What Is a Digital Sales Room? 3 Benefits (and How to Use Them)
Welcome to the digital sales room, a collaborative space where every stakeholder has the information they need to keep deals moving efficiently.
Digital sales rooms—the sales community is excited about this emerging technology because it represents a quantum leap forward in eliminating the inefficiencies of the typical sales process. With these online spaces, sellers can make it much easier for buyers to quickly and seamlessly move through the deal cycle. That means more signed deals toward your quota—and quicker.
This article will explain the three main benefits of sales deal rooms, how to create them, and the key tactics to win more deals.
Bring stakeholders together in a central collaboration space. Learn More - Contents
- What Are Digital Sales Rooms?
- 3 Undeniable Benefits of Digital Sales Rooms
- How to Create a Digital Sales Room
- What Type of Videos Should I Include in a Virtual Deal Room?
- Modern Sellers Are Embracing Digital Sales Rooms–Don’t Get Left Behind
What Are Digital Sales Rooms?
A digital sales room is your central hub for getting your deals done. It’s a virtual selling space to host content, share videos, and collaborate with buyers on deals. Also known as deal rooms or virtual sales rooms, they make it easy for any of your stakeholders to quickly understand what you’re selling and how it can solve their problems. Deal rooms often host content like pricing proposals, video demos, meeting recordings, mutual action plans, and marketing collateral.
With a digital sales room solution like Vidyard Rooms, buyers can invite deal stakeholders to one central hub instead of forwarding multiple emails and assets.
Digital sales rooms eliminate the need to send multiple emails, share documents from a drive, or trade Slack messages. Instead, it’s one central hub where all sales activities happen. Folks from the buying committee can invite decision-makers into the deal room. From here, everyone can discuss objectives and objections, consume helpful content, and tag the sales rep when they have questions.
3 Undeniable Benefits of Digital Sales Rooms
There are a plethora of benefits for both buyers and sellers in B2B for leveraging this type of software. You’ll gain three major advantages from a virtual deal room platform.
1. Elevate the Buyer Experience
Digital sales rooms make evaluating products and services easier and more efficient for modern buyers, who increasingly prefer self-service sales options throughout the buying process. They want to be able to find your pricing quickly and review it on their own time without having to book a call with a sales rep.
According to research from TrustRadius, nearly 100% of buyers want to self-serve for all or part of the buying journey. They also report that two in five buyers said “having to contact sales for a demo or free trial” was among the top three things vendors do to make them less likely to buy.
Digital sales rooms give these buyers a veritable buffet of resources to find what they want. Using video in a deal room is particularly effective since people are much more likely to remember details from videos versus text.
“Vidyard Rooms truly meet our sales needs by providing a hub to keep our prospects in one place so they are not chasing 50 different emails and trying to remember where things were shared. I love that they can find it all here and bring in other stakeholders to quickly get up to speed.”—Nicole Kocemba, Lead Business Analyst at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Trends toward digital sales are only becoming more entrenched. Predictions from Gartner are that B2B suppliers and buyers will conduct 80% of their sales interactions via online channels in the coming years. The companies poised to win their markets are the ones that make it easy for their buyers to self-educate.
2. Accelerate Sales Cycles
In today’s volatile job market, stakeholder turnover is high, with 68% of decision-makers frequently changing during the software buying process. For nearly half of B2B organizations, rep turnover rates are 30% or more. Digital sales rooms expedite deals by allowing quick onboarding of new stakeholders during the process. Without them, new buyers might have to rely on their team or sales rep to locate and provide updates on all the content and discussions shared up to that point. But with digital sales rooms, you can send a single link to the new stakeholder to view the entire history of your conversation with their team.
Digital sales rooms remove much of the manual and repetitive work of sending collateral to prospective buyers, including new stakeholders. Populate it in their deal room once, and it’s there forever for everyone’s reference. With the increasing complexity of online software purchasing, digital sales rooms help sellers manage that complexity to keep deals moving quickly. 30% of global B2B software buyers say there are 10 or more steps in their company’s software purchasing process. And an average of 22 distinct roles are involved in the typical buying process.
