Definitely this is not a typical chatGPT opener like 'In the era of the ever-evolving digital landscape', but really, sales evolved to a new advanced age in the last 3-4 years.
The reason? B2B buyers have changed. Period.
Since then, organizations have started implementing modern-age tools like digital sales rooms to ease their sales process and enable their buyers.
Some sellers may now have questions like, 'Should I also need a digital sales room for my product?' or 'Who should use the digital sales room software?'. We feel you and got you covered with the answers to the questions above.
In summary, not all organizations require the implementation of a digital salesroom to their existing sales process. However, if you meet certain criteria outlined in this blog, then implementing a DSR will undoubtedly boost your sales.
“A Digital Sales Room (DSR) is a centralized platform, similar to a microsite, where sellers and buyers collaborate in a single organized portal by accessing the relevant content assets to the deal cycle. With this, sellers can create more personalized rooms with relevant organized materials that can target specific stakeholders in the buyer's team and ease their purchase decisions. “
It's all because of one primary reason: "B2B buyers have changed." In the last 3-4 years, buying behavior has evolved a lot, and so the traditional way of selling has become obsolete today, and it aggravates the complexities of selling even more.
Imagine if you're getting 6-7 emails from different vendors at the same time. Quite annoying, right? It's very hard, or nearly impossible, to go through all the emails and 10 attached pdfs and brochures to evaluate the best product within the stipulated time limit. Also, the email channel is not meant to carry out engaging and connected communication between the sellers and buyers. All these factors created a scattered buying experience filled with unnecessary complexities that expanded the sales cycle to a never-ending ping-pong game between sellers and buyers for multiple quarters.
Research shows that the buyers nearly made 27 interactions already before they get on a call with a sales representative. Buyers are proactively researching products on their own with available information and filtering the vendors who are very relevant to them. In this kind of buyer-centric era, it's essential for sellers to create their self-serve buying experience to enable buyers to drive their modern buying process.
In this scenario, digital sales rooms serve as a direct substitute for traditional emails. They offer a dedicated, personalized environment that empowers buyers to access any information they require about the product, be it a demo video or a case study—anything that aligns with their research process. Furthermore, it includes collaborative options like chat and comments, where buyers can instantly share their thoughts or queries in the portal to get answers from the sellers instead of hopping on a call.
Gartner predicted that by 2026, 30% of B2B deal cycles are going to be managed through digital sales rooms, and by 2025, 80% of sales interactions will happen via digital channels. Therefore, it is the responsibility of every seller to adapt to the new, interactive way of selling, making the buyer's purchasing process easier than ever.
Most of the B2B product purchases require substantial investments and long-term commitment from the buyers' team. The cost of a wrong decision in choosing the product is very high in terms of time, money, and effort involved. Therefore, B2B buying involves complex decision-making processes and needs approvals across various stakeholders in the team. This causes the buying team to take more time for the final purchase decision in a range from 30 days to several months.
Additionally, if the product solves intricate problems and is complex to understand, it requires thorough evaluation from the respective stakeholders within the buying team. Buyers will typically engage in extensive research and consultations with sales reps, extending the sales cycle even more.
If your product falls into the above category (in the majority, it's mid-market and enterprise solutions), which has a sales cycle ranging from 30 days to 180 days, then you should consider implementing a digital sales room software to organize all the collaboration activities between your salespeople and buyers in one place. An email inbox is no longer sufficient to execute this complex collaboration over a long sales cycle period.
Everyone in SaaS knows about the PLG (product-led growth) model, where buyers can directly opt-in for a product's free trial, play around for certain days, and make final purchase decisions with their own experience without much direct engagement with the salespeople. But not all products can fit in the PLG model because of its complex nature and extensive customization requirements for the respective buyer persona.
Due to the inability to directly showcase their product to buyers, these products are completely oriented towards SLG (sales-led growth), which typically requires more sales engagement with the buyers to unravel the complexities for them.
Non-PLG product sellers who want to create a self-serve buying experience for their customers can use digital sales rooms to craft a dedicated, personalized buying process. Through customized rooms, they can breakdown the complex product into easily digestible assets and showcase them to their buyers to readily learn and understand the benefits.
