Dock

What’s the secret to selling to the mid-market? Chris Michelmore, mid-market sales leader at Zoom, told Alex Kracov it’s about understanding where the company is in their company lifecycle. Earlier-stage companies, for example, don’t want to add any complexity. They don’t have IT teams. They outsource as much as possible. They don’t have the capacity to add more tools. Selling to those companies is less about proving your product is/isn’t a fit, and more about showing how you’ll make their lives easier. How will you make implementation easier? How you will support their product admins? Proving that you won’t test their bandwidth is the biggest hurdle to the sale. - 👉 For more sales lessons from Chris’s 9-year rise from SDR to Head of Mid-Market Acquisition at Zoom, check out the latest episode of Grow & Tell wherever you listen to podcasts.

Managing sales directors is a completely different beast than managing reps. Managing managers was a big jump for me when I became VP of Marketing at Lattice. You’re so many levels above the frontline people where the actual challenges are. On Grow & Tell, I asked Chris Michelmore, who’s moved all the way up the sales leadership ladder at Zoom, what he’s learned from leading other sales leaders. He had great advice: 1. Don’t get pulled too far from the day-to-day. Leading other leaders, you’re not pulled into as many sales calls anymore, but you have to find a way to keep your ear to the ground. Make it obvious to your team that you’re never too busy to talk or get looped into a deal. 2. Be more forward-looking. You can impact change at a greater scale, but coaching through managers won’t have the same overnight impact as coaching reps directly. Plan 6-12 months in advance for change to get adopted. 3. Manage to the numbers, but don’t lead through them. The numbers have to be your best friend. You have to foresee risk and button down your forecasting. But those numbers are for *you* — you can’t lead your team with numbers. Instead, leaders have to say, “If we do this, this is what will happen.” - Chris and I had an awesome conversation about his rise from SDR all the way to Head of Mid-Market Sales at Zoom, so check it out Grow & Tell on your podcast feeds.

What's the secret to selling through a champion? Matt Green and Alex Kracov got into it on Grow & Tell 👇 Matt, who co-founded Sales Assembly's sales skills training program, says reps need to master two key skills: 1. Value articulation Specifically, how to articulate value for two different audiences: your champion and your champion's boss. 2. Business writing Every CFO only wants to read 1-2 pages max when making a business decision. It's a seller's job to write a compelling, concise business case with their champion. And here's a bonus tip #3 from our Head of Sales, Joey Wright: 3. Master the calls between the calls with your champion Between your standard major intro and demo calls, sync up with your champion on short little prep calls to ask the difficult questions and align on what the buying team really cares about. That's where deals are won or lost ✌️

The selling environment has changed. Every deal takes longer and requires increased budget scrutiny. Buyers expect more from sellers. Buyers want a personalized sales experience. Buyers want to work with consultative sellers Buyers need help conducting research on your solutions (and the market) Buyers want to try before they buy. Buyers need a business case to get deals done. The shift in buyer behavior has led to the sales deal room category exploding. Sales deal rooms like Dock are at the top of Gartner’s hype cycle. The reason why 👉 everything buyer’s want aligns with sales deal rooms. 1) Premium & consistent buyer experience 2) Personalized to the buyer’s needs 3) Business cases that can be shared with leadership 4) Product information to help with buyer’s research 5) One place for constant interactions (no more searching through email) 6) Easy link to share with key stakeholders 7) No re-explaining information - it’s all in the deal room Deal rooms also give sellers superpowers by shortening your sales follow up time and giving sellers mid/bottom funnel signals to understand whether the buying team is actually engaged and not just wasting your time. The best part 👉 the better buyer experience leads to higher close rates. One of Dock’s customer increased closed rates by 33%. Watch the video below to get a sense of how Dock’s sales deal rooms work. Then head over to our website to sign up for a free account. DM if you have any questions 

