Glossary

Digital Sales Room

For B2B SaaS companies, basic customer outreach is no longer enough. The modern digital sales process is both complex and involved, with the average buyer engaging in roughly 27 information-gathering sessions prior to reaching out. Your sales team also has less direct influence over the buying process, which has become more nonlinear than ever. 

Finally, purchase decisions no longer rest with a single stakeholder, but instead are frequently driven by a larger group. Buyer expectations have also changed. Buyers who reach out to your company will expect you to meet them where they are with personalized interactions and a unique sales experience. 

Digital sales room software allows you to do so.  

What is a Digital Sales Room? 

Also known as a virtual sales room or dealroom, a digital sales room is a centralized online space that allows buyers to collaborate with a company’s sales representatives. Using a digital sales room not only helps consolidate communication between buyers and sellers but also provides a secure channel for sharing sales collateral, contracts, and other critical content. For SaaS companies, these digital sales tools are equal parts showroom, sales microsite and demo.

How Do Digital Sales Rooms Work?

Digital sales rooms create a dedicated environment tailored to each buyer and their needs. This virtual environment not only supports one-on-one communication but also content sharing, tagging, commenting, and product demos. Examples of content that a sales team might share via a digital sales room include: 

• Case studies.
• Proposals.
• White papers.
• Testimonials.
• Product and pricing information. 

Digital sales rooms are designed to enable personalization through the use of customizable templates. They also provide analytics for deeper insights into buyer activity and engagement. Finally, a digital sales room will typically allow clients to sign contracts and place orders directly within their portal. 

The Benefits of Using a Digital Sales Room

At its 2023 CSO & Sales Leader Conference, Gartner identified digital sales rooms as one of the top nine technologies for boosting buyer engagement. The analyst also predicted that by 2025, 80 percent of sales interactions between B2B suppliers and buyers would occur in digital channels. During the conference, Gartner also called out several key benefits: 

• A consolidated project management hub for a company’s buying team, empowering them with easy access to reference materials and vendor assets. 
• A streamlined sales process that reduces friction and creates a better overall purchase experience. 
• Better targeting and personalization.
• Improved customer retention through collaboration between buyer and seller.  

Other benefits of using a digital sales room for SaaS include: 

• Accelerated deal cycles. 
• Stronger relationships with clients. 
• Alignment with buyer behavior — many B2B buyers engage in something known as looping, which involves multiple visits to the same channel throughout the sales cycle. 
• Easy progress tracking and identification of potential opportunities. 
• Eliminating silos between sales, marketing, and customer success teams. 

Best Practices for Using a Digital Sales Room

A digital sales room is ultimately another form of digital sales enablement platform — meaning the same general best practices apply to both technologies: 

• All content you share must be relevant to the buyer and their needs. 
• Keep all content on the platform up-to-date.
• Make sure each buyer feels like they’re your company’s top priority by ensuring your team is both ready and able to answer their questions. 
• Limit access exclusively to authorized personnel. Use security features such as strong passwords, encryption, and multifactor authentication to protect the platform and its contents. 
• Consider how your digital sales room will integrate with other tools in your sales enablement stack, including but not limited to:
  • Customer relationship management.
  • Price quotation.
  • eSignature.
  • Contract management. 
  • Virtual training. 
• Monitor buyer activity within your digital sales room and use the insights you gain to optimize your sales process. 
• Create playbooks that detail how your team should respond to various indicators of engagement and disengagement. 
• Keep your branding consistent. 

For more information about digital sales rooms, B2B sales enablement or sales enablement training, request a free demo from CloudShare.