This is the crucial part, where most of the companies are facing stalled deals, never-ending sales cycles, and drop-offs. Generally, in comparison to B2C, B2B purchases involve multiple stakeholders to make the final purchase decision. However, as per Gartner research, the average number of stakeholders on the buying committee has increased to 11-20. Leaders from various departments are analyzing the chosen product and assessing it based on their individual perspectives and requirements for final consideration. This will naturally increase the complexities and ultimately impact on the longer sales cycle. Additionally, it's hard to keep everyone in the update loop and even harder to reach the key decision-makers to communicate the value.
If your deal cycle involves multiple stakeholders and you are facing the aforementioned difficulties, a digital sales room could be a suitable solution for you. It allows you to bring all stakeholders together in one room and engage with them both asynchronously and synchronously, at their own pace, using instant collaboration tools such as live chats and comments. Relying on champions alone via emails to reach your key decision-makers is no longer going to work anymore.
Self-serve onboarding is the present and future for top-performing teams, to decrease the time to value for their customers and increase product adoption with less time and effort invested. Customers also love their own pace of self-exploration instead of sitting on calls with support and sales teams. However, not every product can implement an effective self-serve onboarding module through product tutorials and in-app tooltips. Complex products with customized features that serve multiple personas need much more than that.
Digital sales rooms provide a centralized space to create tailor-made SaaS onboarding experiences, where users can easily access their needed resources, play around with product tutorial demos, and receive guidance either without or with support team assistance by just engaging with them in the room. If your product falls under the above category, then it's the right time to implement a digital sales room for your self-serve customer onboarding.
The major reason why the deal cycle is extending to months and years and the process became so complex is just because the buying process is so scattered across the channels. Every touch point, from sales discovery to deal closure and customer onboarding, is dispersed, with collaboration primarily taking place in a maze of email threads. Both buyers and sellers will be clueless about this process when they look back on their deal cycle progress.
Digital sales rooms provide a cohesive environment in which salespeople can collaborate with buyers and mutually forecast their deal cycle right from the first touchpoint. From that point, a single organized space can carry out the entire sales cycle journey, recording every interaction between salespeople and buyers. This makes buyers feel more confident and at ease throughout the sales cycle because they have a connected, coherent buying experience.
A digital sales room is designed as a secured and organized space where buyers and sellers can collaborate effectively. It allows salespeople to orchestrate the entire deal cycle by sharing relevant assets, tracking and assigning activities to the respective stakeholders, and keeping track of every conversation that happens throughout the deal. DSRs help minimize a lot of challenges that salespeople are experiencing in their day-to-day lives, from ensuring sales resource utilization to reaching out to potential decision-makers.
The key people in the sales teams who need to implement the digital salesroom into their existing flow of sales activities are listed below:
Every role in the sales team has different objectives and priorities throughout the deal cycle. At the individual role level, DSR assists everyone in different aspects, and here's how each role is getting influenced by DSR in the deal cycle.
As the frontline soldiers, SDRs are responsible for conducting the initial discovery with prospects and sharing relevant introductory assets to capture their interest. Digital sales rooms heavily assist in resource sharing, where SDRs can provide instant access to assets such as product decks, case studies, etc. and enable them to track their engagement.
In addition to sharing resources, digital sales rooms, equipped with integrated scheduling tools, assist SDRs in setting up meetings at the buyer's convenience and promote asynchronous communication through available collaboration options. In summary, digital sales rooms heavily influence and improve the efficiency of lead generation and prospecting, where SDRs can proactively act and follow up easily to build initial momentum and interest in the deal.
Account executives are the key people who bridge the gap between the buyer and the product during the buying process, and they are the ones who carry out a major part of the deal cycle on their shoulders. Today's customer expectations are highly dynamic, making it challenging to consistently engage them through timely actions that can advance the deal.
This is where the digital sales room comes into play, simplifying the entire process under a single platform. Account executives can easily craft personalized rooms for their target accounts with relevant onboarding materials, product demo videos, and other resources to collaborate with them effectively.
By closely observing each buyer's interaction with the resources, account Executives can discern the needs and potential clients to concentrate on, enabling them to make informed decisions for deal closures. With collaborative options like instant chat and commenting, AEs don't need to wait until the next call. AEs can engage in real-time chats and promptly address their buyers' inquiries.
Research indicates that the sales asset searching process is the biggest hindrance to productivity for 84% of sales executives. The digital sales room streamlines the entire sales content management process, enabling AEs to quickly identify and utilize the necessary resources, potentially saving a significant amount of time and allowing them to concentrate on enhancing their sales strategies.