The two biggest skill gaps right now on sales teams according to Matt Green: Selling through champions and in-person selling. I had Matt on Grow & Tell this week to talk about building Sales Assembly — a sales skills training membership for the biggest tech companies. Matt has his ear to the ground with revenue leaders, so I was curious about what he sees as the most in-demand skills right now. Matt said: 1. Selling through champions: Great sellers can tell two stories at once. They can speak to the needs and pain points of their buyer champion - but also to the larger business case that the economic buyer cares about. 2. In-person selling A lot of AEs and CSMs that started their careers post-2018 have never sold in person. They're great remote sellers, but there’s real anxiety around their employers ask them to go on-site to client offices. Sellers with both of those skills have a big leg up right now. - There was so much other great stuff in our conversation, so check out the full Grow & Tell episode on Apple or Spotify.

New in Dock: The Project widget 📋 Connect multiple checklists from a workplace into one consolidated checklist with Projects. This makes it easier for both your team and your clients to understand all the outstanding tasks during sales, onboarding, or a project. For example, you can split an onboarding plan into three phases and checklists (so as to not overwhelm your client), but also tie the tasks together into one summarized and synced list. The new Project widget also lets you and your clients: - Filter tasks by status and assignees - See project start and end dates - Track the percentage of tasks completed The end result for your client is always understanding what’s next for them. Dock is free to try at 👉 dock dot us

New in Dock: Asana, Jira, ClickUp, and Linear task integrations ✅ Our new task management integrations let you sync tasks from ClickUp, Asana, Linear, and Jira with Dock checklists. When you add a task in Dock, you’ll have the choice of importing an existing task from your PM tool of choice and keeping the due date, assignee, comments, and more synced. This makes it easy to maintain an internal-only task list in your PM tool, while pushing select tasks to your client’s Dock workspace. Your client can easily follow along with tasks during your onboarding/implementation process, and you only have to update tasks in one place.

I'm a hosting a webinar on Wednesday talking about content management for revenue teams. Here's what's on the agenda: - Best practices for sales & marketing content collaboration - How to structure your content library - Where Dock fits into your tech stack - How to think about content across your customer lifecycle - What makes Dock different from traditional sales enablement platforms - How to know if your content is making an impact - How deal rooms help refine your content strategy I'll also save time at the end for Q&A. Sign up here to watch live or get the recording: https://lnkd.in/dpV9g26k See you there!

How does Notion measure onboarding success? Alex Kracov asked Monica Perez, Head of CS at Notion, on the latest episode of Grow & Tell. Monica said their team used to rely on gut-feel for which milestones were important for their CS-led onboarding. They had theories on what actions drove retention — like people tagging each other in comments — but decided to run a regression analysis on which metrics and milestones led to the most renewals 12 months later. They uncovered seven key actions that need to happen in the first 90 days that almost guarantee a customer will renew or expand. Now, their whole onboarding process is built around guiding people to complete those actions. - For the full story on spinning up Notion’s Customer Success program from scratch, check out the latest episode of Grow & Tell on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I had an awesome time chatting with Monica Perez about building Notion's Customer Success program. Monica joined Notion as their first CSM when they were already at $40m ARR. I was really curious about how Notion thinks about CS-led onboarding for managed accounts. Notion has nearly infinite use cases, so there's a really interesting onboarding tension between letting customers run wild with the product-led momentum going through their organization vs. keeping them focused on a few core use cases. We have the same challenge at Dock, where customers see the most value of they use it across all their GTM teams, but it's easier to launch initially in only one department. Here were some takeaways from my conversation with Monica, Notion's Head of CS: - Notion doesn't have a standalone onboarding team because their product isn't very technical. CSMs drive onboarding and adoption. - They try to keep clients focused on MVP initial launches for documentation and knowledge management, and then take them on a maturation journey over time by using a use case map by persona - They did a ton of data analysis to find the 7 product metrics/actions that need to happen in the first 90 days to retain/expand an account, and focus all their onboarding on that. So much in this episode for anyone in CS or founders building out their CS motions. You can catch the whole episode here: https://lnkd.in/gzWRyJwX