How Can Digital Sales Rooms Streamline Your Complex B2B Deals?

What happens before a customer signs on the dotted line?

It’s the product demos, the pricing discussions, the questions answered – all those crucial interactions that build trust and ultimately lead to a sale. These days, those interactions are happening online. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of these exchanges between businesses and their customers will be digital, taking place across various digital channels.

But here’s the catch: most businesses haven’t adapted to how this fundamentally changes the sales processes. They’re still stuck chasing transactions instead of cultivating relationships.

A digital sales room (DSR) offers a better way. It creates a repeatable sales process through optimized workflows and readily available information. This blog explores what they are, how they compare to CRMs and eCommerce platforms, and why a unified approach—one that empowers both buyers and sellers—is crucial for closing more deals.

What is a Digital Sales Room?

A digital sales room is more than just a digital storefront or a communication tool. It’s a dedicated online space, a virtual sales room that acts as a central location, a virtual hub where your sales teams and your potential buyers can connect directly and build the kind of relationship that closes deals, especially complex deals involving multiple stakeholders.

Instead of juggling emails, calls, and scattered sales assets, everything happens within this secure and organized branded space. Your team can share and have easy access to product information, answer questions in real-time, and collaborate with customers on sales proposals – all in one place.This 24/7 accessibility means prospects can engage on their own terms, while built-in communication tools keep the conversation flowing smoothly.

Ultimately, a digital sales room provides a more efficient and transparent buying experience, which helps accelerate the sales cycle from the first point of contact to a signed agreement.

Key Features of Digital Sales Rooms

Personalized Buyer Experience

The information a buyer sees is specific and relevant to their account and their buying team. They see products they need, with their prices attached right up front. They can see their purchase history, their shipments, their users, their locations. No digging, no emailing, no phone calls. This personalized approach enhances buyer engagement and improves the overall customer experience.

Sales Content & Collateral

Safety data sheets, product specifications, exploded diagrams for parts, downloadable brochures, testimonials, FAQs, video demos and other sales materials are all in one place, easily accessible through intuitive client portals. Typically these are scattered across multiple drives, servers, and (gulp) individual workstations.

Digital sales rooms keep your sellers from having to go on scavenger hunts to answer buyer questions. Having all sales collateral, especially customer-facing content, readily available in a centralized location streamlines the sales process and ensures sales professionals are equipped to handle inquiries efficiently.

Real Time Communication Tools

Closing deals faster means making it easy for buyers to connect. When potential buyers can chat with a knowledgeable sales team in real-time, using the right collaboration tools, decisions happen faster.

Customers want to track progress and know that their messages, requests, and inquiries aren’t being lost inside a rarely-checked inbox. Communication in real time, including features like video conferencing, fosters buyer engagement and ensures everyone is on the same page throughout the deal cycle.

What Digital Sales Rooms Offer

According to Gartner’s 2022 B2B Buyer Survey, buyers engaging with sales reps using supplier-provided digital sales tools, are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal than when they engage with the tool independently.

A website is a good digital tool to start with, but the buyer journey is more than clicking buttons and scrolling – it’s interactive, conversational, and efficient. Enter the digital sales room.

When information about sales cycles isn’t easily accessible on demand, sales reps can struggle to know which customers are the most engaged, and where the opportunities for up-sell, cross-sell, and expansion are.

What categories and products are they looking at? What’s in their shopping list? Do buyers have solid descriptions of your products, and accurate pricing with up-to-date inventory quantities?

A smooth sales process requires some form of a digital sales room that enables buying teams to get their jobs done quickly – while sharing their journey with the sales teams. This transparency allows for valuable engagement insights that can further optimize the sales process.

Accelerating the deal cycle requires knowing your customers, and having the ability to quickly put the right offers in front of them at the right time. Enabling that sale means enabling your sales reps, and de-siloing data within your organization. Robust version control within the platform ensures everyone is working with the most current information.

Guiding the Customer Journey With a DSR

Digital sales rooms don’t just change how you interact with potential customers online; they change when and where those interactions happen. It becomes a natural part of the entire buyer journey, from that initial spark of interest all the way to a closed deal (and beyond!).