Sales leaders are facing significant challenges in meeting their revenue goals. The new challenges keep on increasing, and salespeople are experiencing high friction in pitching their product among the buyers. Sales leaders have huge responsibilities to keep their teams well ahead in terms of the tech stack and strategies to balance revenue targets.
Gartner research shows that the B2B sales cycle has seen an increase of 22% in the last 5 years. Sales leaders attribute this significant change to inefficiencies in the sales process and collaboration. Furthermore, they report that customers are increasingly receptive to digital interactions during the sales cycle. The data points indicate that sales leaders are under pressure to manage their deal cycle efficiently, ensuring consistent and personalized interactions with their buyers throughout the deal cycle.
The digital sales room seems to be the only solution for the modern sales leaders, where they can capitalize on these problems through effective collaboration in one space. With the rise in the number of stakeholders in every buying team, it becomes very hard to catch up on the conversations through email threads alone.
Therefore, for the sales leaders, DSRs serve as a single, organized space where they can centralize all their communication and sales content with ease. Furthermore, it helps to evaluate each salesperson's operational efficiency. To deliver an interactive buying experience to the modern buyers and ensure seamless communication between the stakeholders, digital sales rooms remain the only choice to save their team's time and provide them an environment to focus on meaningful efforts to meet the revenue goals.
The primary responsibility of sales/revenue operations is to equip their team with the appropriate tools and technologies to optimize overall sales efficiency. However, teams frequently use multiple underutilized tools, which can complicate the process due to poor integration and collaboration.
Today, with various tools rolling out and the usage of multiple tools in the tech stack, teams need seamless integration to operate it from one place instead of toggling between multiple applications to boost their efficiency. In terms of data management, it should seamlessly flow between different platforms, where data management is crucial to extract insights and enable data-driven decisions at every step in the sales cycle.
According to research, sales reps only spend 28% of their total time in the actual selling process. This is largely attributed to the inefficiencies in the operational aspects. These aspects indicate that the operations team must ensure proper integration and data management to enhance the efficiency of the sales team in the day's complex sales activities.
The digital sales room streamlines this entire process by providing a robustly organized environment for all collaboration activities, asset storage, and tracking of buyer interactions. Additionally, the integration of the DSR with CRM streamlines the entire process within the CRM window, eliminating the need for sellers to switch between different apps. Operations teams can track the overall progress and movement across the teams and with the buying committee via analytics, which helps them to derive insights and enhance operational efficiency.
After implementing a digital sales room, it is crucial to present the post-digital sales room phase results to the sales head and management. Here's a structured approach to showing the results effectively to your sales head:
In the first place, define the key performance indicators that you must focus on to evaluate the DSR's impact on your deal cycle. Some of the key metrics are:
By this way of structured presentation, management can see the convincing results through DSR and help to secure ongoing support from the head to include the DSR as a critical element in the overall sales strategy.
It's obvious that most of the worldwide sales teams were not adapted to the digital sales culture. If you find yourself in this and wish to secure support from your management for the Digital Sales Room (DSR), the following guidelines will assist you in implementing the DSR and ensuring your team understands its value and benefits.
Even though thinking in the long term is beneficial and important, most teams prioritize solving immediate problems. That's why it's important to showcase to them the highly relevant key benefits in the first place that they can immediately attain in the next few months. Some of them are
This is one of the key steps in convincing management to answer the question, "Show me any proof for your suggestion." Collect the success stories from prominent organizations that have seen remarkable results from DSR implementation and experienced improvements in their sales performance and satisfaction among their customers. It would be more effective if the selected case study fell within your specific niche or industry, as this would make it highly relatable and convincing.
Demonstrate to them how implementing DSR could provide them with a competitive advantage by directly comparing it with your competitors' approach in the deal engagement process. Gather pertinent data and buyer's concerns about purchasing and implementing competitor's products from review sites, then emphasize these points to win your team's support. This would provide management with a clear understanding of the choices made by buyers and how they can outperform their competitors by enhancing the buyer experience.
It is necessary to acknowledge the complexities and potential concerns involved in the implementation of DSR for the team and ongoing process. To address these issues, propose practical solutions like pilot programs or phased rollouts to gradually integrate the DSR into the current process.
The overall implementation plan should not create an immediate sense of urgency. Present them with a clear action plan, including key milestones, timelines, and responsible people to demonstrate their preparedness for your gradual implementation. This will assist the management in visualizing the overall process and gaining confidence in implementing a gradual change to the current process.
Firstly, as we discussed in previous topics, determine whether your product and sales process require a digital sales room to enhance efficiency.
