Digital Sales Room: Everything You Need To Know

There is no denying the fact that everything is shifting to a digital alternative in the current age, and buying and selling are no exception. As foreseen by Gartner in this report, Digital Sales Rooms (DSR) are set to become the industry standard for creating a solid customer repertoire and solidifying the ability to close deals faster.

DSRs embody the essence of modern and digital selling. It creates a seamless experience for your buyers to access and engage with your content without hassle.

With a wealth of real-time sales content analytics, you gain a holistic view of your buyers’ needs wherever they are in the sales journey. 

Here is quick summary of what you’ll find in the blog:

What is a Digital Sales Room

A Digital Sales Room is a digital environment where salespeople can share personalized sales materials and interact with potential buyers. It is a secure, branded micro website that facilitates all relevant sales information and resources under one hub.

DSR is where buyers can easily access and review information about your product that is relevant to their needs at that given stage in the sales cycle.

DSR is a secure, branded micro website where buyers can easily access and review information about your product that is relevant to their needs at that moment.

Typically your buyers are bombarded with information as they navigate the buying process. The Digital Sales Room provides a more efficient and convenient way to deliver those materials, and allows them easy access at their convenience.

Buyers can easily access and review information about your product that is relevant to their needs at that moment.

Overview of Typical DSR Features and Functionalities

A Digital Sales Room consists of the following basic features and functionalities:

• A content library for various content formats (e.g., product and service information, case studies, customer reference videos, forms, configurators, 3D models, etc.)

• Automatic file updates and device synchronization

• Customizable DSR branding

• Content sharing and presenting within the DSR

• Seller’s contact details

• Sales content analytics

• Other features such as PIN code and email access, DSR expiration date, personalized message, etc.

Why Do You Need A Digital Sales Room?

The sales process is loaded with bureaucracy, encumbered by several stakeholders who need to be convinced to buy in and a steady stream of questions. One of those questions might be, "why do we needs a Digital Sales Room?"

Gartner states that by providing easy access to relevant information that speaks to the needs and concerns of your buyers, you make the decision-making process easier for them, enabling a much stronger customer relationship.

A Digital Sales Room (DSR) provides this exact solution. By centralizing all essential content in one place, sellers can effortlessly share personalized information with buyers through a single link. Everyone involved has instant access to the latest updates, eliminating the need to sift through endless email chains.

DSR simplifies the sales process, benefiting both sellers and buyers. Sellers can focus on building relationships while ensuring clients receive the most relevant information at the right time. Buyers enjoy a smoother experience with easy access to all necessary materials. Additionally, DSR's analytics offer valuable insights into buyer behavior, empowering sellers to tailor their approach effectively.

Digital Sales Room For Various Roles

Digital Sales Rooms are no longer confined to the sales department. Their applications extend far beyond traditional sales functions. In this section, we'll explore how DSRs can be leveraged to enhance performance across various roles. 

Digital Sales Room for Sellers

DSRs empower sales professionals to deliver a truly personalized sales experience. By centralizing all relevant content within a single, shareable link, sellers can effortlessly create and distribute tailored materials to each prospect.

Gone are the days of endless email attachments. With a DSR, sales teams can quickly update content and ensure prospects always have access to the most current information.

In addition to that, the sales content content analytics provides sellers with invaluable insights into buyer behavior by tracking content consumption within the DSR. This data-driven approach enables sales professionals to tailor their approach to different stakeholders, building personalized sales personas and crafting content that resonates.

For instance, the messaging for an end-user might vary significantly from that for a distributor. With all account data centralized within a single DSR, sales teams can easily access and analyze information to make informed decisions throughout the sales cycle.

Digital Sales Room for Marketers

Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are equally powerful tools for marketers. It It creates a strong bridge of collaboration and cohesion between sales and marketing teams. DSRs enable marketers to ensure brand consistency across all customer touchpoints. Marketers can guarantee a seamless, branded experience for buyers and reinforce consistent messaging at every interaction.

The analytics offer invaluable insights for marketers too! Marketers can track which materials are most effective and most used by sellers, allowing for data-driven decisions on content creation and allocation of resources. This optimization leads to higher ROI and more impactful campaigns.

The collaboration between sales and marketing is significantly enhanced through DSRs. Marketers gain a clear understanding of which content resonates with the sales team, while salespeople benefit from always-relevant, up-to-date materials.

According to Forbes, sales increased for up to 80% of the companies that implemented personalization in their strategy. When that strategy is applied to an entire business pitch, the effects and impressions it has on potential clients are even more effective, making the likelihood of conversions even higher.

