As B2B sales technology advances, this also includes how deals are constructed and finalized.
With new mediums, the rise of B2B marketplace platforms, online demos, and virtual meetings, the means for sellers and buyers to carry out transactions has risen.
An example of this can be found in a digital sales room, a medium that has revolutionized the way deals and sales opportunities carry out the transactional process.
What is a Digital Sales Room?
A digital sales room is a safe place for the sellers and buyers to connect, interact and deal with one another. A digital sales room works as a usable, customizable tool for sales interactions.
Features of a digital sales room include:
- Introduction videos
- Case studies
- Testimonials
- Whitepapers
- Proposals
With just a single link, all these examples can be features of interactions between a buyer and a seller to help aid that purchasing process.
The use of a digital sales room makes the process more efficient, smooth, and timely, all compacted into a digital space. It provides a platform to help sales workers, giving them further data and analysis of buyer behaviors but also allows them to add amendments to proposed deals, add additional stakeholders and monitor the sales performance and metrics.
Examples of how a digital sales room can help can be seen in:
- A shareable, digital link.
- A personalized experience that enhances what would be seen in a real-life sales interaction.
- A branded journey unique to the buyer.
- Data and analysis, tracking the buyer journey to give detailed insights.
In essence, the digital sales room is a place that helps a buyer along their journey. Their path during purchasing is often confusing with many turns and bends – they will work with multiple stakeholders on both sides and have ever-changing variables that relate to the deal.
A digital sales room can help the buyer through a customized, informative resource that also operates as a communication hub too. It gives that important singular place that can streamline the purchasing process.
How Does It Help B2B Sales?
After the start of 2020, sales teams across the world realized that there had to be a much more efficient way to carry out deals. The digital sales room provided the perfect platform to interact, negotiate and close deals using technology.
Before 2020, just a couple of years ago, deals were slower, cumbersome, and required face-to-face meetings to get things over the line. Now, we see sales teams moving away from digital placeholder methods and now transitioning over to high-level, permanent sales technology.
The use of remote buying experiences allows the ability to scale this up to create an unbelievably high-quality buying experience. When you couple this with the advancement of technology like augmented and virtual reality, the possibilities are endless.
The digital sales room is the evolution from manual purchasing processes to a technology-infused buying experience that creates an impressive digital experience for both the sales team and the buyers.
This evolution has also advanced in tandem with the way buyers behave. In past, the buying process would be done solely through the sales manager, who was also in charge of managing and documenting the deal information. Now, we are seeing that buyers have minimal interactions with the salesperson, deciding to spend more time researching their purchase. Gartner reported that buyers spend just 17% of their time dealing with the sales workers of a supplier.
Therefore, the growth of the digital sales room works perfectly around this behavior. The personalized content gives the buyer the perfect opportunity to go back and forth through the content and information in their own time.
The digital sales room can now work as a guide for the sales worker – a tool that buyers can use repetitively through their journey to revisit the information and have a place where all the deal-related information and data is consolidated. The digital sales room also works as a one-to-one communication line between seller and buyer as they go through the process, meaning any hiccups or issues can be addressed easily and quickly, helping progress the deal much more timely than any previous methods.
Conclusion
When you look at how the world is developing post-pandemic, it is clear that the future of B2B sales is through digital sales rooms.
It has been recently reported that 9 out of 10 buyers are happy to spend upward of $50,000 using a digital or remote buying method. This is a world away from the pre-pandemic world where in-person meetings were the minimal requirement for carrying out big purchasing deals.
Giving buyers the potential to have their own digital experience is only going to drive sales forward. A digital sales room allows the sales rep to collate all the related information and numbers into a single place, adding so much value to all the parties involved. The buyer can access content quickly, speedily communicate their thoughts and close the deal in no time at all.
With these factors taken into account, it is clear to see that digital sales rooms and the virtual, digital, and remote experience they provide are the future of B2B sales.