As you have only a limited trial period, you can't focus on multiple modules and activities to evaluate. So, it's important to define clear objectives for the trial, like reducing email usage, increasing content consumption among buyers, etc.
Next, align the key metrics with the chosen objectives, including the duration of time buyers spend, the number of stakeholders who attended the room, and so on. In this way, you can easily measure the success of your DSR in your trial period.
As the free trial has some limitations in most of the products in terms of the number of rooms to create or the number of users, etc., it is better to start the process with a few top accounts that you are already working on. It also helps to avoid clutter and unnecessary complexities in the initial stages of adapting to DSR usage.
Therefore, identify the top 2-3 accounts that are more valuable to your pipeline, and begin creating dedicated rooms for them.
Now, it's time to personalize your DSR with relevant content assets for your target accounts. Access the content repository and upload the required product demo videos, case studies, pricing documents, one pager, and other relevant onboarding materials.
You can also make use of pre-built templates to instantly customize, standardize your presentations based on your use case, and ensure consistency in your engagement.
If there are no restrictions on adding team members during the trial, feel free to invite the necessary team members from the marketing or customer success teams and engage in your internal collaborative activities within the DSR.
After the initial discovery call or demo, prepare a room with relevant assets for the buyers and present the DSR. Provide a brief overview of the chat and commenting features within the DSR, and firmly establish it as the primary source of information for all their interactions with you, replacing emails.
Encourage buyers to have asynchronous communication and content revisits from any of their stakeholders at their own pace. Doing this will make them confident and eased during their purchase and entice them to use DSR on their own.
Track how the stakeholders in your buying committee are interacting with the content assets in the DSR. With analytics, you can identify which assets are getting more traction.
With these engagement data points, you can refine your sales content efforts and easily identify the interests of your buyer to support them with additional resources or relevant follow-up that keeps them engaged in the buying process.
In modern sales, 75% of buyers want to have a rep-free buying experience. Buyers prefer not to rely on answering salespeople's calls or becoming bogged down in email threads. Digital sales rooms offer them the liberty to visit and revisit their needed product demos, brochures, and pricing documents whenever they want during the deal cycle.
This independent research, personalized assets, and organized environment elevates the buyer experience to the next level. Buyers are able to instantly get answers for their queries, easily navigate, and collaborate with fellow stakeholders to move through the next steps of the deal cycle at a rapid pace.
With a single source of truth and point of contact for everyone in the deal cycle, the digital sales room fosters communication speed between stakeholders, and instant access to relevant sales assets ultimately reduces the sales cycle length. It facilitates instant responses through chat and comment features, as well as encourages effective asynchronous engagement between the stakeholders involved. Because DSRs provide simultaneous information access to everyone with immediate responses, they help to eliminate bottlenecks caused by delayed approvals and miscommunications during the deal cycle.
The digital sales room serves as a central repository for all sales assets, such as videos, presentations, and case studies. More than a repository, it facilitates the buyer-seller interaction through instant commenting, integrated chat options, and other features like co-editing, etc. These collaborative features enable immediate feedback and discussions rather than waiting a long time for the delayed responses, fostering effective collaboration between the buyers and sellers.
No more guesswork and unpredictable deal cycles with low-potential accounts. With real-time analytics, sellers can track every buyer's interaction and know which sales assets were consumed well and which buyer accounts are most actively engaging. This data can provide a goldmine of insights about buyers' interests and deal health, allowing sales teams to make data-driven decisions and prioritize accounts with a high probability of deal closure. Following this data-driven approach can significantly reduce sales cycle length by taking timely actions with highly engaging accounts.
With streamlined access to all sales information and enhanced buyer engagement, digital sales rooms create a substantial impact on the overall win rates. Not only do DSRs foster collaboration between the buyers and sellers, but they also enable seamless communication between the internal teams like marketing, product, and customer success. This alignment helps everyone stay on the same page and address buyers' needs instantly, thereby building positive relationships with buyers that ultimately impact win-rates.
Digital sales rooms are not only utilized by sales, but with their diversified use cases and flexible capabilities, other teams like marketing and customer success also started utilizing them. Simply put, email inboxes are outdated and inadequate to meet the expectations and needs of today's buyers. Gartner states that buyers only spend 17% of the total time with vendors during their buying process.
Now the question is, have you started engaging your buyers in the remaining 83% of their time during their research? If the answer is ‘no’ for you, then now is the right time to try a digital sales room for your sales.
