One reason I love making this show is hearing about the things that didn't go right before companies found success. Gong's sales process went through a few major pivots before they found the right fit. Chris learned early on that selling and positioning Gong directly to Sales Enablement as a coaching tool was a tough entry point. When they repositioned as a pipeline management and execution platform, they got in front of CROs with buying power — which had a major sales impact (we're finding similar success being more top-down at Dock).

One of the mistakes I made early on at @dock_us was trying to build for too many uses cases. I wanted to create a horizontal product for any type of business to business interaction from sales to recruiting to finance. But this proved to be an enormous challenge on many levels. 1) Customer feedback was all over the place - when went to talk to customers we heard such a drastic range of things to build. For example, recruiters wanted Dock to integrate with ATS systems, while sales teams wanted us to integrate with CRM systems. We couldn’t build both with our limited resources. 2) Product experience was too open ended - since we wanted to build a horizontal product, we tried to build a super flexible product experience. But this decision led to an activation issue for our customers. The product wan't tailored enough to actual solve for any one persona’s challenge 3) Hard to define our positioning - since we needed to speak to many different people, we had to create generic messaging that spoke to no one. 4) Difficult to gain GTM momentum - when running ads or sending emails or reaching out to folks on LinkedIn, we tried to go after too many personas. We weren’t able to create content that resonated, since we had too many goals. We spread ourselves thin across personas which limited the amount of organic word of mouth growth. Everything changed in our business when we decided to focus. Today, Dock focuses on helping revenue teams collaborate with customers. We have three core uses: sales deal room, customer onboarding, and client portals. This niche works for Dock since all these use cases are interconnected. The sales deal room leads into the customer onboarding plan which ends up as a client portal. Our product matches the natural progression of the customer journey. Everything is focused around a company’s most most important relationship - the customer. Once we made this shift our growth started to take off and everything became easier. We’ve been able to build a more valuable product and our sales/marketing efforts have become way more straightforward. Focus is the key to growth.

Loved hearing @ToddBusler's journey from getting laughed out of the room for pitching a $600k deal for the first time at @heap:

It's hard to add a self-serve motion later in your company's lifecycle. @mariegassee, who led @Box's initiative to add self-serve, shared her toughest lessons from implementing a new system at an established company:

Another new @dock_us improvement I'm excited about: Title layout options Workspace pages now have three different banner layout options: 1. Top banner 2. Side-by-side 3. No banner Each page can have its own banner layout, so you have lots more control over the look and feel of your workspaces.

Dock’s core product - Workspaces - just got a major upgrade. Instead of one long scrolling page, workspaces now have multiple pages. Multi-page workspaces has been the top product request over the past year, and we’re pumped to share this massive update with our customers today. With this update, you can create a page for each moment in your customer journey. And we’ve added a table of contents that makes it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for. With @dock_us, you can share everything from partnership notes to price quotes to onboarding tasks with your customers. Below you’ll see what it looks like in action. Shoutout to my co-founder, @VictorKmita , who has been working on this transition for the last couple of months. A ton of work went into this release, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your efforts. Thanks for all that you do!

I hope this episode is helpful to other early stage marketers. Here's a link to the full episode on Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/2U0…

I learned so much during my time building @LatticeHQ's marketing program. I went from not knowing the definition of an MQL and doing all the marketing myself. To becoming a VP and having a team of talented marketers that ran multi-million dollar campaigns. We went from a seed stage startup with zero revenue to a unicorn with tens of millions of revenue. It was a formative experience and eventually led me to start @dock_us. One of the hardest parts of marketing is managing priorities. There are soooo many things you can do from paid ads to events to seo to podcasts. The lists goes on and on. As I scaled, it became a challenge to communicate the marketing team's priorities to the CEO, COO, CRO, and others. The below clip talks about a priority exercise that I did with @jaltma, J Zac, and @frfrdufour. It was a simple exercise that had enormous impact. The exercise helped me define what success looked like for Lattice's marketing program and made sure I was moving in the right direction. I'd recommend that every marketer go through this exercise with their team. Thanks to @brettberson and @firstround for having me on the In-Depth podcast to talk about early stage b2b marketing. It was fun to look back on my time building Lattice's marketing program and what i'm now doing with Dock.