The focus on improving the overall quality of sales interactions has led to the emergence of sales engagement platforms (SEPs). They help sales departments plan, optimize, and execute interactions with prospective customers, delivering services throughout the customer life cycle. Alex Kracov, CEO of Dock, explains how his company is helping businesses manage external collaboration. He also touches on what inspired him to start Dock, product-led growth and how that creates demand for sales-related software, and Dock’s positioning in the emerging “sales data room” category.
The following interview was conducted by Sacra—July 2022
Background
Alex Kracov is the CEO of collaborative workspace Dock. We talked to Alex to learn more about building a horizontal productivity tool ala Airtable or Notion, how the entrepreneurial culture at Lattice helped Dock get started, and what people get wrong about selling into the enterprise.
Questions
Can you give an introduction to Dock and the problem that you’re solving?
Can you tell us about Dock itself and how the company came about? The company emerged after you were working at Lattice. How did the marketing teams and sales teams work together there, and how did the sales motion help inspire the idea for this kind of tool?
Looking at Lattice’s Invest In Your People Fund prompted the question, was there an entrepreneurial culture at Lattice that rubbed off on you and helped you along?
What kind of trends or evolution are you seeing in external collaboration generally? Are people doing more of it, or different kinds of collaboration and need more software to help do it?
One of the other big trends here is product-led growth. What’s your take on what teams get wrong about product-led growth and how to execute on it, that Dock is a reaction to?
Do you think about Dock as forestalling the need for sales, or is it more like leveling up your sales team to focus on other things than what they would be focusing on?
So when it comes to seller power versus buyer power, the power has essentially shifted to buyers?
Some comparisons we looked at for Dock were Airtable and Notion, these horizontal tools that are usable for a lot different things. Why did you choose to approach Dock in a horizontal way versus designing it specifically for sales or another internal team?
Customer revenue split sounds like it's mostly on the sales customer success and less so on the other use cases for now?
Another parallel with Airtable might exist for Dock: Airtable gets integrated into an organization and people start using it for all kinds of things. By the time the company graduates out of it for a CRM, employees are using it for so many things that it becomes harder to transition. Does that resonate with you as a retention mechanism, that Dock might get used throughout the team?
You mentioned the components that Dock has to build for each use case are pretty similar. Notion was built around primitives of tables, sheets, and docs—from a product design front, what are those key primitives for Dock?
Can you actually sell into customer success today? Is that a real department or function?
What’s your take on the product-led growth CRM space? Are they adjacent or complementary to what you’re doing?
We talked to Arrows about this same topic, and with them, it's more checklist oriented. The checklist completion gets fed into HubSpot to give a proxy for product qualification. Dock integrates with HubSpot and Salesforce, are you doing something like that, feeding info in? Or is the integration more in the sense of the handoff to the salesperson? Do you consider that an important thing for Dock to solve?
What is Dock replacing in the sales stack? It sounds like it's replacing certain kinds of email, and maybe spreadsheets, is that how you think about it?
Is that a challenge from a sales front? With something like Lattice, there's lots of performance review software, but the upside is it's a clear need that people have expressed. There's so much sales software, so from a sales point of view, is that a challenge, to add another tool?
Have you seen that whoever is responsible for onboarding is the one to bring Dock to the rest of the organization?
There’s a category emerging here, “sales data room,” how does Dock fit into that?
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