What Are Digital Sales Rooms?

Right now, the B2B buyer journey is harder than it should be. According to a Gartner report, 77% of B2B buyers rate their most recent purchase as “difficult” or “very complex.”

Why? The typical B2B sales process involves long emails with various links and attachments. This overwhelming and disorganized amount of information is an inefficient way to drive sales.

As a B2B seller, you need to adjust your sales process to align with customers’ virtual selling preferences. About 70-80% of B2B decision makers prefer either digital self-service or remote interaction with a sales rep. A Digital Sales Room (DSR), or a buyer-seller online portal, is the optimal solution to replace the traditional sales process. With a DSR, your sales team can create a customized online space that makes it easy for your customer to take action.

If you haven’t already, implement a Digital Sales Room strategy to increase productivity, keep track of customer communications, and build content resources for your sales team. A DSR will empower your customers to make buying decisions and your sales reps to close more deals.

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Table of Contents

How does a Digital Sales Room work?

Once a DSR is created, sellers can generate a unique shareable link to give buyers and stakeholders access to the portal. The DSR houses all of the information and resources that a buyer needs to make a purchasing decision. Each DSR acts like a showroom, but rather than being in-person, the online space is designed and built for a personalized buying experience.

Since the sales content is tailored to your customer’s business needs, they can have their questions answered through self-service or by reaching out to the salespeople assigned to the room. From the sales proposal to product demos and case studies, the customer experience is enhanced when all sales collateral is centralized in one user-friendly deal room.

Digital Sales Rooms also help sales reps understand which sales content is more effective at closing deals. When buyer behavior is connected to sales enablement platforms, sales teams can gather insights into how prospects interact with content and determine which content can be used or improved in future negotiations.

Here’s a breakdown of what is typically included in a Digital Sales Room:

  • An opening message greeting the potential new customer
  • Personalized video messages from the seller to the customer
  • Key clickable categories for various content types
  • Testimonials or case studies from previous customers
  • Relevant articles or webinars to educate your customers about your product, service, or other related industry news
  • An option to contact via a chat box
  • A button to schedule a meeting with the sales rep
  • A private, shareable link to share the DSR with other stakeholders

What are the impacts of a Digital Sales Room on sales teams?

A Digital Sales Room allows sales reps to drive more sales by building strong, trusting relationships faster. In many ways, a DSR is like a microsite that acts as both a central source of information and a piece of the marketing and sales funnel.

In your DSRs, make your customers feel supported and valued by providing content that addresses frequently asked questions and includes all information specific to your customer’s needs.

Increases sales productivity

A DSR increases sales productivity by streamlining the buyer journey, saving time and effort on needless back-and-forth communications. With a secure, central location where all content exists, the buyer has everything they need at their fingertips. This empowers the buyer to go through the sales process more efficiently. A less-confused customer frees up time for the sales rep, as they no longer need to clarify or resend information to the customer as often.

With a Digital Sales Room, sales reps can build more efficient workflows. Your DSR will help you easily track the buyer journey from proposal to deal approval to the final eSignature. There’s no need to search through countless emails, track down points of contact, or send over a new version of the contract each time it’s updated. Instead, you can update contracts and other documents and quickly swap them out in your DSR. When they’re ready for final approval, your buyers will know where to find them.

Improves understanding of buyer behavior

Another benefit of the Digital Sales Room is its ability to capture data on client interactions and patterns. Effective DSRs include a two-way communication feature or the option to schedule a meeting with a sales rep.

Whenever a customer uses a communication feature, such as a chat box in your DSR, it can be tracked as either a positive sign that the buyer is engaged and wants to learn more or that the content you’ve provided is insufficient.

Sales representatives can review this data and determine:

  • Where buyers might be getting stuck and require more clarity
  • What pieces of content are most important in their purchasing decisions
  • Which products or services customers are most interested in
  • How likely they are to be return customers

Your sales team should use the notes and analysis of the data to improve upon the customer DSR experience either in real time or in future DSRs.

Enhances organization and engagement

The DSR also acts as a content management system that helps sales reps stay organized and increase buyer engagement. Access to the right content is crucial to a successful sales process. Content should be tailored and grouped according to specific stages in the sales life cycle. However, only 65% of sellers claim to have tailored, easily accessible sales content.

