Digital sales rooms are centralized virtual spaces, like microsites, that enable sellers and buyers to regularly engage and collaborate in a centralized environment with relevant sales content throughout the deal cycle. It acts as a single source of truth to share content, engage, and manage every action in the process between all the participating stakeholders in a more secure and organized way, unlike complex email threads and scattered chats.
Through their own research, modern buyers are well-informed, even before and during the sales process. Sales content plays a huge role at every stage of the purchase journey. But sellers are sharing those multiple informative content pieces across a variety of channels, including emails, video conferencing, google drive and chats.
With a digital sales room, sellers can share various types of sales collateral, like documents, demo videos, call recordings, interactive product tours, etc. Buyers will get an organized purchase experience in a single environment, where they can easily address their needed assets, consume them, and instantly engage with the buyers in real-time through chats and comments instead of waiting over for the next meeting. Sellers can track this engagement through analytics and insights, prioritizing buyers with high intent and iterating their strategies.
McKinsey research shows that on average 70-80% of B2B buyers now prefer remote human interactions or a digital self-service in their purchasing process. In short, modern buyers want a 'rep-free’ experience in their purchase journey. Buyers don’t want to scout their email inboxes and skim through webinar videos for the information they need, nor do they want to connect with a sales rep to get that asset. All they want is a single centralized platform where they could get an organized stack of sales content to quickly access and collaborate in real-time with the sellers for their instant queries.
As everyone knows, b2b purchases aren't closed with a single person’s decision. With the increased number of stakeholders in today’s buying committee, sellers often find it difficult to reach and engage every stakeholder in the buyers’ team. Digital sales rooms act as a single collaborative space where sellers can uncover the hidden stakeholders and collaborate with everyone in the committee.
Overall, to cope with the modern buyer’s pace and simplify their self-research and decision-making process, traditional tools like emails, chats, and content sharing through Drive became obsolete. Digital sales rooms help to streamline the whole sales process in a more efficient way than ever by offering them a connected buying experience at every stage.
CRMs always remain the core foundation for any sales team. It should be a single point of source to list all the prospects with day-to-day status updates in the sales process. Today, in addition to the CRM, various tools for different sales use cases have emerged, and sales teams can't achieve maximum efficiency if they need to frequently toggle between the CRM and other tools, like digital sales rooms. The integration of the digital sales room with the CRM allows for the central handling of all actions, eliminating the need for app switching.
The sales process involves sharing various documents, both internally among team members and externally with prospects. Previously, we relied solely on PDFs and documents for document sharing, but today's evaluation stage requires the sharing of various content types, such as videos, interactive demos, and other large files. Secure e-signature features, once completed and during the contract process, are essential to accommodate buyers from various global locations. Digital sales rooms offer both solutions with extensive features like content repositories, multimedia support, and e-signature modules, which provide a single point of contact for managing the documentation.
If you continue to rely solely on email threads for communication with your buyers, you are jeopardizing your buyer experience and potentially losing a significant number of deals. Buyers hate the endless email threads where it is so complex to locate their needed documents and go through the overall progress in chronological order. Additionally, you cannot manage your content versions without sending a follow-up email. It's unclear whether the buyer will be able to access and receive updates on time. Digital sales rooms replace these email threads with real-time collaboration features like commenting, chat, and tagging options inside the portal. Both sellers and buyers will get timely notifications and collaborate in real-time without losing momentum.
Here's where the digital sales rooms truly shine. DSRs are not only meant to store and share sales assets with your buyers with a single link. It’s a treasure of actionable data that can track and analyze how your buyers are interacting with your sales assets, which parts they are most interested in, and overall, it gives you a complete breakdown of how much time each stakeholder has spent in your room. Leveraging these data points, you can easily spot high-intent buyers, which helps to improve your sales content creation efforts.
According to Gartner, B2B buyers give more importance to the buying experience during the sales cycle, more than the actual product and pricing. Consider two vendors, where one is engaging with you through multiple distributed channels like emails, chats, and meetings, and the other is connecting with you via a single point of contact, i.e., digital sales rooms. Naturally, you will get a sense of ease with the second vendor, and that factor has a positive impact on the deal cycle.
Today’s buying process is more complex than ever because hundreds of products are emerging in each category. Buyers are already experiencing frustration with their self-directed research process when attempting to choose the ideal solution. This is where the buyer experience plays a crucial role, aiding the buyers by streamlining the evaluation process in a more tailored manner. Thmode digital sales room helps to deliver an exceptional buyer experience, which will easily attract potential prospects during their evaluation process.
