7 Must-Have Features in a Digital Room for Sales To Craft the Perfect Buyer Experience

Juggling the needs of modern B2B sales is a challenge. You have to keep track of buyers, organise and share sales material, and provide timely responses. It’s even more challenging when using many different tools for each process stage. How do you keep track of everything?

There are many opportunities to lose out on a sale. Buyers can slip through the cracks, your team can miss a critical follow-up, or worse, somebody could send the wrong digital sales proposal to a buyer. 

You could stick with a general template or a form email with a list of links to your sales materials. That’s what other people do, and it seems to work alright. But, B2B buyers are getting increasingly impatient with complicated, generic sales tactics. Businesses need something new and different, something impressive.

Digital sales rooms offer the optimal solution for B2B sales teams, especially when the software has all of the tools to create a centralised workspace. You can support your team and deliver a better buyer experience by drawing everything for every deal into one digital space.

Like other sales tools, a digital sales room is only effective when it provides the right features to support your team. Knowing the different features and how they can serve your team can help you choose the right platform to wow potential clients and meet your needs.

7 Essential Elements Within a Digital Room for Sales

It can be easy to get excited about products with a lot of bells and whistles. You'll be disappointed if you choose a product with some cool, high-tech extras but miss out on key features. 

1. Personalised Workspaces

B2B buyers expect sales interactions to include a personalised experience at every stage of the sales process. Over half report wanting customised content starting with the initial content, and the numbers increase as the relationship grows.

Did you know? 66% of B2B buyers desire personalised content during purchasing, and 72% expect it to continue through onboarding and beyond. Sales teams need to meet those expectations to close deals.

Ensuring your digital sales room aligns with delivering that personalised experience from day one is easy. Sales enablement software that allows you to seamlessly extend a tailored experience through the sales process, through onboarding, and beyond is your best bet.

Look for digital sales room technology that gives your team the power to personalise content for each buyer. It’s important to have the room to progress through the buyer journey and easily continue into onboarding.

Forward empowers teams to create custom micro-sites for every buyer. Start things off right with a single link to your buyer’s personalised and branded micro-site. Continue adding to the site as your deal progresses, and seamlessly add your onboarding team after closing the deal. 

Your buyer never has to wonder if they’re in the right place or figure out where they are in the sales process. They never have to leave their micro-site to find the answers or information they need to make a decision, sign on the dotted line, or learn how to use your product.

2. Multi-Media Embed

Keeping track of sales materials can be a challenge for buyers and sellers. It’s even more complicated in the B2B sales process since it’s so long and involves so many decision-makers.

Traditional methods have buyers collecting sales materials and research from various channels, which is far from further aligning with the future of B2B sales. Sellers need to maintain content and materials with contributions from different teams, meaning one rep may have a completely different version from another. In both cases, losing something in the shuffle is too easy. 

Look for a digital sales room that allows teams to maintain all sales collateral, including media, in one place. It’s easier to share materials with buyers and ensure everyone has the most updated version.

From the buyer’s perspective, the virtual deal room should maintain all sales materials and information you share. Content sharing makes it possible for all of the buyer’s decision-makers to access information in a single space to impress the buyer and make their lives easier. 

Forward provides sales professionals with multi-media embed features that make it easy to share and collaborate among teams and with your buyer: share presentations, documents, and even testimonials from other customers to support your product’s benefits.

3. Mutual Action Plans

Mutual Action Plans (MAP) make it possible to create a structured sales journey, manage the entire process, and keep everyone on the same page. A MAP sets out the entire sales journey from first contact through closing. It should include critical tasks, highlighting the requirements and expectations for every person involved in the deal.

Building a solid MAP sets the groundwork for your entire sales journey. It typically starts from your desired endpoint and works backward to the initial contact. You should be able to schedule meetings, assign tasks, and set deadlines to keep deals on track and moving forward faster. It should also be possible to make adjustments and easily navigate the MAP.

While it can be as simple as a live, shared document in Google Docs, that’s not especially efficient or impressive. Digital sales rooms provide the tools to create something far more impressive and engaging. There’s no need to maintain additional digital channels or documents because you can access everything through the buyer’s personalised workspace. 

For example, Forward’s interactive MAP is user-friendly for sellers and buyers. It’s easy to customise the plan to meet an individual buyer’s needs. Plus, the enhanced collaboration tools reinforce your commitment to your buyer. Interactive MAPs represent the ultimate experience for buyers by ensuring a personalised, consistent experience geared toward joint success.

4. Buyer Engagement Insights

Understanding prospect behaviours, like what materials they often access, helps sales teams determine what content to send next and set timely follow-ups. Tracking buyer engagement with your sales materials provides valuable insight into their biggest concerns and areas of interest.

For example, if your buyer frequently visits a page about one of your product’s key features, they are probably interested in that feature. Your team can provide more information about the feature to hopefully clarify things or encourage the buyer to ask specific questions.

