Right now, the B2B buyer journey is harder than it should be. According to a Gartner report, 77% of B2B buyers rate their most recent purchase as “difficult” or “very complex.”
Why? The typical B2B sales process involves long emails with various links and attachments. This overwhelming and disorganized amount of information is an inefficient way to drive sales.
As a B2B seller, you need to adjust your sales process to align with customers’ virtual selling preferences. About 70-80% of B2B decision makers prefer either digital self-service or remote interaction with a sales rep. A Digital Sales Room (DSR), or a buyer-seller online portal, is the optimal solution to replace the traditional sales process. With a DSR, your sales team can create a customized online space that makes it easy for your customer to take action.
If you haven’t already, implement a Digital Sales Room strategy to increase productivity, keep track of customer communications, and build content resources for your sales team. A DSR will empower your customers to make buying decisions and your sales reps to close more deals.
Once a DSR is created, sellers can generate a unique shareable link to give buyers and stakeholders access to the portal. The DSR houses all of the information and resources that a buyer needs to make a purchasing decision. Each DSR acts like a showroom, but rather than being in-person, the online space is designed and built for a personalized buying experience.
Since the sales content is tailored to your customer’s business needs, they can have their questions answered through self-service or by reaching out to the salespeople assigned to the room. From the sales proposal to product demos and case studies, the customer experience is enhanced when all sales collateral is centralized in one user-friendly deal room.
Digital Sales Rooms also help sales reps understand which sales content is more effective at closing deals. When buyer behavior is connected to sales enablement platforms, sales teams can gather insights into how prospects interact with content and determine which content can be used or improved in future negotiations.
A Digital Sales Room allows sales reps to drive more sales by building strong, trusting relationships faster. In many ways, a DSR is like a microsite that acts as both a central source of information and a piece of the marketing and sales funnel.
In your DSRs, make your customers feel supported and valued by providing content that addresses frequently asked questions and includes all information specific to your customer’s needs.
A DSR increases sales productivity by streamlining the buyer journey, saving time and effort on needless back-and-forth communications. With a secure, central location where all content exists, the buyer has everything they need at their fingertips. This empowers the buyer to go through the sales process more efficiently. A less-confused customer frees up time for the sales rep, as they no longer need to clarify or resend information to the customer as often.
With a Digital Sales Room, sales reps can build more efficient workflows. Your DSR will help you easily track the buyer journey from proposal to deal approval to the final eSignature. There’s no need to search through countless emails, track down points of contact, or send over a new version of the contract each time it’s updated. Instead, you can update contracts and other documents and quickly swap them out in your DSR. When they’re ready for final approval, your buyers will know where to find them.
Another benefit of the Digital Sales Room is its ability to capture data on client interactions and patterns. Effective DSRs include a two-way communication feature or the option to schedule a meeting with a sales rep.
Whenever a customer uses a communication feature, such as a chat box in your DSR, it can be tracked as either a positive sign that the buyer is engaged and wants to learn more or that the content you’ve provided is insufficient.
Sales representatives can review this data and determine:
Your sales team should use the notes and analysis of the data to improve upon the customer DSR experience either in real time or in future DSRs.
The DSR also acts as a content management system that helps sales reps stay organized and increase buyer engagement. Access to the right content is crucial to a successful sales process. Content should be tailored and grouped according to specific stages in the sales life cycle. However, only 65% of sellers claim to have tailored, easily accessible sales content.
It’s important to create an intuitive system that makes it easy for customers and sales reps to find what they are looking for. Tips for building an organized DSR that positively impacts both buyer and seller engagement include:
A successful Digital Sales Room prioritizes high-quality content that follows specific guidelines. The quality of your sales content should always trump the quantity, as quality content tends to generate more engagement. If you want to provide high-quality sales content in ways that accelerate sales, below are the main dos and don’ts when it comes to designing and organizing your DSRs.
Do your research on the customer and their industry. Personalization will keep your customer more engaged. Use persuasive language and terminology specific to their industry (e.g., address the customer by name, position, and/or company and include content that caters to their interests).
If possible, implement real-time communication options such as a text chat or video chat feature. Make your sales team accessible to the customer whenever is convenient for them.
Record explainer videos or video introductions, include links and buttons to relevant resources, and include polls or surveys to gain a better understanding of your buyer’s needs.
Use call-to-action statements (CTAs) that provide the buyer with clear next steps. Include a buyer checklist to follow or a mutual action plan that updates throughout the process.
