Learn how Ingrid Murra, CEO and Co-Founder of Two Front, has completely baked Dock into their sales, onboarding, and account management process for their tricky trio of client bases.
Overview
Challenge: Two Front is a seed-stage software startup that lets orthodontists offer virtual services to the patients of dentists. Selling to and onboarding all three customer bases (orthodontists, dentists, and patients) was a big challenge for their solo founder. Dentists aren’t tech-savvy enough to easily onboard to new software, and Two Front didn’t have a great way to sell to patients via dentists.
Solution: Two Front adopted Dock for three use cases: They use Dock during their vendor sales process to make the ROI case to dentists. They use Dock for account management, to onboard dentists to their software. And they use Dock to create personalized sales and client portals for each dental patient.
Results: Since adopting Dock, Two Front’s founder has not only achieved 30% month-over-month growth for her startup but she’s also gained complete visibility into the status of sales and onboarding for every vendor and customer. They can see exactly how often customers are accessing their sales and onboarding workspaces. Plus, they’ve received a ton of customer love for the convenience of having everything available in one place.
“When we introduced Dock, it was at the same time that we were making a couple of other pretty massive changes. But a couple of months later, our numbers started to really take off. We started seeing 30 percent month-over-month growth. And it's got to be a part of all the changes we made." - Ingrid Murra, CEO & Founder of Two Front
The Challenge
Ingrid Murra is an orthodontist by trade and the CEO and Founder of Two Front—a seed-stage software startup.
Two Front has a unique business model. They serve three customer groups simultaneously: orthodontists, dentists, and patients.
“We started Two Front so that we can democratize access to Invisalign,” said Ingrid. “19 out of every 20 Invisalign providers are general dentists, not orthodontists. The problem with that is they're not specialists. And if you're not a specialist, you don't know how to move the teeth.”
“We’ve built a software platform that connects dentists to virtual orthodontic clinics, where they can act as full-service orthodontists.”
Here’s a super quick rundown of their business model:
- They give orthodontists more customers: “People don't know why you even need an orthodontist anymore. They think of orthodontists like braces—like old-school, archaic dinosaurs. We give orthodontists customers by connecting them to the patients of dental practices.”
- They allow dentists to service more patients: “If they provide Invisalign on their own, it's not going to be predictable, and it's not going to be profitable at their practice because it's going to take up so much chair time.”
- They give patients access to affordable orthodontic care: “One in two people in the world want to straighten their teeth with clear aligners. But 60 percent of the U.S. doesn't have an orthodontist. We make access to care affordable from your dentist.”
Selling to and onboarding each of these groups is a big challenge, especially because Ingrid handles their entire go-to-market strategy by herself.
“Managing the whole pipeline, managing the leads, managing the demos, managing the onboardings, the account management piece—it's a whole pipeline to manage. It's challenging.”
Ingrid wanted something like a client-facing version of a CRM. That’s when she found Dock.
“We have everything in Salesforce. So we have full visibility into how our company works, but our customers don't. When I realized that we can present what we have visibility into to our customers in a way that's beautifully presented and simple, that was really the aha moment.”
Ingrid said Dock’s complete flexibility initially intimidated her, but after a quick learning curve, it paid massive dividends for her business.
“At first, I was a little bit overwhelmed. I had this blank slate but saw it as a massive opportunity. I was like, ‘we can build anything we want.’”
“You guys have the templates, which is really really great, so I used those. And Alex was tremendously helpful. He responded within an hour to some initial questions I had. It was super helpful.”
“And honestly, I basically went in a hole for six weeks. Dock just consumed me. And it ended up being just like—I can't emphasize enough—so tremendously beneficial.”
“As soon as I realized that the world was your oyster, and being able to create your own portal in there. It was amazing.”
“I should pull up a text message that I sent to someone on our team, in all caps. I was like, “OH MY GOD. I figured out how we're going to use this!”
Here’s how Ingrid and Two Front solved their sales and onboarding challenges with Dock.
1. Selling the ROI case to vendors
Ingrid first started using Dock on the vendor sales side as a way to prove the ROI of their services to dentists.
“Our biggest sales roadblock with dentists is the perception that they're going to make more money selling Invisalign without us,” said Ingrid.
The math is pretty clear cut:
“The average dentist does ten Invisalign cases a year. They think they're making $3,000 per case, but the average dentist spends six hours per case. With us, because we've streamlined the workflow, they're making a little bit less per case, but they're only spending an hour of chair time.
“We give them the systems to basically ten times their capacity. You'd think that's very easy to understand. But getting over that initial hump of ‘I make less per case’ is hard to swallow for some people.”
Ingrid says using Dock’s sales rooms to follow up with vendors has helped them visualize that ROI case much more clearly.
“We have our little presentation in there. We have our subscription fee in there. We have a little chart that says, ‘This is how much more you're going to make.’ And a case study really helps.”
Once Ingrid saw the positive impact Dock had on their sales, she realized she could integrate it into the rest of her business.
“Honestly, Dock has helped us in way more than just that capacity.”
2. Selling B2B2C at scale
Ingrid says Dock has also allowed them to create a scaleable B2B2C sales process that’s much simpler for patients.
“We also use Dock on the patient sales side. Since we treat the patients of dentists, we use it as a treatment plan presentation portal, which has been incredibly beneficial.”
