Why Digital Sales Rooms Work for Buyers AND Sellers

B2B transactions have changed. Like consumers in the B2C space, business buyers have developed new habits during the pandemic. Many now demand a self-directed experience online, on their own time.

McKinsey research shows that 80% of buyers now prefer virtual engagements, and companies that add the human touch to digital sales achieve twice the return to shareholders.

What buyers don’t want is to comb through their inboxes looking for scattered bits and pieces of marketing collateral—or for multiple emails from sales reps or colleagues regarding prospective purchases. Or to try to remember where they saw a particular video or saved a webinar link.

What they do want is a single, centralized platform where they can quickly and conveniently access all the relevant materials pertaining to a prospective buy.

Now they can get their wish, with digital sales rooms.

The best news about this trend from a sales and marketing perspective? The buyer’s goals align perfectly with yours as a seller.

Treat Every Customer to a Personalized Buyer Experience

Quite simply, digital sales rooms empower the seller to act as a concierge for the buying experience. You can delight clients by anticipating their needs and deploying a secure virtual space to satisfy those needs through ongoing collaboration.

Besides eliminating hassles through a centralized resource hub, digital sales rooms also empower you to create a professional, branded content experience guided by your marketing department. In addition, you can track engagement with different buy-side stakeholders, so you know which collateral in the “room” resonates best in a given situation and deliver the appropriate follow-up.

Digital sales rooms also introduce a human touch, including some much-needed warmth, to the virtual sales process through personalized video greetings. Moreover, the videos allow you to contextualize the assets available in your digital sales room, making it easier for buyers to dive in and start productively consuming content.

The Right Idea for the Right Time

With research indicating that 82% of companies plan to make the hybrid work model permanent, sales teams have to adapt accordingly. There will be less business travel as well as fewer face-to-face meetings at events like trade shows. Ultimately, that will mean more and more B2B sales take place fully online.

Unlike B2C sales, however, few B2B transactions are one-to-one. Most require buy-in from multiple stakeholders on both the buyer and seller sides who often have different interests, agendas, and timetables.

Traditional remote communications, like phone calls and emails, can compound the confusion and create a “right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” scenario. Getting everyone on the same page, using the same resources, can be a challenge.

Digital sales rooms solve the problem by funneling everyone through a secure, central location. That allows your sales team to deliver a consistent message in a way that is easily shareable. And you can facilitate customer success in a variety of ways, from live chat to recorded sales calls to asynchronous presentations.

3 Benefits of Digital Sales Rooms

1. Alignment

Selling should not be a one-way process. Prospects engage with your content because you offer a product or service that they’re interested in buying. By centralizing all collateral and communication through one hub, digital sales rooms make it much easier for your sales team to connect with interested buyers quickly and effectively and to steer them in the right direction. That way everyone gets the outcome they want.

2. Buy-in

If you’ve been involved in sales for any length of time, you recognize these two buy-side personas: The Champion and The Devil’s Advocate. Digital sales rooms allow you to track each persona’s engagements, so you can help The Champion gather the resources and intelligence they need to alleviate The Devil’s Advocate’s concerns and get their buy-in on the sale.

3. Convenience

Did we mention all of this happens in a secure central location so prospects can get all the answers they seek, engage with all the collateral they want without having to go on a scavenger hunt? Eliminating all the back-and-forth that plagued earlier iterations of online B2B sales will help your team close more deals, and close them much faster.

How to Work the (Digital) Room

How does a digital sales room work? Visualize the digital sales room as a physical space—a fixed location where you can both keep all your content and host prospects. Sales reps can “greet buyers at the door” using personal video messages.

Then they can use templates created by the marketing department to deploy the right set of content assets for any given sales scenario while incorporating their prospect’s logo and a banner message tailored to the individual deal or account.

Finally, your sales team members can “work the room” by monitoring the stakeholders that are currently engaged and exchanging messages to answer questions, provide context, and reinforce your value proposition. And they can grab a virtual business card from prospects by tracking which stakeholders are engaging with which items and then follow up with next best actions.

By keeping all of their content in context and maintaining the continuity of their story, reps can be more confident they will stay on message and never lose momentum. That means closing more deals, more often.

Learn More

Download a copy of The ABCs of Digital Sales Rooms to learn how to create the virtual sales experience buyers crave.