Digital sales rooms help sellers manage all their activities in a more organized way, as they provide a single space to keep everything on track. Usage of too many tools is not a fancy thing to brag about; at the end of the day, switching between the tools leads to time wastage, and it's very tough for the sellers not to miss any crucial action or data when working across multiple accounts. Digital sales room provides a single platform that facilitates the storage and management of sales assets, the creation of mutual action plans, and follow-up with prospects, thereby enhancing their daily productivity.
A well-organized and streamlined sales process will make your salespeople work smarter and not burn out from working too hard. It requires the elimination of unnecessary manual actions and the automation of all possible tasks within the workflow. Digital sales rooms allow sellers to streamline all their sales engagement activities in a connected workflow, where they don't need to nitpick on manual actions like searching sales content, email follow-up, calendar update, content versioning, etc. With a one-time setup in a centralized space, they can handle all their activities in a more streamlined manner, which would save a lot of time and effort in the long run.
One of the crucial factors between a top-performing sales team and a mediocre team is how they leverage data deeply in their sales process. With the right data points in the modern age, sellers can easily predict in the earlier stages which buyers are most likely going to purchase or are not so serious in their buying efforts. This data is a paramount goldmine, as it prevents sellers from focusing on the unqualified prospects and tire-kickers in the pipeline. A digital sales room gives you the capability to track every buyer action on your sales assets. Based on their engagement data, you can breakdown the data points like time spent, participated stakeholders from the committee, content sharing made, number of comments, etc. This ultimately assists you in making decisions supported by these data points, rather than relying solely on imprecise assumptions.
Not all sales teams and processes are the same for every organization. Based on the complexity of the product, the target customers, and the strategy, every sales team follows different workflows, and the priorities vary. Some crucial factors to consider when determining whether you need a digital sales room are:
Digital sales rooms primarily cater to complex products that require a long sales cycle and involve multiple stakeholders. Therefore, it is vital to analyze what your top sales objectives are. Simply put, the end objective of implementing a digital sales room is to simplify your deal cycle, not the other way around. With this aspect in mind, assess your sales process and list out the top priorities you want to accomplish by implementing a digital sales room.
At present, digital sales rooms are solving different use cases throughout the customer journey to provide an organized buyer experience. It includes mutual action plans, a content library, contract management, and customer onboarding. As mentioned earlier, assess your sales process and break down the top priorities you need to focus on immediately. Priorities differ across various sales teams; while one can plan to use the digital sales rooms throughout their pipeline, others will utilize them just for content sharing and tracking their buyer engagement. Based on your needs, prioritize the digital salesroom vendors who offer the right capabilities to meet your specific objectives.
Today, every team has their own sales tech stack based on their workflows. CRM is always the central hub for any sales team. An efficient digital sales room should be capable enough to rightly fit in with your existing tech stack, which comprises all the tools like CRM, marketing automation, content management systems, analytics, and CPQ. With seamless integration into your existing workflow, you can easily achieve a centralized data-driven space that can drive better collaboration with your buyers, which ultimately leads to more deal closures.
When implementing a digital sales room for the first time in an organization, it is critical to onboard and train the salespeople. They should get dedicated guidance on the complete breakdown of a digital sales room's capabilities and how they can implement each of them in their existing sales process. During the initial phase, it is better to assign a person for frequent training and shadowing to effectively train them. In this process, the mentor should ensure a smooth transition from their existing tool usage to digital sales rooms in terms of collaborating with their prospects.
Treating every lead as a good one won't yield any sales results at all. One of the crucial skills that salespeople need is the ability to manage and prioritize high-intent leads and spend their maximum time and effort to close them. Otherwise, it would end up in chaos by getting ghosted by the tire-kickers. Armed with a digital sales room, sellers can easily spot qualified, high-intent buyers by tracking their interactions inside the room. Also, for consistent nurturing, sellers can easily engage by chatting or commenting in the relevant modules in real-time. There's no need to send follow-up emails, endure days of waiting, and remain invisible in the inbox deluge.
Personalization is hard. Personalizing at scale is even harder. No buyer is prepared to focus on content that lacks customization and is tailor-made for their needs. A digital sales room allows sellers to easily craft a customized room from scratch or edit using pre-existing templates in a jiffy. Not only can you provide them with PDFs and documents, but you can also incorporate a brief video in which you greet them and directly discuss their needs. This will have a huge impact on standing out from the crowd of sellers who are sending the same old pdfs to their email inboxes. You can also integrate the relevant automation tools for personalization and make customized rooms without spending much time.