Here’s how a DSR is a game-changer at each stage:

Building the Relationship

As prospects engage with the DSR, your team gains valuable insights into their interests and pain points. This allows for more meaningful conversations through real-time communication, moving the relationship forward organically.

Overcoming Objections

Instead of sending generic responses to questions or concerns, your team can use the digital sales room to provide personalized answers and relevant resources – turning a potential roadblock into an opportunity to build confidence and facilitate a purchasing decision.

Sealing the Deal

When it’s time to finalize the agreement, the digital sales room keeps everything organized and accessible. No more scrambling for contracts or hunting down pricing details – it’s all right there, ready to go. Digital sales rooms can even integrate e-signature capabilities, making closing deals smoother than ever.

Nurturing Long-Term Customers

The journey doesn’t end with a signature. A DSR can continue to serve as a valuable resource hub for onboarding materials, product updates, and ongoing support – transforming a one-time buyer into a loyal customer.

What About CRMs?

If what a digital sales room does sounds like what Customer Relationship Management software does – the answer is “sort of.” CRM’s organize information related to sales processes, customer history, sales pipeline, interactions, orders, and products. But they don’t provide sales collateral, sales enablement, or tools for your buyers.

CRMs are fantastic for sales teams – industry leaders like Salesforce and Hubspot provide pipeline metrics, workflows, and task management to drive a sales cycle. But potential customers and current buyers still need to pick up a phone or write an email in order to engage with the sales team.

Without a customer-facing digital sales room software, CRMs are only 50% of the solution. Buyers run businesses, and they have their own timetables and priorities; waiting for a rep to call them back isn’t in the cards. Decision-makers need immediate access to information and the ability to communicate in real-time.

What About eCommerce Platforms?

To enable a digital sales room experience, an eCommerce site needs to know everything a sales rep knows (account history, past and current inquiries, emails, quotes, orders) and pair it with the things a buyer wants to do (view detailed product information including photos, download spec and sheets, request samples, request quotes and ask questions).

Sometimes you’ll hear this type of experience referred to as a client portal, or a buyer portal.Unfortunately, many eCommerce sites (or portals) don’t provide the data the CRM does, and so the experience your customers want to have – buyers engaging with sales reps using supplier-provided digital tools – is incomplete.

Your customers can and will use a portal to engage with you, but only at a surface level because they don’t have all of the tools they need to trust the sales process.

How many times have you needed to buy something from a website, but you had a question about price, availability, lead time, product details, or whether you could negotiate a better deal?

Those questions often force the buyer into an offline journey that takes valuable time, and doesn’t create trackable progress or a defined workflow. They need a platform that empowers them with instant answers and direct communication, fostering trust and streamlining their buying experience.

Digital Sales Rooms & OroCommerce

Because OroCommerce is both a CRM and an eCommerce platform, it supports all of the core experiences of a digital sales room:

Personalized Buyer Experience

OroCommerce natively lets you build multiple persistent websites that offer different experiences based on customer identity. Show different categories, layouts, buying flows, prices, and content to different buyers without the overhead of maintaining separate microsites.

Sales Content & Collateral

OroCommerce’s built-in PIM & CMS easily allows you to build robust product data, attach downloadable assets, create FAQ and blog posts, and more.

Use our built-in AI integrations to rapidly create product content when your supplier doesn’t give you much to work with, and use our robust permissions and workflows to build out a content authoring process that scales for your organization.

Real-Time Communication Tools

OroCommerce has a built-in messaging platform that supports buyer and seller communication for quote requests, RFIs, and administrative questions. Native inbox integrations with Microsoft and Google make it easy to centralize communication in one platform, and our integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud lets you build a digital sales room experience on top of your existing CRM with no fuss.

Integration can be a challenge when trying to implement a digital sales room on top of existing half-built software. That’s why OroCommerce has only one product that requires no integration – the CRM and the eCommerce platform are one app that combine to create a digital sales room platform.

Enable your sales teams to make your customers happy, and keep them coming back for a modern experience that works at the speed of their business.