It’s important to create an intuitive system that makes it easy for customers and sales reps to find what they are looking for. Tips for building an organized DSR that positively impacts both buyer and seller engagement include:

  • Group the content in folders or hubs, such as FAQs, proposals, contracts, terms of service, etc.
  • Present the content in chronological order.
  • Build a mutual action plan or timeline that automatically updates as you go through the sales cycle.

Digital Sales Rooms: Dos and don’ts

A successful Digital Sales Room prioritizes high-quality content that follows specific guidelines. The quality of your sales content should always trump the quantity, as quality content tends to generate more engagement. If you want to provide high-quality sales content in ways that accelerate sales, below are the main dos and don’ts when it comes to designing and organizing your DSRs.

The do's

Do make it personal

Do your research on the customer and their industry. Personalization will keep your customer more engaged. Use persuasive language and terminology specific to their industry (e.g., address the customer by name, position, and/or company and include content that caters to their interests).

Do provide 24/7 customer support

If possible, implement real-time communication options such as a text chat or video chat feature. Make your sales team accessible to the customer whenever is convenient for them.

Do highlight interactive content

Record explainer videos or video introductions, include links and buttons to relevant resources, and include polls or surveys to gain a better understanding of your buyer’s needs.

Do give clear direction

Use call-to-action statements (CTAs) that provide the buyer with clear next steps. Include a buyer checklist to follow or a mutual action plan that updates throughout the process.

Do keep content on brand

Use your DSR as another opportunity to strengthen the customer’s relationship with your brand. All visual assets should follow brand guidelines, and all language should align with brand voice and tone.

Do include a product demo

Record a product or service demo that is customized to your potential customer.

Do integrate with other tools

Connect relevant sales software and other integrations to seamlessly link information (e.g., CRM, quote software, contract management software, eSignature software, etc.).

The don'ts

Don’t neglect the data

Gather and analyze the data from your DSR. The insights you get from data will help you develop better content and close more deals.

Don’t hard sell

Develop sales materials that educate the buyer without hard selling the product or service. The idea is to help the buyer become empowered in their purchase decision.

Don’t make assumptions

Don’t assume the customer will understand everything you present to them in the DSR. (Or even how the DSR works to begin with.) Provide guides and explanations whenever possible.

Don’t skip the planning

Research your customer and devise a custom DSR strategy. When the customer enters the “room,” their first impression should be a positive one. Planning ahead will position your sales team as a dedicated potential partner.

Don’t limit access

Give DSR access to all support teams and sales stakeholders. This will ensure that everyone stays on the same page and can learn from one another quickly and efficiently.

Build the best Digital Sales Room with Mindtickle

At Mindtickle, we offer Digital Sales Room software with all-in-one functionality, including templates to easily build your DSR, unlimited collaborators, and more tools like Call AI or continuous learning programs to leverage and generate more sales. Whether you need to create new content, monitor a deal cycle, or follow up on your team’s performance, sales leaders can improve the entire buying process using Mindtickle’s products.

Use templates for quick and easy building

You don’t need to know how to code or build a website to build a Digital Sales Room with Mindtickle. Instead, choose from a collection of pre-made templates that can be easily customized for each customer deal.

Here are the steps for using templates with Mindtickle:

  • Choose a template
  • Attach the customer deal
  • Generate the auto-customized portal
  • Edit, reorganize, or add additional content
  • Hit publish! (All contacts involved with the deal will be notified.)

Consider testing out a few different templates with various customers. Then, once you have enough data, clone the top-performing rooms and save those as your go-to DSR templates.

In addition to determining the top-performing templates, monitor behavior within each template and make adjustments to improve engagement. Remember to keep your DSR clean, clear, and simple. For example, if you notice that customers aren’t clicking on the news links you’ve included, remove them. The less clutter, the better.

Manage and track high-quality content

Mindtickle’s asset hub makes content management simple and powerful. With one repository for all content, sales reps can consolidate and organize all assets and content to easily and quickly find the right content when they need it.

Moreover, Mindtickle tracks and measures how reps engage with each piece of content in the field. Sales managers can take a look at the data on an asset-by-asset level and aggregate it by content type. During this data analysis, managers may discover that valuable content is underutilized but is still capable of providing great ROI. Or they may discover that content that is rarely or never used can be removed entirely, as it has no reason to be replicated in the future.