Definitely this is not a typical chatGPT opener like 'In the era of the ever-evolving digital landscape', but really, sales evolved to a new advanced age in the last 3-4 years.
The reason? B2B buyers have changed. Period.
Since then, organizations have started implementing modern-age tools like digital sales rooms to ease their sales process and enable their buyers.
Some sellers may now have questions like, 'Should I also need a digital sales room for my product?' or 'Who should use the digital sales room software?'. We feel you and got you covered with the answers to the questions above.
In summary, not all organizations require the implementation of a digital salesroom to their existing sales process. However, if you meet certain criteria outlined in this blog, then implementing a DSR will undoubtedly boost your sales.
“A Digital Sales Room (DSR) is a centralized platform, similar to a microsite, where sellers and buyers collaborate in a single organized portal by accessing the relevant content assets to the deal cycle. With this, sellers can create more personalized rooms with relevant organized materials that can target specific stakeholders in the buyer's team and ease their purchase decisions. “
It's all because of one primary reason: "B2B buyers have changed." In the last 3-4 years, buying behavior has evolved a lot, and so the traditional way of selling has become obsolete today, and it aggravates the complexities of selling even more.
Imagine if you're getting 6-7 emails from different vendors at the same time. Quite annoying, right? It's very hard, or nearly impossible, to go through all the emails and 10 attached pdfs and brochures to evaluate the best product within the stipulated time limit. Also, the email channel is not meant to carry out engaging and connected communication between the sellers and buyers. All these factors created a scattered buying experience filled with unnecessary complexities that expanded the sales cycle to a never-ending ping-pong game between sellers and buyers for multiple quarters.
Research shows that the buyers nearly made 27 interactions already before they get on a call with a sales representative. Buyers are proactively researching products on their own with available information and filtering the vendors who are very relevant to them. In this kind of buyer-centric era, it's essential for sellers to create their self-serve buying experience to enable buyers to drive their modern buying process.
In this scenario, digital sales rooms serve as a direct substitute for traditional emails. They offer a dedicated, personalized environment that empowers buyers to access any information they require about the product, be it a demo video or a case study—anything that aligns with their research process. Furthermore, it includes collaborative options like chat and comments, where buyers can instantly share their thoughts or queries in the portal to get answers from the sellers instead of hopping on a call.
Gartner predicted that by 2026, 30% of B2B deal cycles are going to be managed through digital sales rooms, and by 2025, 80% of sales interactions will happen via digital channels. Therefore, it is the responsibility of every seller to adapt to the new, interactive way of selling, making the buyer's purchasing process easier than ever.
Most of the B2B product purchases require substantial investments and long-term commitment from the buyers' team. The cost of a wrong decision in choosing the product is very high in terms of time, money, and effort involved. Therefore, B2B buying involves complex decision-making processes and needs approvals across various stakeholders in the team. This causes the buying team to take more time for the final purchase decision in a range from 30 days to several months.
Additionally, if the product solves intricate problems and is complex to understand, it requires thorough evaluation from the respective stakeholders within the buying team. Buyers will typically engage in extensive research and consultations with sales reps, extending the sales cycle even more.
If your product falls into the above category (in the majority, it's mid-market and enterprise solutions), which has a sales cycle ranging from 30 days to 180 days, then you should consider implementing a digital sales room software to organize all the collaboration activities between your salespeople and buyers in one place. An email inbox is no longer sufficient to execute this complex collaboration over a long sales cycle period.
Everyone in SaaS knows about the PLG (product-led growth) model, where buyers can directly opt-in for a product's free trial, play around for certain days, and make final purchase decisions with their own experience without much direct engagement with the salespeople. But not all products can fit in the PLG model because of its complex nature and extensive customization requirements for the respective buyer persona.
Due to the inability to directly showcase their product to buyers, these products are completely oriented towards SLG (sales-led growth), which typically requires more sales engagement with the buyers to unravel the complexities for them.
Non-PLG product sellers who want to create a self-serve buying experience for their customers can use digital sales rooms to craft a dedicated, personalized buying process. Through customized rooms, they can breakdown the complex product into easily digestible assets and showcase them to their buyers to readily learn and understand the benefits.
