Both Outreach and SalesLoft rolled out integrations with sales asset manager DocSend in the past few weeks.  DocSend provides sales reps with a managed content library from which reps send trackable collateral links instead of e-mailing large files to customers and prospects.  DocSend then tracks the links and provides read alerts and viewing analytics.  Conceptually, it is similar to the PointDrive service integrated into LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

“By partnering with two leaders in the space, we’re enabling sales reps to see how accounts and individual contacts engage with the content in their email outreach throughout the sales cycle,” blogged DocSend Senior Product Marketing Manager Sonja Jacob.  “Using DocSend Campaign Links, sellers can create a unique link to share content in their email cadences, without ever leaving workflows in either tool.”

The combined services allow reps to directly insert links into Outreach templates and snippets while providing sales managers with sales rep analytics.  The Outreach partnership helps sales reps “find, share, track, and present the documents that close deals,” said Jordan Greene, Director of Product Marketing at Outreach.  “Even better, you’ll have deeper insights into what content works throughout your sales cycle.”

DocSend helps reps find the right sales content and create a “fully trackable campaign link without ever having leaving your workflow,” said Greene.  Campaign links are customized for each sales rep and can be added “in just a few seconds.”

DocSend analytics track where, when, and how prospects and customers engage with sales collateral.  DocSend supports document forward tracking, password setting, and flagging collateral as non-downloadable.  Campaign links are available both within templates and as standard email links.

Both Outreach and SalesLoft users must have DocSend licenses and the DocSend Chrome extension installed.  DocSend Team is priced at $30 per user per month and supports a white label document viewer, instant notifications, team reporting, and mail merge links.

SalesLoft has a freemium DocSend integration in the works.

SalesLoft offers campaign links that dynamically update within templates allowing admins to build Team Templates with a dynamic campaign link tracked to individual reps.  “This means admins can create a SalesLoft Team Template with a dynamic Campaign Link and the content will be tracked separately for each SalesLoft user specific to the recipient, said SalesLoft VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester.

As a former Product Manager, I can understand how frustrating it is when you have a great new capability and a top competitor launches it at the same time.  You think you have a differentiator and all of a sudden you find out it is a checkbox item.  This scenario is more likely to happen with non-exclusive, API-based partnerships as implementation costs and windows are reduced.

One of the vendors was emphasizing that they were first to market, but whether this was by days or weeks is moot if there is little differentiating the new feature between the competitors.  In the end, customers and prospects are interested in value provided with the current offering, not who beat who to the market by a few days.  When vendors are competing to identify and integrate new partner content and features into their offerings, it is the end users that win.  Over the past 18 months, both SalesLoft and Outreach have rapidly expanded their ecosystems providing significant value to their sales acceleration (ABSD) offerings.