What is a Digital Sales Room? The Future of B2B Sales

Exploring Digital Sales Room as the future of B2B sales enablement

In this digital-first world, buyers prefer to self-serve. They want to research the solution to their problems online rather than having face-to-face interactions with sales reps. This significant shift in remote engagement is why Digital Sales Rooms are quickly gaining popularity with sales teams, and for a good reason. It’s predicted that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels*. Read on to discover why Digital Sales Rooms are the future of B2B sales and how they can help your organisation sell more and faster as the digital transformation continues.

In this article, we answer the following questions:

What is a Digital Sales Room? 

Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are secure, shared online customer-facing content portals where sellers display essential sales collateral to enhance their interactions with prospects and stakeholders. In simple terms, a shared virtual space where sellers and buyers can meet, communicate and make sales with remote customers. The DSR works as a living, interactive resource, creating a streamlined and convenient purchasing experience within a secure microsite.

Essentially, Digital Sales Rooms make it easy for prospects to find what they’re looking for, helping sellers inform, negotiate and discuss concerns with sales reps.

As a result, shared materials are often personalised to the prospect—everything from case studies, testimonials, whitepapers, proposals and introduction videos. Their responses, engagement and general activity can help organisations gain vital real-time insights into buyer behaviour.

Ultimately, Digital Sales Rooms are quickly becoming a powerful tool to help sales teams sell more, whether dealing with prospects in-person or online.

Digital Sales Room Synonyms

  • Virtual Deal Room
  • Sales Microsite
  • Digital Sales Proposal
  • Sales Content Hub/Space
  • Sales Smart Room
  • Business Relationship Workspace

Why Use a Digital Sales Room?

The future of B2B sales is buyer-centric and becoming increasingly remote. According to research by McKinsey, 70% of business decision-makers are open to self-serve or making remote purchases over $50,000. At the same time, 27% would spend more than $500,000. A stance solidified by the fact that in most cases, a buyer has already had 27 information-gathering interactions before talking to a salesperson.

By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.**

As a result, only about 20% of B2B buyers say they hope to return to in-person sales. What does this mean for sales teams? Well, now, more than ever, we have to change how we sell to suit buyers’ needs. Taking this approach to improving sales engagement with a digital sales room has several key benefits.

Also read: It’s Hope, Not Hype: 10 Ways ChatGPT Can Increase Sales

Benefits of using Digital Sales Rooms

Enhance Sales Productivity: These customer-facing content portals make it easier for buyers to use or consume your documents. While also giving sellers and marketers in-depth insights into what content is working to move the sale forward. 

Improve Customer Relationships: With all your customer information in one place, digital sales rooms make it easier for sales reps to stay up to date on where the buyer is precisely in their journey. This approach helps to increase customer satisfaction.

Memorable Buying Experience: To stand out in increasingly competitive markets, you must be inventive, different and convenient to buyers. While virtual sales presentations aren’t going anywhere, digital sales rooms tick all the boxes for creating a unique, visual and exciting experience that ultimately promotes referrals and recurring business.

Better Sales Pipeline Visibility: Easily determine which deals are in progress and where bottlenecks are occurring most, so sales managers can quickly resolve them. 

Keep Prospects Hooked: Momentum is a crucial aspect of driving a sale forward. Digital sales rooms keep the sales process moving by maintaining frequent communication, helping buyers stay on track and ultimately make faster decisions.

Encourage Consensus-Making: Usually, it’s impossible to have multiple key meetings with all decision-makers through the sales cycle. Yet, digital sales rooms allow teams to touch in consistently, allowing stakeholders to reach a quicker consensus on buy-in and negotiations.

Gather Valuable Data: Digital sales rooms enable teams to gather customer activity data and track sales engagement. This can help teams understand how to drive the sale forward by improving their sales methods.

Also read:

How Digital Sales Rooms work

These days, sales teams must have a buyer-first mentality. With virtual selling, the in-person relationships that create the buyer-first experience are gone. That’s why every digital sales room is unique. Organisations can tweak the tools, content and integrations to suit buyers’ needs. As a result, stakeholders can make purchasing decisions faster and easier than ever before.

