Why Digital Sales Rooms Are the Future of Sales

B2B sales have drastically changed over the past decade with buyers preferring a heavily digital experience. The changing landscape forces sales teams to rethink their strategies and find new ways to meet their buyers’ needs. 

Shifting to digital sales presents many challenges since buyers still want a personalised experience that’s tailored to their needs. How can you showcase your product when your prospects prefer the self-serve method? How do you know if your buyers like, or even read, the materials you send? 

A digital sales room helps teams overcome these challenges with a functional solution. Not only can you draw your teams together in an aligned digital sales room, but you can also give your buyers the outstanding experience they deserve. 

What Is a Digital Sales Room?

A digital sales room is a one-stop shop for B2B business deals. The collaborative workspaces bring every aspect of the sales process into a secure space for buyers and sellers. Everyone involved in the deal can access the same information and communicate about the deal in the same space to make negotiations easier.

Using a digital sales room allows teams to create personalised micro-sites for every prospect. These sites contain all deal information, maintain communications, and make real-time collaboration possible.

Further, sales teams work more efficiently because they can easily add new sales materials, make adjustments, and communicate with buyers in the dedicated workspace. You can even track buyer engagement with your sales materials to know who’s most interested and time your follow-ups accordingly.

9 Reasons Digital Sales Rooms Are the Future of Sales

B2B sales teams have many challenges to overcome in the digital sales environment. There are nine big reasons you need to shift your sales to digital sales rooms.

1. Streamline the Buyer Journey 

Sending emails with lists of links and hoping your buyer will click through enough to get a good picture of your product is inefficient at best. On the other hand, working with too many different platforms gets complicated to manage. It often adds roadblocks instead of making the process more efficient, creating problems for sellers and buyers. 

You need a user-friendly platform that’s easy to operate and doesn’t require a laundry list of links to access necessary information. 

Digital sales rooms offer a single workspace that serves as the centralised hub for your entire deal. Your buyers receive one link to a personalised workspace tailored to meet their needs. When you can access all sales materials and communicate through one space, you get a smoother, simpler process.

2. Structure the Sales Process

One of the biggest challenges in B2B sales is the lengthy, complicated process. Mutual Action Plans (MAP) structure the process so everyone involved knows what’s expected of them and when. Traditionally, a MAP could be something as simple as a document that tracks the process, but digital sales rooms give you the power to do more.

Interactive Mutual Action Plans don’t just structure the sales journey, they engage the buyer at every stage and give your team more oversight into the process. It’s easier to identify potential bottlenecks so you can be more proactive and create a smoother deal.

3. Shorten the Sales Cycle

Digital sales rooms remove many of the roadblocks that come with remote sales, including some of the most time-consuming tasks. Sales teams can automate several tasks to save time. For example, you can schedule posts and use customisable templates to reduce time spent creating and sharing content. 

You can easily trim time off the overly long B2B sales cycle. Sales teams have more time to serve more buyers, which boosts your conversion rate.

4. Enhance Your Visual Selling

Long blocks of text might contain the information you want to share with your prospects, but it comes across as overwhelming and boring. You need to deliver an engaging, visual experience, preferably with interactive elements that hold your buyer’s attention.

Digital sales rooms make it possible to share demos through the personalised micro-site. Your team can upload a customised presentation, interactive demo, or case study to the buyer’s deal hub instead of using the old screen-sharing methods. 

Build a library of media that you can share at the optimal time. For example, you could store some recorded testimonials from satisfied customers and add them to a buyer’s workspace to reinforce your product’s benefits.

5. Maintain All Sales Materials and Contacts in One Place 

A digital sales room creates a single space with all the information your buyer needs so they don’t have to keep track of email chains or figure out which links matter. It also makes the process more efficient for your sales team who can edit and share content and documents from a centralised hub.

Look for software that allows the sales team to add, edit, and share sales materials in one place for everyone involved. For example, Forward offers multi-media embed features to ensure your team can easily shift sales materials into personalised workspaces. They can easily edit and adjust materials to meet each buyer’s needs.

6. Easily Track the Progress of Every Deal

Having everything in one digital sales room allows teams to track buyer engagement. You will know when your prospects review materials, how long they spend, and which ones they visit repeatedly. 

Use buyer engagement insights to monitor deal progress, identify the most interested prospects, and know when to follow up for maximum impact. Reduce the guesswork and focus your sales efforts on the highest quality prospects to work more efficiently and convert more deals.

7. Deliver a Personalised Sales Journey

Buyers want a personalised experience instead of something generic that you send to every prospect. They get enough cold emails with lists of links to view, so you need to offer something new and different. That’s where personalised micro-sites make an impression.

Did you know? 77% of B2B buyers consider personalisation a necessity. Find a way to offer a tailored experience or lose sales.

Buyers demand this level of attention because they want to feel valued and understood. Creating a tailored buying experience begins with the first meeting, but it should carry through the entire sales process into onboarding and beyond. 

Forward gives you the tools to craft personalised micro-sites for every buyer. From the very first click, your buyer opens a customised space, complete with personalised visuals, like their logo and a matching banner. As the deal progresses, add the content they require to provide a memorable, tailored experience.

8. Empower All B2B Decision-Makers

B2B deals typically involve multiple decision-makers with unique concerns. Think about how time-consuming and frustrating it is to maintain email exchanges or phone calls with all of them. It’s too easy to lose track of which decision-maker requested what information, and that leaves your team looking incompetent. 

Communication features remain one of the biggest advantages of using an aligned digital sales room. You can easily provide the information and insights each one needs to make a decision. Every decision-maker can see the same information and know that you’re organised and on top of everything, boosting confidence in you and your product.

Leveraging live chat and comment features can facilitate a speedier process and please all of your buyer’s decision-makers. You can also easily maintain conversation chains and upload requested materials instead of emailing attachments.

Did you know? 80% of B2B buyers expect sellers to communicate in real time. You need to reach your buyers where and when they seek you out.

Having the ability to collaborate in real-time allows sales teams to answer questions more timely and negotiate more efficiently to move deals forward faster. There’s no concern for the query going to a spam box or being overlooked because it all exists within the personalised workspace. 

9. Better Security and Privacy

Security and privacy remain a concern for everybody. Tapping into the power of a digital sales room creates a secure and private space to handle your deals. Only individuals with the link can access a buyer’s personal workspace. Create transparency and give your buyers peace of mind as they move forward with a deal. 

Step Into the Future With Forward’s Digital Sales Rooms

Digital sales rooms empower sales teams to deliver an outstanding buyer experience while working more efficiently and effectively. Leveraging an aligned digital sales room allows you to create the personalised, streamlined experience buyers want. 

Sales teams who deliver a user-friendly, tailored experience will be more successful because they put the buyer first. Demonstrate that you understand what your buyers want and need while providing your team with the tools to work more efficiently.

Forward’s digital sales room provides B2B sales teams with the tools they need to succeed, including interactive Mutual Action Plans to structure every deal. Give each prospect access to a secure, personalised digital workspace that serves as the hub for their sales journey. You’ll also impress prospects with buyer-centric features, like live chat and comments to ensure timely interactions. 

Discover how Forward’s Digital Sales Rooms support your sales goals. Try it for free today!