How August sells to multiple buyer personas with Dock

Learn how August's Sales & Marketing teams use Dock to get buy-in from multiple customer personas, track content engagement, and shorten their sales cycle.

:::box "Overview", "Challenge: August’s Sales team needed a better way to guide buyers through a complex, months-long evaluation process. Since their deal champions were often not the decision-makers, they needed to empower these advocates with content to build buying consensus across all stakeholders. At the same time, August’s Marketing team sought better visibility into how prospects engaged with sales content to refine their approach and better support the sales process.

‍Solution: August uses Dock to create personalized sales workspaces tailored to each prospect organization, complete with dedicated pages for every stakeholder persona. By centralizing all the relevant information in a single, trackable workspace, Dock simplifies internal collaboration and helps prospects move seamlessly toward a decision.

‍Results: Dock has helped August shorten their sales cycle, gain real-time insights into prospect engagement, and identify which sales content resonates most. The platform has also strengthened collaboration between their Sales and Marketing teams. Most importantly, Dock has enabled August to deliver a more helpful and engaging evaluation experience for their prospects."

:::

“You only get a tiny, tiny fraction of time with your prospect. Dock allows us to be in the room for that other 90 percent of the time.” — Victoria Bush, Product Marketing Manager at August

The Challenge

August’s software platform helps school nurses, counselors, and school leaders document student well-being to uncover insights and deliver support where students need it most.

Victoria Bush, Product Marketing Manager at August, explained why their platform is so valuable to student well-being.

“Previously, a lot of people used notebooks to take notes when their student came in with a stomachache or when a student was struggling with anxiety,” said Victoria. “When you have notes in that format, you can't get insights out of them. Our founders created August to allow those roles to modernize their documentation platform, keep everything in a centralized place, and get really cool insights out of their notes.

“For example, you can let your school leader know, ‘We had 20 students come in who are struggling with academic anxiety. Maybe we need to do some more programming to support students before exam season.’”

Because August’s platform serves various school roles, their sales team faces the challenge of tailoring messaging to multiple personas during the evaluation process.

“The users of our platform are typically school nurses, counselors, learning specialists, social workers, school leaders—basically anybody who is concerned with the well-being of a student,” said Victoria.

“Every school is different. Sometimes we'll get an inbound from a head of school who is really excited about prioritizing student mental health. Sometimes we'll have a school nurse who’s really feeling the pain of having to take notes in an outdated EHR (electronic health record). Or sometimes we have IT directors who are looking for ways to modernize their tech stack and they spearhead the evaluation.”

Each persona brings unique needs to the table, but they all have to align to make a purchase decision.

“And so I thought, wow, this is the perfect use case for something like Dock.”

1. Simplifying a complex evaluation process

“Because we work with schools, the evaluation process is pretty complicated,” said Victoria. “It tends to be a longer evaluation period because we’re dealing with a very sensitive topic—student health records. We have a lot of different stakeholders. There's a lot of security, compliance, and boxes to check. So it takes a bit longer.”

Victoria explained that managing this process through email created inefficiencies. “The back-and-forth of emails and sharing attachments, and things getting lost in the inbox—it all feels so stone-age now that we have Dock.”

When Victoria discovered Dock, she immediately recognized how it could transform their sales process. “I thought, ‘These people are such geniuses. They’ve read my mind about what I need. This solves every pain point a product marketer struggles with.’” 

Dock allowed August to build branded, personalized workspaces for prospects, streamlining the evaluation process.

“As a product marketer, getting to build those workspaces and provide this really customized evaluation experience for our prospects has been completely, completely a game changer.”

“Dock makes it so easy for people to evaluate your product. They don't have to go digging in your website to find some feature that they heard about from another school. They can just go to the Dock, and everything's there.”

Victoria said their sales team loves the ability to start from a workspace template, but adapt the content to the client as the deal progresses.

“For our salespeople, being able to interact with prospects in this really modern, fluid way where they can cater that workspace exactly to that prospect's needs, questions, wants, and priorities has been really amazing.”