Use your DSR as another opportunity to strengthen the customer’s relationship with your brand. All visual assets should follow brand guidelines, and all language should align with brand voice and tone.
Record a product or service demo that is customized to your potential customer.
Connect relevant sales software and other integrations to seamlessly link information (e.g., CRM, quote software, contract management software, eSignature software, etc.).
Gather and analyze the data from your DSR. The insights you get from data will help you develop better content and close more deals.
Develop sales materials that educate the buyer without hard selling the product or service. The idea is to help the buyer become empowered in their purchase decision.
Don’t assume the customer will understand everything you present to them in the DSR. (Or even how the DSR works to begin with.) Provide guides and explanations whenever possible.
Research your customer and devise a custom DSR strategy. When the customer enters the “room,” their first impression should be a positive one. Planning ahead will position your sales team as a dedicated potential partner.
Give DSR access to all support teams and sales stakeholders. This will ensure that everyone stays on the same page and can learn from one another quickly and efficiently.
At Mindtickle, we offer Digital Sales Room software with all-in-one functionality, including templates to easily build your DSR, unlimited collaborators, and more tools like Call AI or continuous learning programs to leverage and generate more sales. Whether you need to create new content, monitor a deal cycle, or follow up on your team’s performance, sales leaders can improve the entire buying process using Mindtickle’s products.
You don’t need to know how to code or build a website to build a Digital Sales Room with Mindtickle. Instead, choose from a collection of pre-made templates that can be easily customized for each customer deal.
Here are the steps for using templates with Mindtickle:
Consider testing out a few different templates with various customers. Then, once you have enough data, clone the top-performing rooms and save those as your go-to DSR templates.
In addition to determining the top-performing templates, monitor behavior within each template and make adjustments to improve engagement. Remember to keep your DSR clean, clear, and simple. For example, if you notice that customers aren’t clicking on the news links you’ve included, remove them. The less clutter, the better.
Mindtickle’s asset hub makes content management simple and powerful. With one repository for all content, sales reps can consolidate and organize all assets and content to easily and quickly find the right content when they need it.
Moreover, Mindtickle tracks and measures how reps engage with each piece of content in the field. Sales managers can take a look at the data on an asset-by-asset level and aggregate it by content type. During this data analysis, managers may discover that valuable content is underutilized but is still capable of providing great ROI. Or they may discover that content that is rarely or never used can be removed entirely, as it has no reason to be replicated in the future.
An even more pressing issue is when the data indicates that outdated scripts or information are still used. Routine content updates are vital to a flourishing sales team and high-quality sales content in your DSR.
According to our benchmark report, sellers are also more likely to use the content when they believe they can rely on it. Therefore, regularly updating your sales content will also boost your sales team’s confidence and performance.
Our survey of Mindtickle customers also found that teams who updated their key content more frequently generated the most engagement. For the top 10% of organizations with the highest engagement, they updated their content once every 3.25 months.
Here are a few tips on how to prioritize regular reviews and updates of existing content:
A DSR serves as a collaborative workspace where sales reps can share content with both the customers and other team members. By making all information accessible and transparent, Mindtickle’s DSRs eliminate knowledge-siloing that occurs when sales reps are working one on one with customers.
One unique way Mindtickle’s DSRs remove silos is through the use of Call AI, Mindtickle’s conversation intelligence feature. Call AI automatically records and transcribes calls and web conferences. Call AI also uses AI-driven analysis to produce actionable insights about buyer interactions.
Through a shared DSR, the entire sales leadership team, members of other departments, and even the customer can have access to entire call recordings or to relevant, selected snippets.
Advantages of Mindtickle DSRs within and across teams include:
Similar to other websites, accounts, and platforms, there are a few steps you can take to ensure a secure DSR:
Yes, a digital sales room will help you close more deals. Here are the top reasons why:
Sales teams have to deal with constant change. Continuous learning is the key to sales enablement success, especially when implementing a new selling system like Digital Sales Rooms.
Without continuous learning, sales teams forget about 80% of their training within a month. Adequately onboarding a sales rep to a new Digital Sales Room is just one piece of the puzzle. To really thrive in DSRs, sales reps require sales everboarding, a system to repeatedly re-up their skills and apply new training to their work.
Through sales coaching, interactive courses, role-plays, and other training programs, your virtual sales reps will be dominating your Digital Sales Rooms in no time.
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