This is the crucial part, where most of the companies are facing stalled deals, never-ending sales cycles, and drop-offs. Generally, in comparison to B2C, B2B purchases involve multiple stakeholders to make the final purchase decision. However, as per Gartner research, the average number of stakeholders on the buying committee has increased to 11-20. Leaders from various departments are analyzing the chosen product and assessing it based on their individual perspectives and requirements for final consideration. This will naturally increase the complexities and ultimately impact on the longer sales cycle. Additionally, it's hard to keep everyone in the update loop and even harder to reach the key decision-makers to communicate the value.
If your deal cycle involves multiple stakeholders and you are facing the aforementioned difficulties, a digital sales room could be a suitable solution for you. It allows you to bring all stakeholders together in one room and engage with them both asynchronously and synchronously, at their own pace, using instant collaboration tools such as live chats and comments. Relying on champions alone via emails to reach your key decision-makers is no longer going to work anymore.
Self-serve onboarding is the present and future for top-performing teams, to decrease the time to value for their customers and increase product adoption with less time and effort invested. Customers also love their own pace of self-exploration instead of sitting on calls with support and sales teams. However, not every product can implement an effective self-serve onboarding module through product tutorials and in-app tooltips. Complex products with customized features that serve multiple personas need much more than that.
Digital sales rooms provide a centralized space to create tailor-made SaaS onboarding experiences, where users can easily access their needed resources, play around with product tutorial demos, and receive guidance either without or with support team assistance by just engaging with them in the room. If your product falls under the above category, then it's the right time to implement a digital sales room for your self-serve customer onboarding.
The major reason why the deal cycle is extending to months and years and the process became so complex is just because the buying process is so scattered across the channels. Every touch point, from sales discovery to deal closure and customer onboarding, is dispersed, with collaboration primarily taking place in a maze of email threads. Both buyers and sellers will be clueless about this process when they look back on their deal cycle progress.
Digital sales rooms provide a cohesive environment in which salespeople can collaborate with buyers and mutually forecast their deal cycle right from the first touchpoint. From that point, a single organized space can carry out the entire sales cycle journey, recording every interaction between salespeople and buyers. This makes buyers feel more confident and at ease throughout the sales cycle because they have a connected, coherent buying experience.
A digital sales room is designed as a secured and organized space where buyers and sellers can collaborate effectively. It allows salespeople to orchestrate the entire deal cycle by sharing relevant assets, tracking and assigning activities to the respective stakeholders, and keeping track of every conversation that happens throughout the deal. DSRs help minimize a lot of challenges that salespeople are experiencing in their day-to-day lives, from ensuring sales resource utilization to reaching out to potential decision-makers.
The key people in the sales teams who need to implement the digital salesroom into their existing flow of sales activities are listed below:
Every role in the sales team has different objectives and priorities throughout the deal cycle. At the individual role level, DSR assists everyone in different aspects, and here's how each role is getting influenced by DSR in the deal cycle.
As the frontline soldiers, SDRs are responsible for conducting the initial discovery with prospects and sharing relevant introductory assets to capture their interest. Digital sales rooms heavily assist in resource sharing, where SDRs can provide instant access to assets such as product decks, case studies, etc. and enable them to track their engagement.
In addition to sharing resources, digital sales rooms, equipped with integrated scheduling tools, assist SDRs in setting up meetings at the buyer's convenience and promote asynchronous communication through available collaboration options. In summary, digital sales rooms heavily influence and improve the efficiency of lead generation and prospecting, where SDRs can proactively act and follow up easily to build initial momentum and interest in the deal.
Account executives are the key people who bridge the gap between the buyer and the product during the buying process, and they are the ones who carry out a major part of the deal cycle on their shoulders. Today's customer expectations are highly dynamic, making it challenging to consistently engage them through timely actions that can advance the deal.
This is where the digital sales room comes into play, simplifying the entire process under a single platform. Account executives can easily craft personalized rooms for their target accounts with relevant onboarding materials, product demo videos, and other resources to collaborate with them effectively.
By closely observing each buyer's interaction with the resources, account Executives can discern the needs and potential clients to concentrate on, enabling them to make informed decisions for deal closures. With collaborative options like instant chat and commenting, AEs don't need to wait until the next call. AEs can engage in real-time chats and promptly address their buyers' inquiries.
Research indicates that the sales asset searching process is the biggest hindrance to productivity for 84% of sales executives. The digital sales room streamlines the entire sales content management process, enabling AEs to quickly identify and utilize the necessary resources, potentially saving a significant amount of time and allowing them to concentrate on enhancing their sales strategies.