“For example, sometimes a school will initially only be interested in one of our modules, so we share a workspace with only that module. But then halfway through the evaluation, the prospect realizes the behavioral health module is really cool too. The AE can then add that page template into their Dock workspace.”

This flexibility, combined with positive feedback from prospects, validated the impact of Dock.

“We've gotten awesome feedback from prospects. They love that it makes it so easy to evaluate August. One time we got a comment in a Dock workspace from a prospect that said, ‘Whoa, this is so fancy!’”

2. Selling to multiple stakeholder personas

“One of the challenges we've seen, and it's something that a lot of B2B SaaS companies see,” said Victoria, “is that our end user is not the one signing the agreement at the end of the evaluation.”

“The person who's really experiencing the pain and the person that our platform is designed to help is often not the one making the decision to buy the software.”

“Having so many different stakeholders within the evaluation process makes it tricky because everyone has different priorities. A school counselor is going to be concerned about very different things from an IT director.”

“Dock has really helped us speak to all these different personas in one evaluation. Because we have a workspace page for each persona—the head of school has their own persona page, the nurse has their own persona page—it feels like a tailored experience, even if you have five different people in the evaluation process.”

“Having Dock means that the school nurse no longer has to put together a presentation for their head of school about why they should buy August. They don't have to go make a case and defend their budget allocation. They can pass along the Dock workspace, which allows the school leader to do that research on their own and see the benefits for themselves.”

This has helped August keep their buyers informed and have ongoing influence over the evaluation process.

“Dock allows you to be in the room with the prospect when you're not in the room. For a company like ours, where it's a longer evaluation process, you're not going to be in the room for 90 percent of the time that your prospect is talking about you. You only get a tiny, tiny fraction of time with your prospect. Dock allows us to be in the room for that other 90 percent of the time.”

3. Sharing content with Sales

Victoria said sharing sales content via Dock workspace templates has made it much easier for her to empower August’s sales team with the right assets at the right time.

“I’m sure it was frustrating for the AEs because you never really know, ‘What's the situation in which I would use this one-pager versus this other one-pager? When do I know when to use what?’ That’s challenging for both sales and marketing—not having a focused way to share content with prospects.”

Using templated workspaces instead of sending one-off emails has standardized what content their sales team puts in front of prospects, which has tightened alignment between Sales and Marketing.

“Dock has allowed us to have so much more open feedback between Sales and Marketing on what prospects are engaging with. It was really cool to hear from the AEs who said, ‘Somebody's asking me more about this one specific feature. Could you add some more content to the Dock workspace related to that so that we can get ahead of it for the next one?’”

“Dock just made it really easy to get their feedback and immediately implement. It allowed us to be so much more in sync and build content and share it with prospects at a much faster pace.”

It’s usually hard to get sales reps to adopt new tools, but Victoria said that wasn’t the case with Dock.

"The AEs at August immediately fell in love with it. It makes their lives so much easier because they don’t have to worry about following up with ten different organizations and think, ‘Oh shoot, did I already send them that case study? Did I already send them that one-pager?’ They don't have to worry about any of that.”

“They all of a sudden have this very centralized hub where they can interact with their prospect. All they do is click the template—done. It's that easy.”

"If you show your AEs Dock, they will immediately want to use it."

4. Tracking prospect activity

Victoria said Dock’s real-time analytics gives their sales team more visibility into how a deal is progressing.

“Unless somebody emails you, you have no idea what that prospect is thinking. Are they engaging? Are they thinking about your product? You have none of that information.” said Victoria.

“When we sent out our first Dock workspace, seeing those real-time analytics come into our Slack channel was so cool. You can see who within your prospect's organization is looking at your Dock workspace.”

“We always joke that watching the Dock Slack channel updates is addictive. Because that's exactly the insight you don't have unless you have Dock.”

“With Dock, it's like you flip a switch and shine a light on the evaluation. All of a sudden, you can see how people are engaging. That was the moment where I thought, ‘Yep, this is magic.’”

Victoria says Dock workspace engagement has been a great buying signal for their Sales team.

“If somebody doesn't want to engage with your Dock workspace, they probably aren't that interested in buying your product anyway. But for the people who are actively engaged in evaluation, we've seen really, really great engagement.”