Having access to real-time data, like when your buyer views a proposal, helps your team schedule follow-ups appropriately. Your reps can engage more meaningfully with prospects to provide what they need to close more deals faster.

Additionally, buyer engagement insights help salespeople with forecasting. You get a better picture of where buyers are in the deal cycle and when deals will likely close, meaning you don’t overload your onboarding team.

Forward’s engagement analytics provide real-time insights into buyer intent. You can see when prospects view your materials, comment on materials, or ask a question in the live chat. It’s possible to gauge how much time potential buyers spend viewing your material to better understand their interest in your product.

5. Collaboration and Communication Tools

Most B2B buyers, some 80%, want their sales experience to mirror a B2C sales environment. To boost sales productivity and make the process easier for buyers throughout the entire sales process, teams need to prioritise customer service and support throughout to remain competitive.

Did you know? B2B buyers only interact with sellers for about 17% of their sales journey. Sales reps need to make those limited interactions count, meaning they must be fast and valuable.

Establishing a system that includes real-time collaboration and quick reactions to buyer inquiries maximises your interactions. You can experience a digital sales transformation and deliver the B2C experience buyers crave, moving the process forward faster.

When choosing a digital sales room platform, ensure it has sufficient tools to support buyer communication and collaboration. For example, Forward offers live chat and comment capabilities within personalised workspaces. Your sales team can communicate with the buyer through a built-in chat function so they can provide more timely responses.

The comment feature allows buyers to ask specific questions about sales materials or proposals. Additionally, your team can upload sales materials, like presentations and personalised videos that will be easily accessible to your buyer. Send proposals with a few clicks and invite additional stakeholders to ensure you include all buyer’s decision-makers.

Open communication and collaboration between buyers and sellers make virtual selling faster and smoother for all parties. It’s possible for your sales team to deliver a highly personalised and seamless buyer experience.

6. Templates

Successful sales teams work smarter, not harder. You could dedicate hours to crafting a personalised proposal for every prospect, but you only have so many hours in a day. You’ll miss out somewhere if you keep building from scratch.

Using templates to enhance the buying experience is one of the best ways to save time without compromising quality or personalisation. Maintaining a selection of templates that you can customise for each buyer prevents your team from reinventing content every time.

The best digital room for sales will feature a selection of customisable templates with various options to suit different scenarios. Look for software that features a variety of templates, including proposals, quotes, and demos. As a seller, you should be able to personalise them with your buyer’s branding and include all of your necessary information.

Your team can select a template, fill in the necessary data for your product and personalise it for your prospect. It's a smart business move that takes a fraction of the time your team normally would spend drawing up similar material. 

Forward features a library of professional templates to fit any sales scenario. The expert templates are customisable for your product and prospect. Plus, you can easily edit and share the materials to your buyer’s personalised workspace.

7. Seamless Integrations With Sales Tools

Think about all of the sales engagement tools you currently use. Maybe you already use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, electronic signature software, and an in-house chat platform. Your team already knows how to use these tools, you have loads of data stored in your CRM, and you don’t want to give them up. The idea of starting over or transferring all of that data into a new system feels overwhelming.

That’s alright, you don’t have to start over. Look for digital sales room software that seamlessly integrates with your existing toolbox. That way, there’s no need to start from scratch or lose valuable hours to manual data entry.

Whether you’re stuck on a CRM for customer relationships or can’t part with your internal communication channels, Forward has you covered with 30+ integrations. You can keep your chats and huddles in Slack and continue tracking prospect contact information in HubSpot’s CRM. 

Forward Provides You With the Ultimate Digital Room for Sales

Using a digital room for sales processes empowers your team to deliver a better buyer experience while saving time and shortening the sales cycle. With the right virtual sales room features, like personalised micro-sites and buyer engagement insights, you can make B2B buyers feel like they’re getting the B2C sales experience. 

If you’re struggling to find a digital sales room that meets your needs and offers all the features you desire, consider Forward. You get a user-friendly digital sales room that provides all the key features you need to impress prospects and work more efficiently. 

• Personalised micro-sites for every prospect kick things off right from the first meeting and carry buyers through onboarding and beyond.
• Multi-media embed makes it easy for teams to share content in the workspace, including videos, demos, and customer testimonials.
• Interactive Mutual Action Plans structure deals, hold everyone accountable, and reduce the time spent in the sales funnel.
• Buyer engagement insights provide valuable information about prospect behaviours to support better forecasting and timely follow-ups.
• Collaborate and communicate openly through live chat and comment features to maximise the limited interactions with B2B buyers.
• Leverage customisable templates to save time and effort without compromising quality and personalisation.
• With 30+ seamless integrations, you can easily integrate your favourite sales tools to avoid losing time to manual data entry.

Forward helps B2B sales teams overcome the challenges of the complicated, lengthy sales process. Your sales team can work more efficiently while delivering a better buyer experience through personalised sales content. Impress prospects with something new and exciting, making their sales journey smoother and simpler. 

Tap into the future of sales and put your buyer first with Forward’s digital sales room. Try it for free today!