Sales leaders are facing significant challenges in meeting their revenue goals. The new challenges keep on increasing, and salespeople are experiencing high friction in pitching their product among the buyers. Sales leaders have huge responsibilities to keep their teams well ahead in terms of the tech stack and strategies to balance revenue targets.
Gartner research shows that the B2B sales cycle has seen an increase of 22% in the last 5 years. Sales leaders attribute this significant change to inefficiencies in the sales process and collaboration. Furthermore, they report that customers are increasingly receptive to digital interactions during the sales cycle. The data points indicate that sales leaders are under pressure to manage their deal cycle efficiently, ensuring consistent and personalized interactions with their buyers throughout the deal cycle.
The digital sales room seems to be the only solution for the modern sales leaders, where they can capitalize on these problems through effective collaboration in one space. With the rise in the number of stakeholders in every buying team, it becomes very hard to catch up on the conversations through email threads alone.
Therefore, for the sales leaders, DSRs serve as a single, organized space where they can centralize all their communication and sales content with ease. Furthermore, it helps to evaluate each salesperson's operational efficiency. To deliver an interactive buying experience to the modern buyers and ensure seamless communication between the stakeholders, digital sales rooms remain the only choice to save their team's time and provide them an environment to focus on meaningful efforts to meet the revenue goals.
The primary responsibility of sales/revenue operations is to equip their team with the appropriate tools and technologies to optimize overall sales efficiency. However, teams frequently use multiple underutilized tools, which can complicate the process due to poor integration and collaboration.
Today, with various tools rolling out and the usage of multiple tools in the tech stack, teams need seamless integration to operate it from one place instead of toggling between multiple applications to boost their efficiency. In terms of data management, it should seamlessly flow between different platforms, where data management is crucial to extract insights and enable data-driven decisions at every step in the sales cycle.
According to research, sales reps only spend 28% of their total time in the actual selling process. This is largely attributed to the inefficiencies in the operational aspects. These aspects indicate that the operations team must ensure proper integration and data management to enhance the efficiency of the sales team in the day's complex sales activities.
The digital sales room streamlines this entire process by providing a robustly organized environment for all collaboration activities, asset storage, and tracking of buyer interactions. Additionally, the integration of the DSR with CRM streamlines the entire process within the CRM window, eliminating the need for sellers to switch between different apps. Operations teams can track the overall progress and movement across the teams and with the buying committee via analytics, which helps them to derive insights and enhance operational efficiency.
After implementing a digital sales room, it is crucial to present the post-digital sales room phase results to the sales head and management. Here's a structured approach to showing the results effectively to your sales head:
In the first place, define the key performance indicators that you must focus on to evaluate the DSR's impact on your deal cycle. Some of the key metrics are:
By this way of structured presentation, management can see the convincing results through DSR and help to secure ongoing support from the head to include the DSR as a critical element in the overall sales strategy.
It's obvious that most of the worldwide sales teams were not adapted to the digital sales culture. If you find yourself in this and wish to secure support from your management for the Digital Sales Room (DSR), the following guidelines will assist you in implementing the DSR and ensuring your team understands its value and benefits.
Even though thinking in the long term is beneficial and important, most teams prioritize solving immediate problems. That's why it's important to showcase to them the highly relevant key benefits in the first place that they can immediately attain in the next few months. Some of them are
This is one of the key steps in convincing management to answer the question, "Show me any proof for your suggestion." Collect the success stories from prominent organizations that have seen remarkable results from DSR implementation and experienced improvements in their sales performance and satisfaction among their customers. It would be more effective if the selected case study fell within your specific niche or industry, as this would make it highly relatable and convincing.
Demonstrate to them how implementing DSR could provide them with a competitive advantage by directly comparing it with your competitors' approach in the deal engagement process. Gather pertinent data and buyer's concerns about purchasing and implementing competitor's products from review sites, then emphasize these points to win your team's support. This would provide management with a clear understanding of the choices made by buyers and how they can outperform their competitors by enhancing the buyer experience.
It is necessary to acknowledge the complexities and potential concerns involved in the implementation of DSR for the team and ongoing process. To address these issues, propose practical solutions like pilot programs or phased rollouts to gradually integrate the DSR into the current process.
The overall implementation plan should not create an immediate sense of urgency. Present them with a clear action plan, including key milestones, timelines, and responsible people to demonstrate their preparedness for your gradual implementation. This will assist the management in visualizing the overall process and gaining confidence in implementing a gradual change to the current process.
Firstly, as we discussed in previous topics, determine whether your product and sales process require a digital sales room to enhance efficiency.