Digital Sales Room for IT, Security, Legal, and Compliance

As for IT, security, legal, and compliance teams, they are in charge of ensuring that anything that happens in a company follows certain rules and regulations, and can be controlled to some extent.

In some industries, like banking and pharmaceuticals, this is self-evident. Content shared with customers may include information that is controlled by law, so companies must ensure they do not share outdated or wrong information.

Using DSR for Added Security and Control

But for all other businesses, the Digital Sales Room adds an extra layer of security and control. Here are a few examples:  

• Lowers the risk of spam; a higher chance that content reaches the target audience
• Increased control over what can be shared, what can be downloaded, ability to close/shut down shares, update content
• Capability to see and analyze who is receiving, opening, and viewing content shared
• Capability to see who shares content
• Capability to restrict who can download shared content
• Capability to secure shared content with a PIN code

Digital Sales Room increases security and offers capabilities to make sure teams are following rules and regulations in a secure digital space. 

Customization and Branding with Digital Sales Room

When diving into the realm of Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs), customization is the doorway to creating a digital environment that resonates with your brand's identity and ethos.

Now, let’s look into the potential of customization and branding features common in DSRs:

1. Theme Customization

Tailoring the look and feel of your DSR to mirror your brand's aesthetics is pivotal. Through this, you can paint your Digital Sales Room with your brand colors, logos, and imagery, creating a familiar ambiance for your team and clients alike.

2. Custom Domains

Having a custom domain for your DSR not only exudes professionalism but also fosters brand recognition. Most DSR providers allow you to set up a custom domain, ensuring a seamless brand experience right from the URL.

3. Custom Content Layouts

A cluttered DSR is a big no-no. Designing how your content is laid out, creating intuitive pathways to information, and ensuring easy navigation is critical.

When looking for a DSR, look for a user-friendly interface that allows for custom content layouts, making sure your sales materials are organized and easy to access.

4. Personalized User Roles and Permissions

With varied roles in your sales process, having the ability to customize user permissions is key. This lets you define who gets access to what, even the ability to create user groups to ensure a streamlined flow of information within designated channels.

5. Custom Analytics Dashboard

Tracking and analyzing user interaction within your DSR should be as branded as anything else. This feature is highly beneficial for salespeople, while keeping your brand in the spotlight even in the nitty-gritty of data analysis.

6. Customizable Sales Presentations

Crafting presentations that resonate with your brand’s message is crucial. This feature allows for the customization of sales presentations, ensuring a consistent brand narrative.

Customization isn’t about changing something for the sake of change; it's about creating a digital sales environment that's a natural extension of your brand.

5 Practical Use Cases For A Digital Sales Room

“Okay, now I’m convinced that DSR would be great for me and my team. But where and how do I even start using it?”

We get it. The worst thing that can happen is when you’ve invested in a new tool, only to realize that you can’t incorporate into your day-to-day tasks. So we’ve come up with a few starting points for you:

1. Digital Sales Room as Part of the Sales Process

Every salesperson emails their prospects after every call or meeting to send over any relevant sales materials. That’s just sound practice. But not knowing whether or not your sales materials were even opened or shared is where being ineffective comes in.

Or worse, your prospect couldn’t open that 3D model or 2GB product video you sent. Sales become a guessing game and you start losing when you start guessing.

Digital Sales Room is a solution for all of that and more. Not only can you share and open various content types and sizes in the DSR (yup, even 3D content), you only need a weblink to access and share the Digital Sales Room.

Your prospect only needs a browser to open the link. And based on how they perceive your content, you’ll be able to craft your sales materials better to their requirements. This creates certainty at every touchpoint with your buyers. You’ll rest assured that your buyer gets the most personalized experience with content targeted to their specific needs at any given time.

This creates certainty at every touchpoint with your buyers. You’ll rest assured that your buyer gets the most personalized experience with content targeted to their specific needs at any given time.

2. Digital Sales Room for Social Selling

Digital Sales Room is a modern approach to social selling. It's like a virtual showroom where you can showcase your products or services to potential customers 24/7. You can share the link to the room on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter to get more eyes on it.

You can share the link to the room on social media platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter to get more eyes on it.

You can answer any questions visitors might have and give them more information about your offering. This eliminates that initial barrier between your product and a wide audience. And the best part? You can acquire all the visitors' email addresses when they access your content. These email addresses can be then used in multiple ways for sales and marketing outreach. 

3. Digital Sales Room for Product Launches

DSR can also be a valuable tool when launching new products. Just like a virtual showroom, you can use it to provide detailed information about the upcoming product, such as its features, specifications, and pricing.

