BC Startup Sales Podcast — Content Effectiveness During COVID-19 with Russ Heddleston (DocSend)

Following our pandemic theme, this week we had our friend Russ Heddleston on to talk Content Effectiveness During COVID-19. Russ knows a bit about this topic as DocSend is the market leader in secure document sharing and tracking. The team has built an incredible product in market with tens of thousands of customers and millions of document views per month. He thinks hard about account based marketing, sales content effectiveness, sales enablement and more. We’ve covered early content marketing and sales marketing with prior podcasts, but this was the first that talked about what works and how the world is changing amidst COVID-19.

We started the podcast talking about some of the scale that DocSend has in terms of document views and customers. They are able to analyze such a large amount of data that any seller should pay attention to the outputs. Russ spent a bit of time talking about what makes for effective content at a high level. How long people view your sales deck, what material within matters and what does not, and finally what is the most effective areas DocSend sees in decks. Within this, we cover pricing and case studies as areas that are the highest performing types of content. Russ and I then covered what he is seeing around COVID-19 and content effectiveness during COVID-19. Russ covers viewing pattern changes, industry (i.e. media or hospitality) issues within their sales decks, and finally pipeline and how he has seen re-prioritization and deal closing from prospects. We then moved on to how sellers need to adapt their content to this “new normal” and where the focus will be in the coming months and years. While not specific to the topic, Russ and I closed on some details on fundraising data and what he is seeing in the short term as it relates to entrepreneurs raising money. Give it a listen and we hope you enjoy it.

Russ is the Co-Founder and CEO of DocSend, a secure document sharing and tracking solution that helps professionals build relationships and close business. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Microsoft, and Trulia. Russ holds a BS/MS in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

If you liked “Content Effectiveness During COVID-19” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.