Overall, DSRs can function as:

  1. A platform for sales teams to add content in one central folder or repository. (Either as part of a greater sales enablement tool or a standalone tool.)
  2. A secure microsite where salespeople give clients access to the platform by sending them a link. Prospects either log in with a username or use a personalised URL to access the materials. Teams can track prospects’ interactions on each asset. Creating valuable insights into customer behaviour that teams can use to improve the sales cycle.

5 Digital Sales Room features

Today’s digital sales rooms are a central virtual space for buyers’ to access your sales collateral and assets. Here’s a closer look at some of the key features you can expect to find in an average digital sales room:

1. Product Information & Pricing

Use a digital sales room to create a central repository for all sales-related information. Provide up-to-date product information and pricing, so your clients can easily find the products they need and see how much they will cost. This includes client contact information, product information, pricing data, and more.

2. Embedded Sales Content

Host key sales content such as case studies, customer testimonials, demo decks, explainer videos, personal messages, and product descriptions.

3. Personalisation

Create an excellent customer experience by branding and personalising a digital sales room to suit your buyer’s needs. Teams can tweak sales rooms depending on the customer’s product requests, location, and level of product knowledge.

4. Real-time Communication

Level up your sales pitch—no more messy email threads with lost links. Sales teams can now keep deals on track and stay out of stakeholders’ email inboxes with a click of a button.

5. Deal Approval

Integrations make it easy for clients to sign contracts and review documents like NDAs, licensing agreements, and terms and conditions.


Types of Digital Sales Room Technology & Integrations

As many companies undergo a digital sales transformation, there is an increase in demand to improve communication between buyers and sales teams. They can already use existing tools to streamline their customers’ experience. But, by integrating them with a digital sales room platform, you can provide prospects with a seamless, efficient and satisfying experience.

Below, let’s review how you can integrate digital sales room technology and sales enablement software to improve productivity and overall streamline the entire sales process.

eSignature

With digital sales rooms, you can be sure all the stakeholders and decision-makers are working in one place on your microsite. Integrating eSignatures enables buyers to sign off on deals there and then ultimately simplifies the sales process.

CRM

Your CRM tool helps you store and record all customer and prospect information vital to closing sales. So by integrating digital sales room technology with your CRM, you can provide clients with a single place to access all the facts they need to make a purchase. For example, client contact information, product information, and pricing.

CLM

Integrate contract management software with your digital sales room to help all departments access and approve contracts in real-time. Not only does this process help version control, but it also streamlines workflow approval for both the salesperson and the buyers.

CPQ

Configure Price Quote software is often essential to many organisations’ product configurations, accurate pricing, and sales quotes. By integrating the CPQ software with your digital sales room, the speed at which you relay information to the prospect is faster, increasing the chances of a satisfying buying experience.

Also read: Essential Sales Technology Stacks for Professionals

Popular digital sales room software products

  • Paperflite: Is remote content collaboration software. Sales teams can share content with prospects via microsites with multi-recipient tracking technology.
  • DealHub: Offers sales proposal software technology that generates customised proposals in a digital room. However, they don’t yet provide a space to host additional, trackable content, assets, or videos.
  • GetAccept: Offers a central hub for sales teams to share sales collateral, send personalised videos, store essential documents and templates, manage contracts, and secure final signatures. It includes a robust suite of integrations that makes it easy for your sales team to harness the power of the Digital Sales Room environment.
  • Allego:Is an all-in-one, rep-centric platform that ensures sellers have the skills, knowledge, and content they need to optimise team success in a virtual world.

*https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-15-gartner-says-80–of-b2b-sales-interactions-between-su#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20Gartner’s%20Future%20of,climbs%20to%2044%25%20for%20millennials.

Final word: Perfect your buyer-centric approach & win more deals remotely

Selling virtually is not a matter of just doing the same old sales pitch but online. You have to be highly organised and have tightly planned out presentations, so you don’t leave your prospect bored and disconnected.

Gain the skills to master the process of moving from in-person to virtual selling by enrolling in SOCO’s Virtual Selling online course. Once registered, you will get immediate access through our e-learning portal SOCO Academy.

Prefer live or in-person training? Our virtual selling program equips sales professionals with virtual selling skills and techniques through live training, to help them build rapport virtually, effectively present their solutions online and win deals remotely.

Virtual Selling Training E-learning Platform SOCO Academy Certificate
Scroll to Top