Additionally, you can use the DSR for virtual product demos, sales presentations, and Q&A sessions, which can help potential buyers understand the value of the new product. 

4. Digital Sales Room for Email Campaigns

Yes, you can use a Digital Sales Room for email campaigns. You can include a link to the DSR in your email marketing campaigns, allowing potential customers to access relevant material easily. In the DSR, you can provide detailed information about your products or services, such as product or service specifications, pricing, and demos.

By including a link to the DSR in your email campaigns, you can allow potential customers to learn more about your products or services and interact with your company in a more engaging way.

In addition, you can use the analytics and tracking features of a DSR to measure the performance of your email campaigns and make adjustments as needed.

5. Digital Sales Room for Internal Communication and Knowledge Sharing

DSR can also be leveraged for internal communications in different ways. It can be used for training and onboarding new employees or a dealer sales network. The DSR acts as a source of interactive and engaging content about the company such as product offerings or a sales playbook.

It can be used as a platform for employees to share and access critical documents, files, and other resources. This can streamline internal communications and make it easier for employees to access the information they need.

Best Practices for Digital Sales Rooms

A DSR can be a powerful tool if you’re looking to streamline your sales processes. With the right approach, DSR can help you showcase your products or services engagingly and interactively. This will make it easier for potential customers to learn about what you have to offer.

We’ve come up with some best practices so you can ensure that your DSR is used in the most effective and user-friendly way, helping you to increase conversions and boost your bottom line.

1. Only Share Content That is Relevant to the Buyer

It's key to focus on providing relevant, engaging content for potential buyers. This means providing information that is directly related to the products you are selling, and keeping it simple and focused.

By only sharing relevant content, you can help to keep your buyers engaged and interested in what you have to offer. This can help to increase the chances that they will take action, such as making a purchase or requesting more information.

It’s also beneficial for your buyers if you segment your audience. It can be done by providing different information for different personas, stages of the funnel, or even their location or language.

2. Support Sales With Interactive Tools and Immersive Content

Another excellent practice when using DSR is to support sales with interactive tools or engaging content. This can include a variety of different types of interactive elements such as interactive animations, virtual tours, or engaging materials like customer reference videos and 360-degree and 3D product views.

In addition, interactive tools can provide valuable insights about your visitors, such as their preferences, interests, and buying behavior, which can be used to improve your sales strategy.

These interactive tools can help to engage visitors and make the experience of exploring your products or services more engaging and interactive.

3. Regularly Analyze the Data

By regularly analyzing data gathered from DSR, you’ll be able to pinpoint where your strengths lie and replicate them. It also shows you opportunities for improvement.

Analyzing data includes monitoring metrics such as open or view rates, share rates, and user behavior. This will enable you to gain insight into how your content and the overall sales process is performing and where improvements can be made.

By understanding what is working well and where there may be issues, you can optimize your sales strategy for better results and a more effective sales process.

Showell's Digital Sales Room: Make Buyer Experience Your Competitive Advantage

Showell's Digital Sales Room is all about improving the buyer's experience, guiding sales and marketing teams to keep content relevant, optimizing the ease of content sharing, pairing intuitive conferencing tools with a presentation hub, and creating a branded environment that leads to fewer sales touchpoints. All these factors increase the velocity of closing deals.

McKinsey found that video conferencing accounted for 43% of the average B2B company's revenue during the pandemic, and that isn’t likely to go away. While Gartner found that 80% of B2B sales between suppliers and buyers will occur through digital channels by 2025.

All the statistics point in one direction and one direction only. Digital Sales Rooms will not only become the norm but the expectation when buying in a B2B environment. The question is, will you embrace the future now or later?

How Do I Get Started?

So whether you’re looking to upgrade your sales platform, streamline your sales processes, or simply want to see where a DSR can fit in your strategy, it’s fairly simple to start.

If you’re looking for an intuitive tool that is highly rated and quick to take on, Showell's DSR is the easiest to use in the market and is loved by sales and marketing professionals worldwide. Showell’s Digital Sales Room is free with no strings attached. Get Showell Free and start with your very own Digital Sales Room today!

A Digital Sales Room is a valuable asset for companies looking to expand their reach and drive sales remotely. By carefully planning and customizing the DSR, you can create an interactive and productive digital sales environment that aligns with your specific role and objectives.

By selecting the appropriate platform, creating relevant content, incorporating brand elements, ensuring ease of navigation, and having a follow-up strategy, you can use DSRs to connect with buyers, establish trust, and ultimately close deals conveniently and efficiently.

As the trend of remote work and digital communication continues to evolve, Digital Sales Rooms are worth considering to become an integral aspect of your sales strategy.

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