New in Dock: Content Management for Revenue Teams

Dock’s new Content Management platform gives revenue teams one place to find, share, and track customer-facing content. 

You can watch my quick demo here or keep reading for more details:

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Every revenue team struggles with asset management. 

It’s hard for marketing to share content with the rest of the organization. Nobody knows where to look for the latest case study, pitch deck, product collateral. Sales ends up sharing an old asset.

Startups will typically start with a Google Drive folder to organize assets. Then each new asset gets updated with Pitch Deck V1, Pitch Deck V2, etc. 

Inevitably, it becomes a mess really quickly. 

My personal content management nightmare

When I ran marketing at Lattice, we tried everything from Google Drive to Notion to organize our assets for the sales team. 

But we ran into the same problems time and again:

• Reps would struggle to find the latest content. 
• The product marketing team had no feedback loop to measure if our assets were performing.
• The sales team struggled to find the content we put on our website. 
• The marketing team was constantly asked to redo how we shared and organized content. 

It was a source of tension between marketing and the rest of the organization. I turned to software for help but was frustrated with what was available in the market.

When I looked at the leading software solutions to solve this problem—Highspot, Seismic, and Showpad—they were prohibitively expensive for a startup.

I was also shocked at the complexity of these tools. 

It took sooooo many clicks to find an asset and share it with a customer. There were lots of bells and whistles, but the core use case was buried in a quagmire of enterprise features. 

That’s why I've spent the last year researching this space at Dock. 

Introducing Content Management in Dock

Today, I'm excited to release Dock’s Content Management library for revenue teams.

Dock’s content library is an asset management system that’s designed for small to midsize revenue teams. 

Teams can upload and organize videos, links, PDFs, and images and then within seconds (and one click), find the asset they’re looking for and share it with a customer.

For each asset, you’ll get a set of analytics to track internal and buyer/customer engagement. 

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Content Management can be used as standalone sales enablement product, but it's much more powerful once you combine it with Dock's Workspaces.

You can get started for free here. The first 10 assets you add to the library are free. 

Asset management vs. knowledge management

The biggest mistake that revenue teams make is combining asset management and knowledge management in the same solution. 

I made this mistake myself, and I’ve heard the same from my interviews with other revenue leaders.

‍Knowledge management is for internal-education purposes. This is typically managed with a company-wide solution.

Sales, Marketing, HR, Finance, Engineers, Product, Design, etc., all need a place to share internal documentation—whether that’s employee onboarding plans, holiday schedules, or team-specific information like sales commission plans or marketing team style guides. 

There are many great solutions designed for knowledge management like Guru and Notion.

The problem with knowledge management systems is that they’re designed for internal purposes—not the customer. 

Why is that a problem?

• It’s hard for revenue teams to separate internal vs. external content.
• They don’t offer analytics on internal or customer engagement.
• They don’t integrate with CRM systems.

Instead, revenue teams need a dedicated asset management system for customer-facing content.

They need a single destination that hosts everything that’s ready to share with customers. A place that makes it easy for the marketing team to share content with the rest of the organization. A place where you can track client engagement and close the product marketing feedback loop to better understand what assets the sales and success teams are actually using. 

That’s what we’ve built with Dock’s Content Management platform. We’re a dedicated place for Revenue teams to organize, find, share and track customer-facing content. 

Organizing assets

Dock has a two-level hierarchy system to make it easy for marketing and enablement teams to organize content for the rest of the organization. 

Here’s the overall structure of the content management system:

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• ‍Boards are internal categories that organize a number of collections. For example, you might have boards for Products, Sales, or Customer Stories. ‍
• Collections are tags for assets. For example, you might have a collection called, "Customer Quotes" 

Here’s the structure using “Teams” as an example board, with assets organized into team-based collections.

Here’s what this structure looks like in the product: 

When uploading assets to Dock, choose which collections you’d like to tie that asset to. From there, the asset will be added to all the connected collections and boards. 

We’ve given teams flexibility in how they want to organize different assets for their organization. There’s a number of different ways you can approach organizing these assets. 

For example, here's a Products board with collections split by product line:

Or you could organize your customer stories into a board, split by asset type, industry, or segment. 

Finding assets

Before creating this product, we interviewed hundreds of sales reps and watched them use similar tools to find assets. 99% of the time, they started by typing in a search.

That’s why when building Dock’s Content Library, we prioritized building an incredible search experience. We’ve partnered with Algolia, a search and discovery platform, to make our search super powerful and improvable over time.

So when a sales rep is looking for an asset, all they need to do is to use our search to find and share the asset with one click. 

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Of course, boards and collections are another great way to discover content that you don’t already know exists. It’s easy to discover content around specific products, customer stories, etc. 

But we also wanted it to be easy to discover effective content that other reps are using. 

So you’re also able to see the most popular content across the company from both an internal share perspective but also from when a client engages with an asset.

Marketing teams can also share entire collections and boards directly with sales teams. For example, if you have an upcoming product announcement and want to share all the assets related to the announcement.

Sharing assets

We’ve also made sharing possible with one click. 

Each asset, whether you find it in a search or you’re on an asset page, has a share button. With one click, you can share the asset with the customer. 

Each Dock user has a unique link to that specific asset, so you can track engagement on your specific share and then create roll-up reports across the company. 

When you share a link with a customer, they will be prompted to add their email address the first time they see the asset. After they add it once, we cookie the user and they will not be asked to add their email again.

From there, they can view the asset, download it, and share it with other folks if needed. 

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These assets can be shared as independent links or as part of a Dock workspace.

Tracking assets

Each asset in the content library has a unique set of analytics, but the two main goals are the same: 

1. Internal popularity: Which assets are most popular internally? Which assets are reps sharing the most?
2. Client engagement: What content is driving client engagement? How are customers engaging with the asset? Who is looking at the asset?

These metrics are available for every asset:

• Views: the number of times an external person viewed the asset
• Shares: the number of times an internal person shared the asset 
• Downloads: the number of times someone downloaded the asset

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For PDFs, we show you more advanced analytics, including:

• Time spent per page: The average time on page hints at what content resonates most with your audience.
• Drop off report: Understand when someone stops looking at your content. This gives you a sense of what's least valuable.

Additionally, each Dock user at your company will have a unique link to each asset. This allows companies to analyze an individual’s engagement with a link, but also understand a rollup of analytics across the company. 

Over time, this system will allow Dock to build interesting slices of data across the company.

Content Management & Workspaces

Of course, any asset in your content library can also be added to a Dock workspace. Just select it from the “Libary” when creating a new workspace section.

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Looking ahead

We’re incredibly excited to ship this initial version of our content library. 

We already have several improvements in the works already, including a Google Drive integration, but we'd love to hear from our customers on how else we can improve this product over time. 

And again: our new Content Management product is free to try for up to 10 assets, so give it a shot! Pricing details are available here.