact has been on how CSMs spend their time. With both onboarding tracks laid out in Dock, customers engage with materials on their own.

"We've had kickoff calls or specific calls related to each of the onboarding tracks. Immediately seeing the Dock workspace engagement that's happening after or during the call—it just gives us an indication that our customers are engaged."

That engagement translates directly into time saved for CSMs. "It allows us to not need to explain as much in detail live," said Tok. "We just basically have to point our customers to a certain section, maybe walk them through it really lightly."

In the long term, Tok expects to see better client retention. Mutual accountability is taking hold, and strategic onboarding is now held to the same standard as technical implementation for the first time.

"One of our intentions with using Dock was to build that mutual accountability," said Tok. "And at a high level, we're seeing signs of that."

Dock tips

We always ask our customers for their best Dock tips.

Charlie had two tips for getting more engagement with your Dock workspaces during the sales process:

"If you want to see adoption, you have to sell it. Get it up on a call and say, 'We're going to use this dedicated environment to run your POC.' I've seen examples where we sent it over without really mentioning it on the call—and you're just not going to see as much adoption. You need to drive home the point that this is where we're going to collaborate."

"You have to get important information into the workspace to drive engagement. We've seen a ton of adoption because in order to run a POC, people need technical information from us—they're working with our solutions engineers from within a page in Dock, and that's the hook. Figure out what your version of that is. What's the thing people need badly enough that they'll actually show up for it?"

Tok's advice for CS leaders:

"Use the Dock rollout as an excuse to revisit your processes and onboarding collateral. Our approach was: if we're going to implement Dock, we want to do it right. Don't be afraid to change things up pretty drastically, then iterate quickly and often. We created an internal Slack channel just for Dock feedback, and it makes it a lot easier to manage."

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