Digital Sales

A Guide to Digital Sales Rooms: All You Need To Know

Digital selling has already become the standard 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 improve your buyer engagement by focusing on one simple thing: deliver a personalized experience to each buyer to enable deeper customer engagement. Although this might seem challenging this is where digital sales rooms can help.

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. 

We'll tell you all about digital sales rooms, and how you and your teams can use them to accelerate your deals.

Let’s dive right in!

Co-Founder
emlen
7
min read
Jan 9, 2024

What is a digital sales room?

A digital sales room is a central hub where your sellers can organize all their sales content, collaborate with buyers, and track engagement throughout the sales cycle. What does a digital sales room look like?

Digital sales room features

A digital sales room goes far beyond being file storage. Here's a look at their core features to empower your sellers and improve your buyer's experience:

Content repository

Store all your presentations, case studies, videos, whitepapers, and more in an organized, easily searchable format. With advanced tagging and filtering, your sellers can quickly find the right content for any stage of your buyer's journey.

Customisation and branding

Make your digital sales rooms feel like an extension of your own website. Add your logo, brand colors, and tailor the design to create a cohesive, professional experience for your buyers.

Communication tools

Communicate seamlessly with your team, buyers, and other stakeholders with integrated chat, commenting, and even video conferencing features. Everyone can interact directly within the digital sales rooms to foster real-time collaboration and faster issue resolution!

Engagement analytics

Give your buyers the content they want and need at the right time along their journey. Robust analytics dashboards show you who is viewing your digital assets, what they're viewing, and for how long. Your sales teams can use that data to refine your content strategy and tailor your pitches for greater success.

Integrations

A digital sales room shouldn't be an island. Look for solutions that integrate seamlessly with your CRM, marketing automation tools, and the other tools in your sales tech stack for smoother workflows and better data insights.

Whether we're talking about "digital deal rooms" or "sales microsites" (here at emlen we call them collaborative spaces), why should your business be using digital sales rooms?

4 Key benefits of digital sales rooms

Now that you understand what a digital sales room is, if you want a smooth sales process, let's explore their four key benefits:

1. Improve seller productivity

Finding the right leads, at the right time.

In a growing business, your sales reps face an influx of leads. Digital sales rooms solve this by making it simple to spot the most engaged buyers. Reps get the right content to the right prospect at the perfect moment, positioning themselves as knowledgeable advisors and streamlining the buyer's journey.

2. Increase content engagement

Put your best content to work.

Digital sales rooms reveal exactly how prospects interact with your content. These insights help marketing teams understand what resonates, allowing them to optimize existing materials and create even more targeted collateral that truly speaks to your audience.

3. Accelerate sales and close more deals

Streamline the sales process.

The complex B2B buying cycle can be a drain on sales teams. Digital sales rooms provide a centralized hub for everything sales-related, keeping your team organized while empowering them with real-time buyer engagement insights. This competitive edge leads to faster deal cycles, higher revenue, and a motivated sales team.

4. Create a qualified, intelligent pipeline

Uncover your hottest leads.

Digital sales rooms act like a sixth sense for your reps, showing exactly how prospects engage with product materials.  This allows for quick qualification of leads.

Once synced with your CRM, nurture those leads with personalized content that addresses their specific needs. As the prospect shares your content, effortlessly map all stakeholders within the buying committee for a lightning-fast sales cycle.

Beyond the benefits: Choosing your digital sales room

Consolidate disorganized emails, presentations, and follow-ups into a single platform. Stakeholders get easy access to sales assets for smoother internal buy-in. Track buyer engagement and intent to send the most relevant information at the right time, guiding decision-making.

Now you know why they're beneficial, how do you choose the right digital sales room technology for your business?

How to choose a digital sales room tool

As your buyers' needs evolve, the features and functionalities of digital sales room software will need to evolve alongside them. 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 core features 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.

The features you need depend on your specific use-cases, but having digital sales room technology that checks all the boxes ensures it covers your entire sales funnel and fits right in with your CRMs and workflows.

Be sure to really evaluate the best solution for your business with a true digital sales room comparison. Then, when you've chosen the perfect digital sales room platform, here's a step-by-step guide on how to set up your digital sales room.

A step-by-step guide to set up your digital sales room

A digital sales room is only as powerful as the content you put in it. Before customizing the look and inviting buyers, build a strong foundation with these steps so you know how to use a digital sales room:

Step 1: Build your content library

  • Gather your existing sales and marketing assets. This includes things like presentations, blog posts, product demos, or case studies.
  • Organize your content with clear naming conventions, tags, and folders to find things easily.
  • If needed, create new, targeted content to fill any gaps.

Step 2: Design your digital sales room

  • Customize the look and feel with your branding.
  • Create a clear navigation structure or sections depending on your sales process.
  • Craft a welcome message or short video to personalize your buyer's experience.

Step 3: Invite buyers and collaborate

  • Generate a unique shareable link for your digital sales room.
  • Add team members and other stakeholders (if applicable) to make sure the collaboration is seamless.
  • Engage with buyers through comments, chats, or scheduled meetings within your virtual sales room.

Step 4: Track, analyze, and optimize

  • Monitor engagement analytics to see what content resonates with your buyers.
  • Update your digital sales room with fresh content and insights based on buyer and sales interactions.
  • Adjust your sales approach using data gathered from your digital sales room.

Now you understand what digital sales rooms are, how they can benefit your business, and how to set them up.

Remember, all of this is to create the optimal buyer journey so your sales teams can ensure the best sales performance.

Let's take a look at emlen.io's digital sales room solution to truly align and boost your sales process.

emlen: The digital sales room solution for buyer led growth

A great digital sales room example is emlen, which goes beyond your standard sales enablement.

Here's how emlen's powerful digital sales rooms align the entire sales journey with your buyer's needs:

Boost productivity

emlen's content organization, intuitive search, and in-depth analytics save sales professionals' time, helping them focus on the most promising deals.

Increase content engagement

Track real-time buyer interactions to understand what resonates. emlen provides the insights to optimize content to deliver a more relevant experience.

Accelerate sales cycles

Streamlined communication tools, personalized content hubs, and deal-stage tracking within the emlen solution helps move deals forward efficiently. Now you can close deals faster.

Intelligent pipeline building

Easily discover the most engaged buyers and gain visibility into the entire buying committee with emlen's analytics, enabling targeted nurturing strategies.

Powerful integrations

emlen seamlessly connects with your favorite tools like Slack, Hubspot CRM or Pipedrive. Now you can enjoy a smooth flow of data and maximum efficiency for your team.

Focus on the buyer experience with digital sales rooms

Your prospects and buyers demand a more personalized and self-guided experience. They want to feel in control and empowered to make informed decisions.

If you and your sales reps haven't evaluated digital sales room platforms to deal with your current sales materials you risk falling behind your competitors who are already putting the buyer experience at the forefront.

If you’re ready to streamline your sales process, explore emlen’s digital sales room solution today, and book a demo!

Marc is co-founder of emlen and responsible for the go-to-market strategy and execution that convinces today's modern B2B buyer.

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