With digital selling now an essential skill for sellers, technology in the form of digital sales rooms has risen to meet the need for sellers to share their content in more engaging ways.

Companies including Journey, Aligned, GetAccept and Trumpet have developed specific DSR solutions, and sales enablement platforms like Highspot, Seismic and Showpad have Digital Sales Rooms as a bolt on to their core content products.

Digital Sales Rooms allow your sellers to build a bespoke branded microsite to share content with customers, and in more advanced platforms, to share mutual action plans and manage the quoting and contracting process.

As you roll out DSR technology to your sellers here are some guidelines to improve your buyer’s experience.

Stop calling it a Digital Sales Room

I’ve always had an issue with calling things the ‘sales hotline’ or the ‘salesroom’, or the ‘salesperson’. It is such an internal view of the world.

“Press 1 to speak to Sales”

As a buyer I don’t want to talk to someone who’s very definition is they want to sell something.

Its a small change, but calling it a digital collaboration room, or a deal room, or a customer microsite helps your sellers to step out of their world and try to create something that benefits the buyer and is not just a new channel to pitch through.

Action: Decide what you’ll call these digital rooms internally, as that name will be used by sellers when they speak to customers.

However, as Digital Sales Room (DSR) is the industry term, I will use it through the remainder of this article so we know what we are talking about!

Think from the buyer’s perspective

Your sales process has a corresponding buying process in the customer’s organisation.

If your seller thinks this deal is worth designing a DSR for it then there is a high likelihood the buyer is tracking their decision process in a purchasing system themselves.

It might just be a Sharepoint or Google Drive folder, or they might be using a procure to pay platform like Coupa or SAP Ariba.

The buyer is trying to co-ordinate their buying team and provide a consistent format to all the vendor content they receive, so a natural reaction is,

“Thanks for sharing all your content on that webpage. I have downloaded it and put it all in the Sharepoint folder for the wider team to access”

All of that hard work designing a beautiful (and trackable) experience and it provided no additional value to the buyer.

Action: ask your sellers to understand from their buyers how they are running their internal processes. How could a micro-site help them support their buying committee? Can they share links in their internal system or does it need to be files?

Create content specifically for the DSR format

It is tempting for busy sellers rushing from one call to another to just use a DSR to share a set of content that they would have shared via email.

“After the call I’ll send you a couple of case studies and the recording of this call”

Over goes three links in the DSR.

They might have a nice thumbnail, but the buyer has the same experience - they need to click to download and then watch through a one hour call.

(A little secret - No-one has ever watched a one hour video of a demo that happened previously)

Instead your sellers should take some learnings from your web team around attracting and retaining attention.

Use of header text to guide the viewer. Describe what you are showing and what you want the viewer to do next.

Use of images. Instead of sharing a 50 page deck, take screenshots of key slides and add these in so the viewer can learn from them without opening the file.

Short-form video. Instead of sharing a 60 minute demo, re-record a 90 second segment and add that in, with text describing what the buyer will learn from it.

Think of your DSR more like a webpage than a content folder. It is easier to consume, and it removes the desire to download every item to Sharepoint.

Action: Provide training and coaching to sellers to support their build of DSRs. Can one of your marketing interns be assigned as a DSR ninja that does the heavy lifting for the AEs?

Design for the process before and after where you are now

It can be tempting to ‘speak’ directly to the main contact or set of contacts that attended the meeting.

G2 provide some fantastic content about buyer enablement, and found that 71% of buying processes have new individuals added to the process as it progresses.

Executives leave, champions change roles, a new admin is hired.

At this point your outgoing contact is likely to share content with the new person to bring them up to speed.

This is the opportunity for your sellers to have a section that is regularly updated on how we got to this point.

This is our understanding of your challenge
This is the cost of inaction (and why it is important you do something)
This is how our solution fits this problem

Any new member of the buying committee is going to assume your seller is just like every other seller - solely focused on their own quarterly number,

The welcome section is a great way of differentiating yourself for the new buyers that get added to the process along the way.

Action: Have your sellers create a welcome video that speaks to people yet to be introduced to the buying process.

Create content for the person your contact shares it with

The buying journey is a complicated one involving many different roles within the customer organisation.

As your customer progresses through their process they will want to introduce teams including legal and infosec.

Instead of waiting for your customer to raise the topic and share their draft documents or a 240 row security questionnaire, get ahead of it by including tabs or pages in your DSR specifically for these topics.

You might include an FAQ document on the top questions customers have about your MSA.
You might include video testimonials from the security team at other customers who share their perspective of your security practices.
You might share your registration for the Cloud Security Alliance.

Think from the perspective of a lawyer, or security team member who has been told to start working with a new vendor. “Eurgh - back to the start again,” they think.

*Quote from G2’s 2023 Buyer Behaviour Report*

What if that vendor just made your job a whole load easier by laying out the red carpet to you.

That is going to help you to give a quick thumbs up and to keep the process moving.

Action: create templated pages for your sellers for supporting teams including legal, security, project managers, integrations.

Don’t jump on every interaction

Imagine you are in a shoe shop. You see a pair of trainers you quite like, and pick one up.

Immediately the assistant is there “these are $79.99, leather uppers, we have a discount on today….”

I’m putting that shoe back down and walking off,

Buyers know that the ‘deal’ with using a DSR is that their activity is tracked. But if you jump on every interaction then it just encourages them to download all the documents and put them in Sharepoint.

Don’t encourage your sellers to be stalkers.

Next time they are on a customer call of course it is useful to know that the customer didn’t open the pricing table, or did share the customer video with a colleague. But that isn’t the focus of the conversation.

Allow your buyers to ‘browse’ without jumping on them.

Action: Coach your sellers on how to use the analytics they receive through the DSR platform.

Get feedback from your buyers

Once you have rolled out your DSR platform and it has seen action in a number of successful and non-succesful sales processes get out in the field and speak to buyers about their experience.

Treat this like a product interview -

Who used the tool?
How did you use it?
What did you find easiest/most complicated to use?
How did it change the way you interacted with content?
How did it help/hinder your internal buying process?
How did it affect your perception of our company/our seller?

The DSR is a key part of your customer’s buying experience, and it is too important just to roll the tech out to your sellers and let them get on with it.

If buyers don’t see value in your platform, then you are spending a lot of money on licences for a tool that doesn’t impact your bookings.

Get started

Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.

Buyer Experience Audit - I’ll impersonate a buyer researching your segment and company and let you know what I find. Ideal for planning your Revenue Operations strategy.
Business Model Design Workshops - I’ll work with you and your team to design or refine a business model for a new or existing product.
RevOps Impact Playbooks - I’ll help you implement one or more tactical processes across your revenue teams - content, referrals, testimonials, adoption and more.

7 tips when deploying Digital Sales Rooms