“Because when you walk out of your dentist, you’re told you’ve got to get a filling, a cleaning, and Invisalign, and you're like, ‘Wow, this is really overwhelming.’”
“And suddenly [with Dock], we give you this beautiful portal where you can see everything, you have someone to follow up with you and explain it to you, and it becomes a lot more digestible.”
“We make it super visual, and that's where it's been incredibly beneficial for us. Before that they were just getting a phone call and a Canva doc. Now they're getting a full-on portal.”
Simplifying the sales process for patients has reduced the overwhelm and led to far more closed Invisalign sales for their dentists and orthodontists.
“We can see in the Dock backend that they're going into it and looking at it like 25 times before making their purchasing decision. So we know how helpful it is.
3. Onboarding non-tech-savvy customers
“Using Dock on the sales side to close the vendors is great, but for us, Dock has actually been much more beneficial on the onboarding and account management side,” said Ingrid.
“Onboarding is literally everything for us. Signing a contract, they pay basically nothing. If they don't actually use our software platform, it's a failure. It's critical to our success.”
But onboarding dentists to their software proved incredibly challenging before they found Dock.
“Our onboarding is a two-step process. There’s the implementation of the software, which is super challenging with dentists—like really, really, really challenging—and then there's the clinical training of how you actually start implementing this with patients, and what you say to your patients.”
Emailing onboarding instructions in a Google Doc wasn’t clicking with the dentists.
“This is a segment of the population that's used to being literally in people's mouths all day. Non-technical is an understatement. And it's really hard to capture their attention.
“I had one dentist yell at me, like, ‘Ingrid, we're not computer people! All these emails don't work for us!’
“We were like, ‘Oh, but all you have to do is click 1, 2, 3.’ And they're like, ‘No, it's not as simple as you think. Like, we don't live in computers.’
“And that really hit me.”
Now, Two Front uses Dock as an onboarding portal, where dentists can walk through implementation in a step-by-step checklist.
“Now, they basically have a client portal with us. It’s been incredibly helpful for them to have a one-stop shop. Dock has just simplified the presentation of things.”
“We're pre-Series A, we're still pre-building our product, which means onboarding is still fairly janky because we're using a lot of third-party services. The fact that we can present it in a streamlined way, outside of an email and some Google Docs, has been just really tremendous.”
Ingrid says the biggest unlock has been the ability to track whether the dentists have accessed their onboarding portal or not.
“Oh man, before Dock, we didn't have any tools. I was just like calling them up, being like, ‘Hey, how can we help? I don't know why this isn't working for you.’”
“Now we can see if a doctor hasn't gone in there. We've connected Dock to our Slack channel, and we just get notified all day, every day, who's looking.”
“So that's been tremendously useful because we can kind of call them out. We're like, ‘Oh, of course, you're not getting any results. You haven't even looked at this. You’ve gotta go into your portal and get rolling. Take a look at what we've provided there for you to get onboarded. ”
“Before we didn't really have any visibility into that. So the data visibility is huge.”
Results
Ingrid said the impact on her business has been obvious.
“When we introduced Dock, it was at the same time that we were making a couple of other pretty massive changes. But a couple of months later, our numbers started to really take off. We started seeing 30 percent month-over-month growth. And it's got to be a part of all the changes we made.”
But Ingrid never expected how deeply Dock would be ingrained into her customer experience.
“At first, I was hoping Dock would help us streamline sales. And it is incredibly helpful for us in vendor sales. But I think both for patient sales and account management, it's been a game-changer.”
“It's been really, really great. It's core to how we do everything. It's baked into our sales. It's baked into our post-sale process. It's baked into account management. We use it every step of the way.”
We asked Ingrid what she’d say to other founders considering using Dock:
“It's going to streamline your sales process. It's going to streamline your onboarding and account management process. And it's gonna deliver a better experience for your customers.”
Ingrid says she never expected the amount of positive feedback she’s gotten from vendors and patients.
“Everyone loves it. It's such a core part of our offering an incredible patient experience that our providers love it so much. They text and they're like, ‘Wow, like, this is fantastic. Thanks for putting that together for our patients. They love it.’
One Dock Tip
We ask every customer what tip they’d give to others using Dock. Ingrid said her biggest tip is not to be intimidated when creating your first workspaces.
“At first, just don't give up, because the potential is really, really big if you can figure out how to make it work for your company. Our portals are full-on portals now.”
“So, you know, get as creative as you want. Treat it as if it's your own product—as if it's a no-code product.”
Ingrid says that after that initial time investment, the impact scales very quickly across your team.
“It's super easy. Someone has to make a template, but then it's just copy-and-paste and you enter your customer's name. You make it super simple for your sales reps. It's a no-brainer tool for sales reps.”
One Founder-Led Sales Tip
We also asked Ingrid if she had sales advice for other early-stage founders.
“Don't try to outsource sales,” said Ingrid. “Pre-series A, we get super excited when we make some sales and we're like, ‘We're gonna hire a sales team.’”
“But I think the reality is that you're still figuring out your product and your sales process. Try not to outsource it until you're at your full capacity because it’s the best use of your time.”
“It's the closest you're ever going to get to the feedback loop. Like, I'm texting with my customers all the time and they're like, ‘But what about this?’ And I'm like, ‘Oh my God. Imagine if I didn't know this.’”
“Early on, you just have to get all the feedback.”