How Spotnana’s lean sales team increased win rate by 20% with Dock

Learn how Spotnana’s sales team increased their win rate by 20% and sustained strong growth with Dock—all without scaling their sales team.

Overview

Challenge: Spotnana is a lean startup that sells travel technology to channel partners who offer travel solutions to corporations of all sizes—including some of the biggest companies in the world. The sales process can last over a year, with a rotating door of stakeholders involved. Spotnana needed a way to continuously educate and support prospective channel partners and corporate buyers without putting a big strain on their small sales team.

Solution: Spotnana uses Dock sales rooms to consolidate all their follow-up resources in one place for their buyers. Instead of sending lots of emails back and forth and scheduling multiple demos, they can educate large buying teams from one actionable workspace.

Results: Since adopting Dock, Spotnana has increased their win rate by 20% and maintained strong revenue growth while keeping costs flat—all without having to scale their sales team.

"The team really embraced it. One of our reps put together around 20 Dock sites in a week. At that point, I thought, ‘All right, this is something that's really needed.'

"Typically, it's hard to get salespeople to do anything more than they need to. They're not updating Salesforce, but they saw Dock as something that can help them not just become more efficient, but look more professional and close deals more effectively.”—Bill Tillman, VP of Revenue & Growth for Spotnana

The Challenge

Spotnana is a B2B Travel-as-a-Service platform that provides next-generation travel experiences to corporations and leisure travelers. Spotnana’s offering includes an online booking tool, a comprehensive set of tools for travel agents, and more—all running on a single, unified platform.

They sell their platform to different types of channel partners, including corporate travel management companies, leisure travel agencies, airlines, hotels, and software companies that embed a white-labeled version of Spotnana into their own products. Spotnana also works directly with corporations, helping them evaluate Spotnana’s technology before providing a referral to a channel partner.

Bill Tillman is the VP of Revenue & Growth for Spotnana.

“The corporate customers using Spotnana vary in size from SMB companies all the way to the largest corporate companies in the world who are spending over a billion dollars a year on travel,” said Bill. “They need to manage that spend efficiently and effectively.”

Regardless of the deal size, Spotnana’s sales process starts by working with a single buyer point of contact.

“Often, it's a one-on-one conversation,” said Bill. “We usually get into a demonstration of the product right on that first call because it really brings to life the value that we bring. When prospects see what we've built, they get excited about it.”

Bill says the real sales challenges begin after that first call, when more stakeholders need to be looped in. Some of those challenges include:

• Scaling personalized follow-up with a lean sales team
• Keeping multiple stakeholders aligned over a long sales cycle
• Educating buyers on their offering
• Enabling channel partners

Here’s how Bill and the Spotnana team have conquered those challenges with Dock.

1. Scaling a lean sales team

“Once the prospect buys in and says, ‘Hey, this is great, I really want this,’ then they say, ‘I've gotta bring 10 other people along on this journey internally,’” said Bill.

Doing multiple product demos and re-educating multiple stakeholders put a resource strain on Spotnana’s small sales team.

“We have a very limited, small team. We're a startup. We're five years old now, but we still try to run as lean as we can. One of the key reasons we brought Dock in, is because we can appear as a bigger company, despite our limited resources. It makes us more efficient.”

Bill said he wasn’t aware of sales rooms before finding Dock, but became an immediate fan.

“Honestly, this wasn't even a category or a solution that I was looking for,” said Bill. “Alex had connected with our founder, Sarosh, who knew we were trying to run lean. Running lean is one thing, but we also want to be very professional. Design is really important for us—like how we show up. Image is really important.”

Bill said Dock allows his team to look polished throughout their long, complex sales cycle.

“The way our sales cycle works is we'll have an initial conversation with a prospective partner or corporate travel buyer. We'll do intros and a high-level demo. It usually leads to a bunch of questions that we need to follow up on. Often, an NDA needs to be signed. And then a deeper dive demo, often with additional people involved in the review—whether it's somebody from the security team who needs an IT review or other colleagues.”

“After that first call, we put a Dock site together immediately. All the follow-up from the initial conversation goes into Dock. We have a set of materials that we've built out that we provide to every prospect.”

“With a small team and what can be an extensive sales cycle, Dock makes it easier to close deals. Instead of playing this game of sending PDFs back and forth and scheduling multiple demos, we can put everything in one place for the prospect to self-educate and bring others along.”

Bill said the ability to templatize the majority of the content and tweak it for each prospect has allowed his team to do personalized follow-up at a greater scale.

“We want to make it really simple, not just for the prospect, but also for our account executives. Our sales team doesn’t have to come out of an initial meeting and craft this epic email with all these follow-ups and attached PDFs and demo videos and all this stuff—like recreating the wheel every time. It's just a lot.”

“So the fact that we've already got this built out in Dock, means we can just flip a couple of switches and mark up the action items—we can respond really quickly to the customer. It's really impressive for the customer then to see how fast we've responded, but also with content that's super relevant for them.”

Bill was surprised at how quickly his team adopted Dock.

“Once we launched Dock to our sales team, they really embraced it. One of our reps put together around 20 Dock sites in a week, working with some of the prospects they were already working with.”

“At that point, I thought, ‘All right, this is something that's really needed.’ Typically it's hard to get salespeople to do anything more than they need to. They're not updating Salesforce, but they saw Dock as something that can help them not just become more efficient, but look more professional, and close deals more effectively.”

