The Rise of Digital Sales Rooms: Creating a Compelling Buying Experience
Thanks to digital sales room software (DSRs)—also known as digital solution rooms or buyer experience rooms—the buyer journey is easier and enables sales to assist the buyer with the behaviors they want to exhibit. Buyers research the products, read customer reviews, watch demos or do virtual tours, and compare prices. The problem is the information they gather is saved all over the place–in their email, in a browser tab, on their hard drive. Digital sales rooms make easier but putting all the videos, product details, and documents in one location. This puts the buyer in control and in the center of the sales experience.
Today’s buyers expect frictionless virtual evaluations. And using digital sales rooms, you can share content with customers and deliver a compelling, modern buying experience.
Digital sales rooms help you:
- Eliminate hassle for buyers with a centralized buying resource hub.
- Use personal video messages to “greet” buyers and contextualize assets.
- Deploy a secure virtual space for ongoing collaboration with buyers.
- Delight modern buyers with a branded experience.
- Track engagement by various stakeholders to prioritize follow-up.
Digital Sales Room Use Cases
Digital sales rooms allow you to communicate and collaborate with buyers throughout the duration of a deal through a personalized, centralized, and secured space. They deliver a compelling buying experience, while enabling you and your marketing team to track which content the buyer reads, watches, and/or downloads—and which content performs best.
Companies primarily use buyer experience rooms as external channels to support buyer and seller engagements. However, teams other than sales can use them across the customer life cycle. For example, a customer service team can use a buyer experience room to share a customer implementation plan, or an account management team can use a buyer experience toom to share updates with an account’s stakeholder team.
These are the top digital sales room use cases:
- Buyer engagement: Use the digital sales room as a place to collaborate with buyers for the duration of a deal.
- Relationship management: Provide ongoing information to strengthen customer relationships for renewals and expansions.
- Post-sale engagement: Provide relevant resources to customers post-sale to enable them on the product they purchased.
- Prospect Education: Share educational materials with external audiences in a personalized and secured space.
Create a Dynamic Virtual Sales Experience
Download the ABCs of Digital Sales Rooms to learn how to create personalized virtual buyer experiences.
5 Best Practices for Digital Sales Rooms
The key to creating a digital sales room that your buyer likes and will use is to make it a personalized experience. Here are five tips for building highly effective and engaging digital sales rooms for your buyers.
1. Include a Personalized Welcome Video
Add a personalized welcome video at the top of your digital sales room to welcome your buyers to the space. Doing so helps you maintain the human-to-human connection. Tip: Your video thumbnail should include a friendly image (i.e., smiling and/or waving).
2. Create a Branded Experience
When creating your digital sales room, be sure to include a title and a custom message to set the intent of the room. You also want to tailor the environment by incorporating the buyer’s logo and color schemes to reflect the look and feel of their brand.
3. Use Marketing-Provided Digital Sales Room Templates
Tap the expertise of your marketing team to help you quickly create your buyer experience room. Your marketers can create templates pre-populated with content, such as articles, eBooks, videos, and customer stories.
Marketing can also create customizable modules that you can easily add to your buyer experience room. Modules may include clickable contact cards for members of the account team, a bullet list to outline next steps, and a list of follow-up tasks. All should be editable so you can personalize the space yourself.
4. Curate Content for Each Buyer
Here are some good rules to follow when adding content to your digital sales room. The first version of your digital sales room should include no more than 3-5 pieces of content. Great options include customer stories, testimonial videos or PDFs, white papers, analyst reports, eBooks, and product-specific solution briefs and brochures. Once the buyer stakeholders have been identified, the curated collection can grow along with the deal.
In most cases, include no more than 1-2 items for each type of asset. These items should be relevant to the buyer’s industry, persona, and their stated need. For example:
- 1 customer story or testimonial
- 1-2 thought leadership content pieces (analyst report, white paper, etc.)
- 1-2 product or solution content piece (short video overview, one-pager, etc.)
5. Refine Buyer Experience Room Content
Add or replace content as needed based on the progression of the deal to continue to ensure content remains relevant to the buyer.
Your marketing team may recommend content in the digital sales room template based on a particular selling scenario. But you want to make sure it’s the right fit for your specific buyer. Review and refine the content collection to ensure the materials you share are the most relevant for your selling scenario.
Today’s buyers want a seamless virtual buying experience—one that is personalized to address their needs. With digital sales rooms, you can give that to them.
Learn More:
Download The ABCs of Digital Sales Rooms to learn how to create the virtual sales experience that buyers crave.