Digital selling has already become the de facto medium for most B2B Sales. According to Gartner, as many as 80 percent of interactions between B2B buyers and sellers will take place through digital channels by 2025. 

And while this offers greater flexibility and scalability to the sellers, it is also becoming more and more challenging to reach and engage the buyers. But you can break through all the noise and take your buyer engagement to the next level by focusing on one simple thing: delivering a personalized experience to each buyer and enabling deeper real-time customer engagement.

Well, it's not so simple, but this is where Digital Sales Rooms come to the rescue. 

By offering a dedicated space for personalized content and meaningful conversations, digital sales rooms remove friction from the buying process and help accelerate a deal toward closing in a very smooth and simple way. 

In this blog, we’ll cover what digital sales rooms really are and how can you leverage one for enabling your buyers and accelerating your deals.

So let’s dive right in!

What Is a Digital Sales Room?

A digital sales room is a microsite where sellers can collaborate with buyers and share content in a highly personalized, engaging and secure environment. Also referred to as "digital deal rooms" or "sales microsites", they allow B2B businesses to gain detailed insights about how the buyer engages with sales content and measure their buying intent.

Using the digital sales rooms, all stakeholders have easy access to the sales collaterals shared by the seller. This makes it easier for the prospect to get internal buy-in and accelerate the sales cycle. 

One key benefit of DSRs for sellers is the ability to capture and track buyer engagement insights. By monitoring how buyers, partners, and third-party stakeholders interact with sales content, sellers can gain knowledge of the buying intent and share hyper-relevant information to drive decision-making.  

How Does a Digital Sales Room Work?

A digital sales room is a customer-facing space where sellers upload and share curated content for the buyers to access. 

Here is an overview of how a digital sales room work:

• Sellers create a central library of all content assets (e.g. blog articles, videos, case studies, datasheets, or any piece of content really). They assign relevant metatags, buyer personas, lifecycle stages, industries, and topics to discover the right content at the right time quickly. 
• Once a central content hub is up and running, the next step is to create a branded and dynamic digital sales room for the buyer. This digital deal room is your customer-facing microsite and can be personalized the way you want.
• The seller shares a single URL with the buyer using which they can access their tailored virtual deal room and go through the content shared with them and communicate with the seller. 
• These deal rooms can be updated on the fly so instead of sharing each content asset individually by email or IMs, the seller can simply add new materials to the deal room and the buyer is notified of this update. This way, sellers are able to communicate hyper-relevant and personalized information which is readily available to all the stakeholders from the buying side. 
• The seller can now access complete analytics about which content pieces a buyer viewed, how much time they spent on reading a particular page or a slide, etc. With real-time insights, it is easier to help your buyers throughout their journey and make sure they have a great experience with you.

Why Use One?

With the majority of sales decisions taking place online, digital sales rooms have become essential to deliver a smooth B2B buying experience. They streamline and simplify the chaotic buyer journey that involves more channels, stakeholders, and interactions than ever before. 

Here are the top 4 reasons why digital sales rooms are a must-have for any B2B sales organisation:

1. Improve the productivity of your sales reps

As your business expands and a higher number of leads start coming in, your sales reps have to spend more hours engaging, enabling, and converting customers. Without visibility into which leads and deals are more engaged, they would not know where to put the focus and thus spend countless extra hours trying to reach the right ones.

Digital sales rooms increase the productivity of your sales reps by making it simpler and easier to engage with the right buyers with the right resources at a right time. What’s more, by making relevant content self-accessible to the buyer, digital deal rooms also allow your sales reps to serve as trusted advisors and help the customers every step of the way. 

2. Increase content consumption

The benefits of digital sales rooms are not just reserved for sales reps. They offer immense value to marketers as well by providing them insights into how prospects engage with and consume content. 

Digital sales rooms give you insights into the performance of your content assets and using this data, marketing can optimise the existing content, as well as create new collaterals that will appeal to the right audience. 

By allowing easy accessibility and real-time insights into how prospects interact with content, DSRs boost content consumption by miles.‍

3. Accelerate sales and close more deals

The lengthy and complex B2B buying cycle can demotivate even the most passionate sales teams. A digital sales room prevents burnout and keeps your salespeople working enthusiastically by accelerating sales cycle. 

By providing a centralised digital hub for all sales-related materials and deal stages, digital sales rooms help your sales teams stay more organised and close more deals. They also provide your team a competitive edge by providing real-time insights and notifications on buyer engagement. This leads to accelerated deal cycles, increased revenue, and most importantly, peace of mind for your sales team. :)

4. Create a Qualified, Intelligent Pipeline

Digital sales rooms act as the sixth sense for your salesreps. By gaining real-time insights on how prospects engage with your product material, salespeople can quickly identify qualified leads from a pool of prospects. 

Once qualified leads have been identified and synched with the CRM, the next step is to nurture them into customers. This is done by sending highly targeted content that is personalized to address the specific needs and use-case of the customer. And as the customer engages and forwards your content to other members of the buying committee, you can easily map all the stakeholders and accelerate the sales cycle by acting right away. 

Features to Look for in Digital Sales Room Tool

As the digital sales landscape continues to evolve, so do the features and functionalities of digital sales room software. From allowing sellers to host on-platform virtual meetings with the buyer to tracking engagement and managing approvals, digital sales room tools offer a vast range of features.

Here are a few that you should look for in your digital sales room tool: 

Custom Branded Experiences: The custom-facing digital portal should be rebrandable to use custom domain, logo, font, colors, and other visual elements to deliver a personalized experience to the user. 

Live Chat and Virtual Meetings: Collaboration via notes, live chat, and video calls is essential to allow your sales team to serve customers in real-time and deepen buyer relationships. 

‍Support for all Content Formats: From presentations to links, videos, and documents, the digital sales room software should offer support for all types of content. 

Engagement Analytics: Comprehensive and real-time engagement analytics is a must-have to discover and replicate the content and activities that deliver the best outcomes. 

Contract Management: Once you have successfully nurtured and converted a lead, you should not have to take them off platform to get a contract signed. Support for contract management is critical to close deals end-to-end in one digital channel. 

Real-Time Notifications: Real-time in-app, email, or Slack notifications to notify your sales team about a customer’s interaction with a sales collateral.

Out-of-the-box CRM Connectivity: You should look for native connectivity with popular CRM tools, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, and others to easily enrich customer data in your CRM hub.

Ultimately, the features you need depend on your specific use-cases, but having the above can make sure you have a digital sales room tool that covers your entire sales funnel and fits right in with your CRMs and workflows.

At emlen, we have all of these and many more cool features that you can check out here. If you would like to see how it can improve your buyers' experience with you, shorten your sales cycles, and make your sales teams more productive, you can book a demo with us here.