Close deals faster with these 12 best practices for using digital sales rooms for sales.
Digital sales rooms offer sellers and prospects an online space to continue conversations and share content anytime, anywhere. In fact, Gartner highlighted digital sales rooms as an essential buyer engagement technology for the virtual selling tech stack.
Gartner predicts that 80% of B2B sales transactions will be conducted through a digital channel by 2025. This is because customers seek more autonomy in their buying decisions. A digital sales room helps you rethink buyer enablement by creating a continuous demand cycle that blends virtual sales calls with the self-service-driven digital experience customers are looking for.
As we mentioned in the “What is a digital sales room?” blog post:
“The digital sales room has simplified the selling process for sellers and buyers alike. In a world where buyers connect worldwide, both parties must have their own space for engaging conversation and content-rich experiences. Digital sales rooms bridge these gaps, making buying and selling easier than ever before.”
A well built virtual sales room empowers sales representatives to:
To take full advantage of digital sales room software, we’re updating our original 5 best practices for digital sales rooms with a total of 12 best practices. If sales organizations and representatives can take advantage of this new sales tool, this can provide an important competitive advantage with B2B buyers expecting a more personalized, digital-first purchasing experience.
Virtual sales room software enables sales to deliver a tailored buying experience by allowing sellers to:
Regarding welcome messages, using videos in sales outreach increased response rates for 70% of sales representatives, creating a marked improvement in prospect engagement and increasing the likelihood of deal closure.
Based on our Trendwatch 2022: Digital Sales Room Boost Buyer Engagement, prospects watched an average of 43s of a video welcome message. Moreover, buyers are 13% more likely to remember details from video content over text content (Source: Vidyard).
It’s tempting to create an online space high on visual appeal and the latest technology widgets. However, you want prospects to easily navigate through the page and your story narrative:
By pulling together a cohesive layout and narrative, this will increase buyer interaction and engagement with your company.
Consider adding at least one sales action to guide prospects or provide relevant information as part of the buyer’s journey. Based on aggregated customer data, nearly 50% of customer digital sales rooms had at least one call to action. The most common were related to scheduling a demo, meeting, or call.
Digital sales room software allows you to monitor the engagement of different buyers to determine what content is most effective during the deal process. Other interactive tools provide more opportunities for sales reps to support and guide buyers through the process:
Typically, email, questions and responses happen via email, which can easily get lost as the deal progresses. On the other hand, virtual sales rooms are a personalized, ever-evolving source for interactive sales collateral, including proposals, case studies, previously recorded demos, white papers, Q&A, and more.
As a central resource for all conversations and content between sellers and buyers, all decision makers can easily access all the content via a single, persistent link throughout the entire purchase process.
Virtual sales rooms capture in-depth buyer interactions and new contacts as rooms are shared. Integrating this information with your CRM system enables the sales organization to have a more complete picture of their deals, while increasing adoption amongst sales representatives.
According to Drew Hultgren, Director of Revenue Operations, Propeller Aero, integrating Enable Us with their CRM enabled them to “feed meaningful insights back and forth to enrich our CRM data and make it even easier for sales to adopt the platform in a meaningful way.”
When requests for information or questions are sent via email, it becomes an extended thread with multiple attachments. The conversation and next steps can be lost, requiring sales review the entire thread and delaying a sales rep’s response accordingly.
With digital sales rooms, sales reps and other sales collaborators have the option to receive notifications via real-time email or Slack updates for any new activity, questions or shares. Any sales team member can immediately respond, keeping everyone in the loop and impressing prospects with a high-level of customer service.
As your deal progresses, a mutual action plan (MAP) is a great way to outline the key milestones that your sales rep and prospect must complete to close the deal.
Both the seller and buyer can easily make adjustments to the sales success plan, such as:
Previously, sales reps would send an email with attachments to prospects. Beyond open rates, sellers received scant insight into how prospects engaged with the email:
Digital sales room software addresses this black box of buyer analytics.
Virtual sales rooms gather information on buyer interactions and conversations. Sales leaders and reps analyze what content buyers are viewing and sharing. Studying this data gives sales teams valuable insight into buyers’ behaviors and how to enhance their journey. This leads to better sales interactions and faster decisions on how to effectively meet the demands of your customers.
All your collaboration has happened in the digital sales room and you’re ready to sign the contract. Keep the momentum going by uploading signable documents into the room for verified signers to review and sign with eSignature technology.
Better yet, create templates of your most commonly used contracts, NDAs, and other documents to streamline the process.
According to the Salesforce State of Sales report, sales spends over 70% of their time on non-selling activities. Recapture some of this time and streamline the sales process by turning your high performing rooms into digital sales room templates.
The rooms will include sales content appropriate for specific sales scenario, such as by:
In today’s business climate, digital selling has required buyers and sellers to find new ways to engage. Resulting from many years of self-contained buyer journeys and technological advancements, digital sales rooms bring the traditional selling method into an enhanced digital world.
Digital sales rooms offer buyers and sellers an online space that allows them to continue conversations, synchronously and asynchronously.
In fact, our customers reported sales deals closing 20-40% faster as a result of digital sales room software. Virtual rooms enhance how sellers and buyers build relationships, trust, and collaboration throughout the entire buying process.