With more steps and stakeholders than ever, the need for a unified and seamless sales experience has never been greater. The vast majority of buying groups (95%) report having to go back and revisit decisions at least once as new information emerges. And 71% said that additional stakeholders are always or frequently added over the course of the buying journey. With deal rooms, sellers can rest assured their hard work will remain easily accessible throughout the entire deal cycle.
3. Increase Engagement and Encourage Collaboration
Since digital sales rooms are a lower friction experience than the typical sales tech stack, they encourage more collaboration. It’s quicker and more casual, so buyers are more likely to fire off their questions without considering composing an email. They entice stakeholders to engage in a way you can’t match with just email and Zoom. For example, you can comment within the room, tag members, and get your questions answered. You can tag a teammate and say, “Hey @Lucille, you missed this call, but I need you to look at this pricing proposal or this video.”
Digital sales rooms let you comment and tag deal members to keep the deal momentum.
Digital sales rooms also give insights into who is engaging. Sales reps can identify if any new stakeholders they haven’t met have entered the room. This allows sellers to jump in and support these conversations you otherwise may not have known were happening. One in three buyers says that collaboration amongst stakeholders has increased since the pandemic. Digital sales rooms support this increased collaboration at every stage of the sales process.
With Vidyard Rooms, you’ll get notified when someone watches the content in your deal room.
How to Create a Digital Sales Room
By following these four steps, you can easily set up a sales deal room, collaborate more efficiently with all stakeholders in your deal, and ultimately, start winning more business.
Step 1: Personalize Your Room
People love it when experiences are personalized to them, like a barista who remembers their exact order. Digital sales rooms are no exception. Start by giving your sales room a name like “[Your company] x [Prospect company name]” and uploading their logo. Then, add a description for the room that summarizes the problem you’re solving from your customer’s perspective. For example, “A space for us to discuss how Acme Corp can help [Prospect company name] scale their ABM efforts.”
In addition to the branding, make sure to personalize what content you’re uploading to meet the buyer’s needs and address their particular needs and objections in any video content you create and upload.
Step 2: Populate Your Deal Room with Content
The possibilities for content in a sales room are endless, but some common collateral includes product one-pagers, pricing information, recordings of past calls, demo recordings, and marketing content.
Since today’s buyers have clearly preferred self-serving content, they’ll have a much better experience if you populate your digital sales room with the resources they need to move the deal forward quickly.
Knowing various customers may have different learning styles, it’s wise to present a variety of formats—including video content for audiovisual learners and PDFs or web content for those who prefer to read.
Step 3: Add Video for a Better Buyer Experience
Traditional content deal rooms let you share just that—traditional content. However, a deal room platform like Vidyard Rooms lets you take it one step further and share valuable video content within your room as well.
If you’re not used to selling via video, take a peek at this comprehensive primer first. Video allows you to respect your buyer’s preference for asynchronous communication while still providing some of the benefits of a live call—your personalized attention and your warm, sparkling personality. Your prospect, meanwhile, can reap these benefits without having to fix their bedhead to get on a video call.
Step 4: Share and Engage on an On-Going Basis
While digital sales rooms are all about letting customers self-serve, they’re certainly not a passive tactic. Buyers want to engage with information on their own terms and then have quick and easy access to your expertise when they’re ready. Prospects can comment at any timestamp on a video and tag team members with questions. Make sure to monitor your deal room and be ready to answer questions as they arise—you’ll be notified via email or platform notification when prospects engage.
Share your digital sales room with everyone involved in the deal, and encourage prospects to share it with any new stakeholders on their team that get involved later in the process. This has the added benefit of allowing you to identify stakeholders in the buying committee you didn’t realize were influential. If your prospect sends the deal room to the VP of Finance, you now know they’re an important part of the buying committee, and you can tailor your content choices and communications to this individual.
