5 tips for designing a Digital Sales Room program
The concept is simple - as buying groups get larger and more fragmented across teams and geographies, instead of sending an email stacked full of links and decks, a seller creates a bespoke branded micro-portal to share with their customer.
This micro-portal comes with the ability to track who is looking at which pieces of content, meaning sellers have insight that can help them progress their deals in a way they couldn’t by just sending emails.
But what’s in it for the end buyer?
Why would they engage with these platforms in exchange for being tracked?
Here are five tips to help you roll out a Digital Sales Room program that actually improves your buyer’s experience.
Think about what your buyers are trying to do
It will vary depending on the size of your deal and the size of the company you are selling into - but most companies making a purchase that would warrant you creating a Digital Sales Room are going to be following some kind of internal procurement process.
For earlier stage processes where your buyers are trying to understand the problem and explore potential solutions, they will typically store all vendor information in a project folder in Google Drive or Sharepoint, with individual sub folders for each vendor.
This makes it easy for new colleagues that join the buying group to access to the folder and get up to speed with each vendor’s presentations, responses and call recordings.
More advanced buying requests will be handled in a procurement tool like Coupa, Procurify or SAP Ariba where a requisition gets opened and the buyer can centralise information, including pricing, provided by potential suppliers.
These tools allow larger organisations to centralise their information for fragmented buying groups as they move towards consolidation and vendor selection.
Consider what your buyer is trying to do with the status quo tools.
They are trying to centralise multiple vendor’s content so it is easy for their team to find it.
They are trying to make it easy for new additions to the buying group to get up to speed
This is important - because if you can solve the second problem better than uploading a set of links and files to a Sharepoint folder your buyers will gravitate to your micro-portal.
If all you do is use your micro-portal to share the same set of links and files - they will simply download them and re-upload them to the shared in a centralised folder to solve the first problem.
Create the portal for the people you haven’t met
Gartner shares a statistic that buyers are in front of vendors for only 17% of their buying process.
The remaining 83% they are collaborating internally and doing their own internal research.
So whilst your sellers will be doing their best to multi-thread and uncover the influencers in their customer’s buying group - the reality is that many of the people that can say no to your deal will never meet your team.
The people that join during the buying process
G2’s Buyer Behaviour Survey shows that more than 70% of buying processes introduce new contacts to the buying group as the deal progresses - how are you going to bring them up to speed with the conversations so far?
G2 Buyer Behaviour Report
Digital Sales Rooms allow your sellers to speak ‘through’ the screen to those individuals without ever having met them.
Consider a page that conveys “the story so far” - how we got to this point, the operational challenge the customer is facing, the cost of the status quo, the financial assessment that was done to initiate this project.
IT and Infosec
For any technology product, especially SaaS, at some point a security assessment is going to be required.
Why wait and be on the back foot? Include a page that speaks directly to the customer’s infosec team:
“Typically customers want to know these three things….”
“Here is a short video from our head of security talking about how we architected the platform.”
“Here is a diagram explaining the locations and redundancy of our datacentres”
“Here is a copy of our ISO27001 accreditation”
“Have a question? chat directly with our infosec team here”
Your customer’s infosec team is going to be grateful you’ve made their job easier
Legal
As you get towards a decision your customer’s legal team will get introduced and you’ll lose time as you have a merry dance over who’s paperwork you are going to start from and why your contracts have the most relevant terms for the product you are selling.
Provide a page directly for their lawyers:
“Here’s a short video with our general counsel explaining our approach to contracting”
“Here’s an FAQ covering the most commonly debated MSA terms”
“Here is a mutual NDA that can be executed directly in this portal”
“Here are the terms that we are unable to move on and why”
Implementation
While you are focused on getting a signed contract, your customer is focused on getting value from the chosen solution, and your micro-portal can give your customers project team, or their chosen system integrator, a head start on planning their implementation:
“Here is a short video from our head of onboarding”
“We can wait to help you get value from the platform”
“Here is a typical onboarding plan that works with other customers”
“Here are some of the most common lessons learned from other projects”
“Here are the typical roles and responsibilities you’ll need in your team”
Additional teams
You can see how this can extend into Learning and Development, Accounts Payable (understanding your bill), Technical Support teams….
Think beyond the people you are trying to sell to and add real value to those you’ll never meet.
Provide templates for your sellers
Too many companies I work with delegate the responsibility of creating these micro-portals to their sellers.
This has the potential to be complex work, and for any seller that doesn’t have a side hobby in web design they’ll either opt out of it, or the output will be of low quality.
With many of the pages above - for Infosec, for legal and other teams the content is consistent from client to client.
Your Revenue Operations team should create templated pages by customer segment, by country, by product area, by sales stage - whatever makes most sense for your circumstances.
Next time a seller spins up an opportunity they can use the relevant template to share with their customer, adding in the deal personalisation to make it unique.
Support sellers in personalising their portals
Within your RevOps enablement team nominate a colleague who is skilled at personalising the micro-portals.
Have them reach out to sellers that have created opportunities that meet certain thresholds:
Target accounts
Opportunity size
Opportunity stage
“Hi, I’d like to help you build out a super-personalised micro-portal for your deal”
This individual can then pick up the logistical challenge of creating and maintaining the portal as the deal progresses.
Support the seller in creating bite-sized content for their DSRs. Don’t just upload a one hour call recording or a 30 page deck, think web design and create a blend of call snippets, individual graphics, timelines and FAQs.
Shouldn’t this be the role of the seller?
It may well be - but the reality shows that this is a big enablement shift for sellers - and you’ll want to physically take them on that journey.
It’s not a skill you can pick up over a one hour lunch and learn.
Monitor and iterate to improve your buyer’s experience
Buyer enablement and digital selling are at the forefront of B2B sales.
Everyone is still figuring out how these tools and techniques will fit into their go-to-market models and how they influence your key metrics.
Speak to your buyers
Include buyers that did choose your product as well as those that selected a competitor or the status quo.
Include non-core roles in addition to your champion - speak to the lawyer and the infosec team:
How did you use the micro-portal?
Who did you share it with?
Which content did you find most/least useful?
How did the seller introduce and explain the micro-portal?
What were your concerns about using the micro-portal?
How was this better/worse than receiving links over email?
How did you integrate the micro-portal content into your buying process?
What would you like to see in the micro-portals in future?
Speak to your sellers
How did you personalise your portals?
Which template pages did you find most/least useful?
Which additional template pages would you like created?
Who helped you create and maintain your micro-portal?
What did your customers tell you about their experience with the micro-portal?
Report on closed revenue and adoption
And ultimately - did customers that experienced a Digital Sales Room
Convert at a higher rate
Convert more quickly
Have less negotiation on price
Have fewer custom terms in the contract
Onboard faster
Have higher adoption
Experience lower churn
In your CRM create a flag for opportunities where a DSR was used and report against that group versus others that don’t.
Note: You’ll need to control for the fact that you are most likely to use a DSR in an opportunity of higher value.
How are you using Digital Sales Rooms?
These are five tips for rolling out a successful Digital Sales Room program,
How are you using them in your company?
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