Update content regularly

An even more pressing issue is when the data indicates that outdated scripts or information are still used. Routine content updates are vital to a flourishing sales team and high-quality sales content in your DSR.

According to our benchmark report, sellers are also more likely to use the content when they believe they can rely on it. Therefore, regularly updating your sales content will also boost your sales team’s confidence and performance.

Our survey of Mindtickle customers also found that teams who updated their key content more frequently generated the most engagement. For the top 10% of organizations with the highest engagement, they updated their content once every 3.25 months.

Here are a few tips on how to prioritize regular reviews and updates of existing content:

  • Allocate content development resources toward reviewing and updating existing content.
  • Maintain consistent communication with sellers to reinforce their confidence and engagement with key content.
  • Generate automated reminders for your content creators and editors.
  • Assign asset-specific updates to team members on a recurring calendar reminder.
  • Time your content reviews and updates around other key milestones like product roadmap developments or field events.

Eliminate knowledge silos across teams

A DSR serves as a collaborative workspace where sales reps can share content with both the customers and other team members. By making all information accessible and transparent, Mindtickle’s DSRs eliminate knowledge-siloing that occurs when sales reps are working one on one with customers.

One unique way Mindtickle’s DSRs remove silos is through the use of Call AI, Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence feature. Call AI automatically records and transcribes calls and web conferences. Call AI also uses AI-driven analysis to produce actionable insights about buyer interactions.

Through a shared DSR, the entire sales leadership team, members of other departments, and even the customer can have access to entire call recordings or to relevant, selected snippets.

Advantages of Mindtickle DSRs within and across teams include:

  • Sales reps can easily and quickly cover for each other when necessary.
  • Sales reps can learn from each other for future customer deals.
  • Sales managers and revenue leaders can monitor rep performance, customer behavior, and deal health to plan necessary interventions.
  • Marketing team members can update and manage templates with the most up-to-date copy and branding standards.
  • Engineers can adjust terminology and add explanations for new features.
  • Sales content creators can track the impact of their content on engagement and provide feedback or make adjustments.
  • All teams have access to insights from customer calls (e.g., a quarterly trends report).

FAQs on Digital Sales Rooms

What crucial content should I include in my Digital Sales Room?

  • Pricing and product information (if possible, implement a Configure Price Quote software (CPQ)).
  • Embedded sales assets (e.g., demos, photos, testimonials, explainer videos, product descriptions, product sheets, personal sales rep messages via video or audio, etc.).
  • Contracts and other legal documents (e.g., licensing agreements, conditions, NDAs, terms, etc.).
  • Customer details (e.g., contact information, purchase history, custom notes, and account history).
  • Resources for sales reps (e.g., scripts, training documents, proposal templates, presentations, etc.).

How do I ensure the Digital Sales Room is secure?

Similar to other websites, accounts, and platforms, there are a few steps you can take to ensure a secure DSR:

  • Get pre-written approval on all the people who should have access to the room.
  • Password-protect the room.
  • Use two-factor authentication/encryption.

Is a Digital Sales Room really worth it?

Yes, a digital sales room will help you close more deals. Here are the top reasons why:

  • It helps everyone involved in the deal understand what’s happening and what’s going to happen.
  • It provides instant access for the customer at any time, from anywhere.
  • It is easy to update with new offers or pricing changes, revise contracts, and add additional information.
  • It is a centralized location that allows all sales reps to track deal progress and learn from others.
  • It is another opportunity to convey your brand values and build new customer relationships.
  • It is multifunctional. For example, demand teams can create Digital Sales Room “events” to attract new customers, track behavior, and determine which are sales-qualified leads.

Deliver continuous learning through Digital Sales Rooms

Sales teams have to deal with constant change. Continuous learning is the key to sales enablement success, especially when implementing a new selling system like Digital Sales Rooms.

Without continuous learning, sales teams forget about 80% of their training within a month. Adequately onboarding a sales rep to a new Digital Sales Room is just one piece of the puzzle. To really thrive in DSRs, sales reps require sales everboarding, a system to repeatedly re-up their skills and apply new training to their work.

Through sales coaching, interactive courses, role-plays, and other training programs, your virtual sales reps will be dominating your Digital Sales Rooms in no time.

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