Bonus Step: Start Closing Deals Faster
With your virtual deal room all setup, you’re in a great position to win more business. With the information they need in an engaging and personalized manner, you can ensure every interaction is impactful and memorable—and that each customer walks away with a good feeling about your product or service.
You can also keep the room going after the deal closes for your customer success teams to help onboard, upsell, and retain your accounts.
In this Fast Forward on-demand session, award-winning sales coach Kevin Dorsey discusses why he thinks virtual deal rooms will be the next big thing in sales. Plus, he walks you through how to set up a digital sales room with Vidyard Rooms.
What Type of Videos Should I Include in a Virtual Deal Room?
The type of videos you should include in a room will depend on the buyer’s needs at a specific point in the buying cycle. Generally speaking, videos should be tailored to the buyer’s interests and needs and provide an overview of your product or service. Videos should also include relevant information about pricing, terms, and conditions.
Consider including some or all of the following types of sales videos in your virtual deal room to provide the best and most relevant experience for all those involved.
A Welcome Video
We highly recommend populating your digital sales room with a personalized welcome video. As you create your virtual space, consider recording a short video message to welcome buyers to your room and highlight the space’s purpose and focus areas.
This welcome video will allow you to get your face and personality in front of all the stakeholders related to your deal.
Recorded Micro Demos of Your Product or Service
You could share longer-form product demo videos your marketing team has produced, include micro-demos tailored to your potential customer’s unique situation, or answer specific questions that have come up in the discovery process. Either option provides an easily accessible and on-demand view of your product or solution’s capabilities.
Meeting Recordings
Not all stakeholders can (or need to) attend live video calls. If you’re recording your meetings, consider adding relevant recordings to your virtual deal room to keep everyone in the loop.
If a critical stakeholder happens to miss your killer live software demo, add it to your deal room so they can watch it on demand.
Bonus if you’re using a hosting solution like Vidyard, where all your Zoom recordings can automatically load to the platform for accessible, on-demand access.
Customer Testimonial Videos
A customer testimonial video is a great way to show prospects the value of your product in a way that is relatable to their industry and their specific pain points.
Whether a quick customer testimonial video on the benefits of working with your company or a more deep dive case study video with ROI, stats, and facts, these videos will let your customers talk for you.
If you have highly produced videos featuring your customers (like our one with HubSpot), share them. Don’t let production value or lack of marketing budget get in the way of a good story or soundbite. Consider asking your clients to record their speaking points. Take that video, edit it, and have a similar effect.
Proposal Walkthrough Videos
As you go through the negotiations and proposals stage of the deal cycle, consider including a video of a walkthrough to go along with the written proposal you feature in your digital sales room. Adding video to a proposal drives over 50% higher engagement and can help you close deals faster.
Consider the video proposal example below from sales coach Todd Caponi. He sends a video walkthrough with every sales proposal and has over a 90% win rate.
What should you say in your videos? Explore our sales templates library to find the perfect fit, or give the Vidyard AI Script Generator a try and get a little boost with the help of AI.
Modern Sellers Are Embracing Digital Sales Rooms–Don’t Get Left Behind
Virtual sales technologies have been evolving at a breakneck speed over the past few years—and this rapid pace is only expected to accelerate. While change can be overwhelming, embracing emerging technologies as an early mover is also an opportunity.
“Adoption of digital sales room software is growing 2.5x as sales leaders seek to support asynchronous digital buying experiences.” —Bryan Brown, Co-Founder & Chief Analyst at GTM Partners
If you can embrace the digital sales room today, you’ll set yourself up for a lucrative career as a star sales rep in the future.
Bring stakeholders together in a central collaboration space. Learn More
This post was originally published on April 25, 2023. It was updated on September 19, 2023.