Across all industries, at the final stage of sales, less than half of proposals succeed, and salespeople encounter difficulties during the final closure phase. This is mainly due to poor contract and proposal management, where buyers are frustrated and lose trust. Digital sales rooms simplify this process through organized proposal management, where sellers can craft personalized sales proposals that are unique to the respective buyer. Moreover, DSRs automate the creation of quotes and enable real-time collaboration and edits between buyers and sellers, eliminating the need for sellers to repeatedly revise and send the proposal. With real-time insights, sellers can take immediate actions such as mapping the relevant stakeholders, setting up reminders and renewals, and engaging promptly with the latest versions that are readily available to the buyers at any time, ensuring a seamless transfer of proposals and contracts.
A successful deal closure happens through healthy collaboration between all the stakeholders from both the seller and buyer ends. With the increased number of stakeholders, especially on the buyers' side, it has become very complex for the sellers to engage everyone through complicated email threads. The digital sales room uncomplicates this factor by providing a single dedicated virtual space where sellers can share presentations, proposals, and videos in a well-organized format. With this centralized platform, everyone in the deal cycle has the advantage of a common place to gather, consume information, and resolve their queries instantly in real-time discussions. For both internal and external collaboration, digital sales rooms help to achieve a seamless collaborative experience.
The primary cause of misalignment between any sales and marketing team is the lack of understanding about the performance of sales content. This assumption-led approach to content creation resulted in significant time and effort waste, as well as misunderstandings among both the sales and marketing teams. With a digital sales room, from the moment a link is shared, every buyer interaction inside the room will be tracked. Simply by watching the real-time impact and analyzing the engagement data from every stakeholder, sellers can take data-backed decisions to fine-tune their next set of actions for improving their sales content.
With dashboard views and reports, the digital sales room can give a holistic view of accounts based on the stages in the deal cycle and interactions made by the buyers. Every day, this comprehensive view provides a concise evaluation of the sales team's performance, highlighting the top buyers for further attention. Sellers can easily monitor their sales performance regularly with the right KPIs, such as potential accounts engaged, time spent by buyers, top-performing assets, the number of decision-makers engaged, and so on.
As said earlier, sellers can easily track and analyze the engagement reports extracted from the digital sales room. Sellers can extract fruitful insights from this data, gaining a deeper understanding of their customers' needs and interests. With this extensive knowledge and understanding, marketing teams can craft well-targeted campaigns, and sales teams can design and improvise their strategies to connect better and convert their prospects faster in the deal cycle.
Robust security measures are crucial because digital sales rooms handle highly confidential and sensitive information such as product pricing, customer data, top stakeholders' emails, and contract details. Buyers expect their data to be double protected when sharing it through a digital salesroom. For this, DSRs should be capable enough, with extensive capabilities like access and permission controls, content versioning, data encryption, and secure file sharing with strong authentication steps. Both sellers and buyers should be very keen on following the security protocols by utilizing the above-mentioned DSR's capabilities in the right way. Sellers must regularly review and update the security settings, and it's their responsibility to educate the buyers' team properly to follow the security measures.
Ensuring compliance with data protection regulations is one of the primary considerations when considering a digital sales room, and it reflects the security and trustworthiness of its use. It is imperative for any digital sales room to consider accreditation with regulations such as GDPR, ISO, and SOC. In this way, buyers can gain the trust and confidence to implement a secure and safe environment in their sales process.
The sales content assets fuel the sales process at every stage of the buyer journey. By emphasizing secure document sharing and storage, the digital sales room helps sales teams seamlessly store, protect, and operate all the sensitive information at ease with the multiple accounts they are dealing with every day. By leveraging capabilities like access controls, data encryption, and automatic content updates, both sellers and buyers can focus on seamless collaboration in real-time instead of worrying about a data breach.
Currently, every one of us is sailing in the “there’s an AI for that” era. Not a decade ago, but in just the last three to five years, the emergence of advanced data enrichment and AI automation tools revolutionized every industry and department's work practices. Sales are not an exception to this wave, and in fact, this emerging technology and trend played a key role in the advancement of new and efficient sales methodologies. State-of-the-art technologies have significantly transformed how sales teams operate today, allowing sellers to concentrate more on the "actual selling" process by reducing the number of manual activities that consume the sales team's bandwidth. Ultimately, this saves a significant amount of time and effort in their daily sales, leading to a higher number of deal closures within shorter sales cycles, all while improving the buyer experience.