“It engages people a lot better than just the typical email back and forth. It's been an amazing resource. I cannot rave enough about Dock.”

5. Measuring content engagement

Before Dock, August’s Marketing team couldn’t tell which content was driving the most engagement.

“As Product Marketing, we never really know what the engagement looks like between our prospects and our Sales team. You have this hodgepodge of one-pagers that go out as attachments to emails. You don’t have great data on what people are looking at, or what people are finding interesting.”

“Now I can see, ‘Oh, wow. A lot of people have downloaded this case study—I know it's a really engaging piece of content. Versus, nobody's really watching this other video. Why is that? Maybe we need to reevaluate where we're putting that in the workspace.”

This analytics feedback loop has helped Victoria optimize how they share content in Dock to drive more engagement. 

“We had a panel of amazing speakers from our client schools. They had such insightful, thoughtful things to share. But I wasn't seeing people watching the webinar in the workspaces. I decided to chop it up into smaller chunks and embed it into the persona pages. All of a sudden, so many people were watching those videos. It worked really well for us.”

Results

By using Dock, August’s Sales and Marketing teams have seen:

• A shorter sales cycle
• A more engaging buying experience for their prospects
• Increased visibility in stakeholder engagement
• Greater visibility into content’s impact on sales
• Better Sales & Marketing collaboration

“Anecdotally, I think Dock has shortened our sales cycle because it's so much more efficient than going back and forth over a series of months.” said Victoria. “It makes it so much easier for our internal champion to go to their school leader and make the case for something like August. I would be shocked if it did not shorten our sales cycle.” 

Victoria says the ability to track content engagement will allow her to equip her Sales team with better content over time. 

“Now that I can see content people are most engaging with, I'm excited for what we can do down the line once we have more data on closed-wons, closed-losts, and how those different segments are interacting with the workspace. Eventually, we want to do more analysis on what piece of content higher-converting accounts were really engaging with.”

Victoria thinks every sales team should be using Dock. 

“I just love it so much. I'm Dock’s number one fan. I truly believe that if you have anything longer than a one-week sales cycle, you should be using Dock.”

“Implementing Dock was probably one of the easiest things I've ever done. It's so intuitive. I didn't need to do any training. I didn't have to watch any videos. And I immediately knew how to use the platform. That, to me, is the highest standard in product design.”

“I had an initial training call with Madison to introduce Dock. We didn’t end up even having our second session because it's so easy to use. I cannot speak highly enough of the whole implementation process.”

The biggest impact, though, has been the upgrade to August’s buying experience.

“This just feels like such an evolution in the way sales should be. It’s the evaluation that prospects deserve. No one wants to do the whole annoying back-and-forth with a salesperson. You want to be building a relationship. Dock allows you to really get to know your prospects. You have greater insight into what they're thinking about and what they care about. It's such a smarter way to go about the evaluation.”

“It's so hard to even remember what things looked like before Dock. We sent case studies or one-pagers as attachments? That seems so crazy.’”

“One of the AEs at August sent me a Slack message that said, ‘I honestly don't know how I used to sell before Dock.’ And that's, that's truly what it feels like. I don't know what people do without Dock.”

“In our experience, it's been absolutely incredible. Truly a game-changer.”

One Dock Tip

We always ask customers for their best Dock tip. Here’s what Victoria said:

“My biggest Dock tip is to use GIFs in your templates. They make the workspace so much more fun. It's a little bit of extra work, but it's so worth it. It makes the templates so dynamic. It makes it really engaging for the prospect and makes it a lot more fun.”

“We've found a lot of success with using GIFs versus static images.”

One Product Marketing Tip

We also asked Victoria for her best advice for other product marketers.

“My advice for other product marketers is if you're ever feeling stuck, go do a case study. Case studies are one of my favorite things to do because talking to people grounds you so much in your ICP and the person that you're serving.”

“It allows you to get back to why you're doing what you're doing. It’s easy to get caught up in the marketing emails and all the little things that come with being a product marketer, that we forget we're here to serve the people that we built this product for.”