What is a digital sales room?
In short, a digital sales room is a centralised location where sales reps and buyers can collaborate and access content that is relevant to the deal cycle.
But let’s expand on the case for digital sales rooms, how they work and how Stageset specifically improves your sales process. Let’s start with where the need for digital sales rooms comes from.
Why should you use a digital sales room?
In B2C the change towards buyer-centric sales happened a long time ago and even luxury goods can today be purchased via self-service online. In B2B we are now catching up with buyers doing their research online before even reaching out to a sales rep. But this creates new issues, as your buyer now faces the difficult task of going through nearly endless information and of comparing very different offerings where he is not an expert.
From the sellers perspective, times haven’t made it easier to close a deal as well. They partially lost the information framing power and have less interaction time with their buyers. Furthermore, according to Gartner there are now a record number of stakeholders involved and closing deals has become more complex and time consuming.
With digital sales rooms you can address all these issues:
- You tailor your information to your buyer’s case, making it easier and more convenient for them to evaluate your proposal.
- You allow the customer to advance the sales process anytime by themselves, shortening sales cycles.
- You can include and communicate to target stakeholders more directly and even target content for their specific needs. Think contract documents for the legal department.
What makes a digital sales room successful?
A digital sales room is a very powerful tool – in the right hands. It won’t replace a good product market fit, it won’t replace a strong outreach and it won’t (completely) replace a good sales performance.
So in order to be successful with your sales room, you need to have a proven sales process in place.
Sales Collateral
Prepare relevant sales presentations, case studies and pricing models for each product and each target customer segment. By creating these targeted templates you can focus the discussion with your client on the relevant portion of your offering – and if you need to readjust after a discussion, that is still easily possible.
Involving your buyer
Successful B2B sellers have been using mutual action plans to close complex deals for a long time. Most sellers discuss the next steps with their buyers, but expert sellers plan further ahead and discuss possible future roadblocks with their buyers ahead of time. If you want to learn more about mutual action plans, head over to our more in depth article.
An often underestimated aspect of digital sales rooms is the reduction in onboarding time of new stakeholders. One Stageset user reported that the digital sales room helped him bring through a deal although several key stakeholders at the prospect were exchanged during the sales process.
Repeatable sales process
By working with templates, you can continuously develop your sales process on an individual and on a team level. New sales reps have a huge head start if they can start with a proven sales process and proven targeted sales collateral.
Analytics
A digital sales room gives you insight into which sales collateral is effective, by tracking interactions closely.
It also gives you insight how a sales process performs for different products or different target customer segments
Better forecasting by measuring customer engagement. If the buying side regularly checks into the deal room, a close is very likely.
Introducing the digital sales room to your client
Once a prospect has crossed the interest threshold – which is from the beginning for inbound leads and after more information is requested in the outbound case – you can invite your prospect to the deal room. It takes no time to set up a new deal room based on a template, so you want to get insights into his real interest asap. If you’re worried that buyers might not want to join a deal room, see it as a win, as these clients aren’t really interested anyways and you save time on a qualification call.
Manage handovers
One of the great aspects of digital sales rooms is that a handover comes with the full picture of the discussions, the up to date version of the signed contracts and all the necessary contact information to get started in no time at all. Ideally, handovers are done fluently, with people being introduced and involved before the responsibility changes.
Nurturing
Maybe your timing didn’t work out with a client. But with the smart usage of templates, you can keep your deal rooms up to date without manual steps. By using automatic notifications about updates to sales collateral like e.g. the upload of a new case study or pricing, you can nurture your leads but don’t spend much time on a single account.
How does Stageset help
With Stageset, you can immediately create your own Sales rooms with success-proven templates. You will experience faster Sales cycles, a higher win rate and save hours of work everyday. For individuals the platform is free-to-use. For our early birds, we support you extensively to get started successfully.
