Startups should create a digital sales room to increase interaction with buyers

Krishna Depura

Contributor

Krishna Depura is the CEO and co-founder of Mindtickle, where he sets the vision and direction for the company. Prior to founding Mindtickle, Krishna was the Director of Product Management at PubMatic and has also worked with leading companies and startups, including Microsoft, Tejas Networks and Infinera.

Facing tighter budgets and unabated economic uncertainty, today’s buyers are scrutinizing deals more closely and asking more questions. An analysis of the state of SaaS buying identified a shift to value-focused spending as a defining trend across SaaS buying in 2023.

The verdict? Buyers are scrutinizing purchases more and sellers are under pressure to provide value in every buyer interaction.

So how can sellers provide value outside of the interactions during meetings and sales calls? Revenue teams have to create new ways to connect and communicate with buyers. I founded Mindtickle, a sales readiness platform, in 2011 to address this issue and help companies prepare their sales teams to tackle any challenge. Closing deals is a skill that can be taught, and over the years, I’ve found that it comes down to forging a personal, transparent relationship with every buyer.

Digital sales rooms offer a new way to achieve just that. Winning sales organizations have now started using digital sales rooms (DSRs) to introduce buyer enablement to the sales enablement ecosystem to create a more interactive and engaging experience for buyers.

Combining DSRs with sales enablement tools

Digital sales rooms are online microsites where sellers can customize and share contracts, mutual action plans, sales content, and more with buyers. It creates a singular link buyers can access and refer back to at any point during their customer journey. It is also a single platform for sales reps and managers to track every action and process throughout the journey. It’s a great place to share and store content like product demos and records of your conversations.

Assets have traditionally been sent as a file or folder over email, which ultimately leads to lost information and buyer disengagement. With the emergence of DSRs and the maturity of on-demand content libraries, buyers now have a single link where all this content is stored, which helps them access the information more easily and keeps them more engaged. Plus, it gives sellers the tools to become more proficient at customizing the buyer experience for every deal.

But now there’s an added benefit: These rooms can also facilitate rep training and coaching. Sales enablement and RevOps teams can look at interactivity — how buyers interact with the content and how their reps respond — in winning sales reps’ DSRs and then infuse those learnings into training programs.

The need to boost predictable income is the main factor behind the growth of the revenue productivity platform market, pushing sales teams to look for a complete platform with content and coaching solutions, conversation intelligence, and buyer enablement. So, when revenue enablement platforms pair up with DSRs, sellers can now make data-informed decisions and drastically improve sales cycles while offering an engaging, personalized B2B buying experience that customers truly want.

How to create personalized experiences with DSRs

Each DSR should be specific to the buyer, so you should refrain from inundating them with content that’s irrelevant to their deal. To do this, think about what stage in the buyer journey they’re in and ask yourself the following questions:

What are your prospects searching for on the internet?What solutions does your product provide for their business?What roadblocks are preventing them from buying?Do they need to share this content with other stakeholders?

On top of relevant content, make sure you also include a support channel for buyers to ask any questions. To keep the ball rolling, it’s important to make the next steps clear, too, which can be done through embedding customized CTAs (calls to action) within each piece of content or creating an action plan that lives in the DSR.

Of course, your DSR is only as good as what’s in it, so your sales content is the real driver of the sales process. Using insights from past successful deals is the best way to learn what kind of content is the most impactful for a sale, which will help simplify the process by empowering the buyer to make their decision.

Building training programs with DSR insights

Digital sales rooms aren’t just for sales reps to interact with buyers.

In DSRs, sales managers have insight into rep performance in real time. How often are reps entering the rooms? What content are they sharing the most with prospects? How are deals progressing or stalling? All these insights provide intelligence about how reps engage with buyers and identify training gaps.

From these insights, sales managers can plan out one-on-one coaching or set up performance discussions, fostering a culture of continuous learning to ensure sellers are offering the best experience to buyers.

Connecting content and training with buyer activity helps shape the outcome revenue teams want, and these insights help bridge the gap between training and business outcomes. To achieve this, you want as much input and data as you can get from the field.

For example, if a salesperson closed several recent deals, their manager can go into the enablement platform to determine what made the call successful. The manager might find that the rep asked multiple questions during certain calls, handled objections particularly well, got the contract over the finish line, and more.

Looking at the behaviors of winning reps is essential to ensuring all your sellers are ready for evolving customer expectations and needs. DSRs, coupled with a conversation intelligence tool that gives visibility into why top reps are winning, allow managers to arm the rest of the team with the appropriate training and content to win, too.

This year, let’s get personal

In the current market, the customer is king. Buyers hold all the cards when browsing deals and sales teams are quickly adapting. The best way to meet the buyer engagement challenge is to offer buyers exactly what they’re looking for — a more interactive, personalized experience. Every piece of content in a DSR is another opportunity to deliver your brand’s value or purpose to the buyer, so make sure to keep the design and content on brand.

The rise of digital sales rooms is marrying sales training and go-to-market with deal progression and buyer engagement. We’re now able to see how sales reps apply training knowledge in the field through how they interact with buyers, all via one platform. This single platform creates a complete revenue productivity tool where revenue-facing teams receive training, deliver personalized buying processes, and close more deals.