As you have only a limited trial period, you can't focus on multiple modules and activities to evaluate. So, it's important to define clear objectives for the trial, like reducing email usage, increasing content consumption among buyers, etc.
Next, align the key metrics with the chosen objectives, including the duration of time buyers spend, the number of stakeholders who attended the room, and so on. In this way, you can easily measure the success of your DSR in your trial period.
As the free trial has some limitations in most of the products in terms of the number of rooms to create or the number of users, etc., it is better to start the process with a few top accounts that you are already working on. It also helps to avoid clutter and unnecessary complexities in the initial stages of adapting to DSR usage.
Therefore, identify the top 2-3 accounts that are more valuable to your pipeline, and begin creating dedicated rooms for them.
Now, it's time to personalize your DSR with relevant content assets for your target accounts. Access the content repository and upload the required product demo videos, case studies, pricing documents, one pager, and other relevant onboarding materials.
You can also make use of pre-built templates to instantly customize, standardize your presentations based on your use case, and ensure consistency in your engagement.
If there are no restrictions on adding team members during the trial, feel free to invite the necessary team members from the marketing or customer success teams and engage in your internal collaborative activities within the DSR.
After the initial discovery call or demo, prepare a room with relevant assets for the buyers and present the DSR. Provide a brief overview of the chat and commenting features within the DSR, and firmly establish it as the primary source of information for all their interactions with you, replacing emails.
Encourage buyers to have asynchronous communication and content revisits from any of their stakeholders at their own pace. Doing this will make them confident and eased during their purchase and entice them to use DSR on their own.
Track how the stakeholders in your buying committee are interacting with the content assets in the DSR. With analytics, you can identify which assets are getting more traction.
With these engagement data points, you can refine your sales content efforts and easily identify the interests of your buyer to support them with additional resources or relevant follow-up that keeps them engaged in the buying process.
In modern sales, 75% of buyers want to have a rep-free buying experience. Buyers prefer not to rely on answering salespeople's calls or becoming bogged down in email threads. Digital sales rooms offer them the liberty to visit and revisit their needed product demos, brochures, and pricing documents whenever they want during the deal cycle.
This independent research, personalized assets, and organized environment elevates the buyer experience to the next level. Buyers are able to instantly get answers for their queries, easily navigate, and collaborate with fellow stakeholders to move through the next steps of the deal cycle at a rapid pace.
With a single source of truth and point of contact for everyone in the deal cycle, the digital sales room fosters communication speed between stakeholders, and instant access to relevant sales assets ultimately reduces the sales cycle length. It facilitates instant responses through chat and comment features, as well as encourages effective asynchronous engagement between the stakeholders involved. Because DSRs provide simultaneous information access to everyone with immediate responses, they help to eliminate bottlenecks caused by delayed approvals and miscommunications during the deal cycle.
The digital sales room serves as a central repository for all sales assets, such as videos, presentations, and case studies. More than a repository, it facilitates the buyer-seller interaction through instant commenting, integrated chat options, and other features like co-editing, etc. These collaborative features enable immediate feedback and discussions rather than waiting a long time for the delayed responses, fostering effective collaboration between the buyers and sellers.
No more guesswork and unpredictable deal cycles with low-potential accounts. With real-time analytics, sellers can track every buyer's interaction and know which sales assets were consumed well and which buyer accounts are most actively engaging. This data can provide a goldmine of insights about buyers' interests and deal health, allowing sales teams to make data-driven decisions and prioritize accounts with a high probability of deal closure. Following this data-driven approach can significantly reduce sales cycle length by taking timely actions with highly engaging accounts.
With streamlined access to all sales information and enhanced buyer engagement, digital sales rooms create a substantial impact on the overall win rates. Not only do DSRs foster collaboration between the buyers and sellers, but they also enable seamless communication between the internal teams like marketing, product, and customer success. This alignment helps everyone stay on the same page and address buyers' needs instantly, thereby building positive relationships with buyers that ultimately impact win-rates.
Digital sales rooms are not only utilized by sales, but with their diversified use cases and flexible capabilities, other teams like marketing and customer success also started utilizing them. Simply put, email inboxes are outdated and inadequate to meet the expectations and needs of today's buyers. Gartner states that buyers only spend 17% of the total time with vendors during their buying process.
Now the question is, have you started engaging your buyers in the remaining 83% of their time during their research? If the answer is ‘no’ for you, then now is the right time to try a digital sales room for your sales.