Today, remote selling is very prominent and has become the new normal in the sales industry. With remote and hybrid cultures, both sellers and buyers work in different time zones and geographies, so the need for digital sales has become abundant. Digital sales are all about serving the right information and engaging at the right time, and digital sales rooms help to achieve that aspect seamlessly. Modern sales teams strategically focus their efforts on the buyer's journey, designing every step to consistently engage buyers through digital sales rooms. The shift is so evident that winning teams are leveraging modern sales strategies through signal and data-led engagements through digital sales rooms instead of assumption-led spray-and-pray strategies using traditional tools and methodologies.
To maximize the efficiency and benefits of a digital sales room, regular educational measures should be given to SDRs, AEs, marketers, and customer success in terms of breaking down various use cases and capabilities. Different teams will use the DSR for their specific needs, but all teams should regularly receive extensive training. This knowledge base and skill development will help them easily transition from their old sales methodologies and leverage the digital sales rooms to the maximum level in their day-to-day actions, without any dependencies throughout the sales cycle. This can be easily implemented by infusing the DSR training into the existing sales training and coaching program.
The sales teams that periodically iterate, reflect, and immediately adapt the changes based on their previous efforts are the ones who are on the right growth track. This is a challenging task, as many sales teams struggle with inefficient strategies and operations at their core, leading to seller burnout and eventual failure. Implementing a digital sales room in a flawed sales process at the base won’t yield any fruitful results. Regular assessments of strategy, operations, and execution efforts are necessary to mitigate this issue. We should implement changes based on the insights from this evaluation process, ensuring the sales teams remain flexible and adaptable to the dynamics of the new process. With this kind of practice and approach, sales teams can get their maximum mileage out of adding digital sales rooms to their sales.
Today, everyone is sending outbound emails and trying to knock on the buyers’ doors through LinkedIn messages. But successful salespeople can cut through the noise by embracing innovation in their actions and collaborating with their peers. Whatever successful process or framework you establish will saturate and become obsolete as the market and competition change. Therefore, don’t try to limit your salespeople’s efforts inside a box. Design and establish a healthy environment with the help of digital sales rooms, where salespeople can easily collaborate with internal team members and buying committee. Encourage your team to take innovative actions without imposing rigid process boundaries. This approach will open new gates and spark thoughtful ideas across the team members, which leads to an overall healthy sales environment.
Garter states that, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales are going to happen predominantly through digital channels. The B2B buying process has been evolving rapidly, and it has become more complex than ever. Today, choosing a product that accurately aligns with the buyer's goals and other factors, such as pricing and security, is a challenging task. Therefore, it is the sellers' responsibility to streamline the buying process, and traditional tools and approaches are ineffective in achieving this. The digital sales room serves as the only savior, providing an organized and delightful buyer experience that can expedite deal closures in a shorter cycle.
Buyer enablement
Buyer enablement is the process of supporting buyers throughout their purchase journey by consistently collaborating, which in turn facilitates their decision-making process when buying a product.
Buyer engagement
Buyer engagement is the interaction that happens between sellers and individuals in the buyer's team during the sales process.
Buyer experience
Buyer experience is the overall impression and guidance a prospect gains from their interactions with a company during a purchase journey.
Content analytics
Content analytics extracts data by tracking buyer engagement and how prospects share and consume the content.
Compliance
Compliance with data protection refers to the product's ability to adhere to the regulations created to protect sensitive, confidential information collected and encourage individuals' rights to control access to their data.
Content management
Sales content management is a process or activity that enables team members to quickly find, personalize, and distribute content to the appropriate person at the right time.
Contract management
Contract management is the process of managing and administering the contract lifecycle by managing deliverables, deadlines, and ensuring compliance and terms to properly close a deal with the buyer's trust.
Content personalization
Content personalization is the process of creating tailor-made content that is more specific to a buyer's interests and needs.
Digital sales room
Digital sales rooms are centralized virtual spaces, like microsites, that enable sellers and buyers to regularly engage and collaborate in a centralized environment.
E-signatures
E-signatures are electronic signatures used for secured contracts and proposals in a virtual space.
Mutual action plan
A mutual action plan is a collaborative document that comprises a list of actions to be done in a timeline, that gives clear visibility on the overall sales process to both buyers and sellers.
Sales enablement
Sales enablement equips sellers with quality information through content and the necessary tools to perform at their maximum efficiency.
Training and onboarding
Training and onboarding is the process of educating salespeople to improve their knowledge and skills using effective resources to keep them highly productive.
Training and onboarding is the process of equipping new sales hires with the necessary knowledge, skills, and resources to become productive and successful members of the sales team.
Virtual selling
Virtual selling is a sales process that completely happens between sellers and buyers remotely through online mediums.