Bill said he was sold on Dock pretty quickly because of the company's vision.

“I loved Alex. He just has a great vision, and the product was great. He was very creative in the way he was trying to solve problems. It just seemed like a really strong commitment to building out this category and also taking my feedback.”

2. Aligning many stakeholders over a long sales cycle

Bill said Dock has helped Spotnana support larger buyer teams as they’ve moved upmarket.

“Early on, we were selling directly to SMB and mid-market companies. Oftentimes, a sales cycle would last less than 30 days. It's one or two calls, and then you move right to contract and implementation. It’s very rapid for small companies. As we matured our business, we started selling to channel partners and larger companies. Those sales cycles can extend easily to six months. Sometimes it can be a multi-year sale.”

“There are some relationships that you start building where you wouldn't even say you're in a sales cycle. You're just building a relationship, we're learning about the company and their challenges and providing education about what we're building.”

These multi-year deals mean a revolving door of stakeholders.

“Oftentimes, there's different players involved, both on the Spotnana side and the customer side. In the old days of just emailing back and forth, if someone changes roles or leaves a company, the whole process kind of dies off.”

“But with Dock, it keeps everything alive. Dock is great because it almost doesn't matter who's evaluating or who's part of the process because all that history is in the Dock site.” 

Bill says Dock has been particularly effective at helping their prospects share the business case for Spotnana.

“Our prospects most often have to put together a business case and get buy in from their colleagues. We'll do the ROI analysis and post it on the Dock site. Our prospects can use Dock to help with that socialization and put that business case together… without having to ask the sales team to provide that content for them.”

📘 Related reading: Selling to Buying Committees: How to win over buying teams

3. Prospect enablement

“Customers like to self-educate rather than be told,” said Bill. “So Dock’s been effective that way for us to get the word out there.”

Dock has allowed Bill’s sales team to take the role of educator and facilitator rather than seller.

“We're not putting demands on prospects. The culture that we built is educating prospects and sympathizing with the pain points that they're experiencing, and equally positioning how we can help them without us constantly hounding them, like, ‘Hey, what's next steps? Where are you at? What can I do to help?’”

Bill says the major advantage of using Dock is how action-oriented the sales room is for customers.

“I think we made it actionable. It's not just a website, right? It's very step-by-step oriented—not just marketing fluff. There's some really good videos in there and action items—laying out the whole sales process and requesting their input on things. What are the steps to contracting? What are the onboarding steps?”

This action-orientedness has unlocked more visibility into what Spotnana’s customers want during the sales cycle.

‍“One of the great things about Dock is that you've got amazing analytics. We know when one of our prospects engages with the content, how often they're engaging with the content, what content they're leveraging—but also what content they aren't leveraging. That's important because we know how to respond and how to react accordingly.”

“We can constantly tweak the content and make sure that we're just providing the most relevant content for our prospects. We're not overwhelming them with too much stuff.”

“I suggest diving into the analytics, because it really does tell the story of how customers are engaging with you as a brand.”

📘 Related reading: Buyer Enablement Guide: To sell more, make it easier to buy

4. Partner enablement at scale

“We distribute Spotnana through channel partners,” said Bill. “There's a number of travel management companies, technology companies, and suppliers that we’ve built a relationship with. These companies will white-label Spotnana and offer our technology to their customers as their own.”

“What we've had to do is educate them effectively on our talking points, the unique value, competitive landscape, and the latest and greatest product updates.”

“We found that the best way to do that is through Dock. We create a Dock site for every partner to enable their sales team to effectively position Spotnana.”

📘 Related reading: Channel Sales Enablement: Tips & tools for empowering partners

Results

• 20% increase in win rate
• Strong revenue growth while keeping costs flat
• Increased visibility into rep performance
• A long-term growth partner in Dock

Bill said Spotnana’s sales win rate has increased by about 20% since adopting Dock. But for Bill, the even greater impact has been the ability to scale revenue without scaling their sales team.

“We've continued to experience strong growth while keeping costs flat,” said Bill. “We haven't had to scale the sales team at all. To me, that's partially due to Dock and our ability to educate customers without having to bring on a large support team.”

As a result, Spotnana has seen great ROI from Dock so far. “It's a really cost-effective solution,” said Bill. “As we scale, and as we add more team members, it's a reasonable cost for the value we're getting.”  

Bill said Dock has also unlocked more visibility into his sales team’s performance. “I can look at a rep's performance and understand, are they doing well, are they not doing well? If they're not doing well and not using Dock, that's a big sign that they're not leveraging the tools that we've given them to be effective. That's a big thing.”

Bill also said Dock has been a great growth partner as they’ve scaled their startup.

“Dock is a super forward-thinking company. Really easy to work with. Really creative. You guys are always thinking about what's next. And been really good at helping us.”

Bill says they’re looking to expand Dock across more of their teams.

“I know we haven't taken advantage of everything yet. The less technology vendors we have to work with, the better.”

One Dock Tip

We always ask customers for their best Dock advice. Bill recommends starting small with Dock before expanding to other use cases because of the immediate value it can provide.

“A bit of advice is just to get started. Start with one thing. Don't try to boil the ocean. Because you'll get value out of that one thing.”

“That's where we started. We started seeing immediate value and then you can expand out from there.”