What are Digital Sales Rooms? A comprehensive guide to DSRs

There’s a massive shift in sales happening around buyer engagement and hyper-personalization. Sales representatives used to be buyers’ main source of information. Buyers now conduct an average of 27 online information-gathering sessions on their own before they engage a sales person. Instead of providing general information, buyers expect sellers to answer specific questions and solve their problems. According to Forrester, 68% of B2B customers prefer researching independently instead of interacting with sales representatives.

Fortunately, Digital Sales Rooms and the move toward digital selling gives sales teams an effective way to meet customers’ rising demand for a personalized buying experience.

In this article, you’ll learn more about what Digital Sales Rooms are, why they’re a critical part of the modern sales process, and how to get the most out of them to improve customer experiences and increase win-rates.

What is a Digital Sales Room?

A Digital Sales Room (DSR) is a personalized and interactive microsite to facilitate and streamline the sales process between buyers and sellers. It’s an all-in-one hub that holds all of the conversations, assets, and other information that has been discussed or provided as part of a deal – from start to finish.

In a typical DSR, the buying party accesses a one-on-one, private sales environment that’s branded and built specifically for them, with added security to keep sensitive information safe. They make it easy for you to create unique, personalized experiences with tailored content and answers to specific questions that improve engagement more than generic marketing or sales copy.

Digital Sales Rooms also have interaction-tracking abilities that let you see who visits the site and what they interact with while there. You can use this information to evaluate deal health based on their engagement and track which pieces of sales enablement content are working and which aren’t to refine your sales strategy.

Prospects can easily access demos, call recordings, pricing data, and other deal-specific information without scouring their email or involving a sales rep, which removes friction from the sales process. They can also revisit the site at any time during the deal cycle to improve their understanding, answer their own questions, compare the competition, and get additional answers to any obstacles that arise.

The evolution of selling

Sales is a fluid, ever-changing industry constantly adapting to customers’ needs and expectations. Traditional ‘handshake’ sales strategies are making way for new, modern approaches leveraging technology to help meet prospects where they are and how they want to buy.

For example, Zoom calls replace hard to schedule in-person meetings, interactive websites and guided demos replace static sales brochures and pitches, and Digital Sales Rooms replace inefficient email chains and ‘phone tag.’

Here’s the evolution of selling across the decades with a short video explainer too:

1970s: Traditional sales methods dominated, with a heavy reliance on face-to-face interactions and relationship-building.

1980s: Emergence of consultative selling. Sales began to focus more on understanding customer needs and providing solutions.

1990s – 2000s: The rise of telemarketing and direct marketing. Sales automation and more sophisticated CRM systems became widespread.

2010s: social selling became widespread with platform like Twitter and LinkedIn being used to engage prospects and sell.

2020: Remote selling and virtual interactions became more accepted and expected due to the global pandemic.

Today: Hyper-personalized selling with Generative AI and ChatGPT is accelerating this and compounding all the benefits of the previous years.

Winning sales strategies: Old vs. new

As customer demands changed, sales teams are forced to adapt their sales strategies towards data-driven, customer-centric practices.

Generic vs. custom-tailored content: If you want to win deals, create custom-tailored content that focuses on each prospect instead of relying on one-size-fits-all sales pitch.

Analog vs. digital communications: In the past, sales communication wasn’t very efficient. Faxes and postal mail were a staple in finalizing deals that couldn’t be made face-to-face.

Modern sales benefits from near-instant communication through calls, video meetings, emails, and instant messaging. Digital Sales Rooms replace meeting rooms, customer relationship management (CRM) software makes customer data accessible from anywhere, and it’s easy to record calls or meetings for later reference.

In-person vs. digital collaboration: Many early sales processes required face-to-face meetings for sales presentations and negotiations, as they were the easiest way for a sales rep to engage prospects.

Modern sales processes use virtual tools to streamline presentations and negotiations. Video conferences offer in-person engagement in less time and can be recorded for later reference. Prospects can revisit presentations and ask questions, which you can quickly answer with a text or video reply for fast, personalized service.

Experience vs. data-driven insights: The more you know about potential customers, the easier it is to personalize your sales pitch and provide specific solutions to their problems. However, past sales teams have had limited access to tools that made information easy to access and leverage. They mostly relied on the sales rep’s experience and intuition during communication.

Modern systems allow you to collect customer information from forms, analyze website or app behavior, look at buying signals and track traffic sources, which you can examine and store in CRM to find the best data-driven approach to progressing and closing deals.

Single-threaded vs. multi-threaded relationship building: Buying decisions are complex and often involve multiple decision-makers like executives and department leads. Limited communication tools in past decades forced sales to run a single-threaded process with a single point of contact. This individual would relay the needs of others, but the insights were limited, and you couldn’t follow up by asking questions or addressing them directly.

Modern tools and communication allow for multi-threaded sales strategies that revolve around building relationships with multiple stakeholders. Your team can work directly with each member to answer questions and gain feedback, allowing you to comprehensively address the entire organization’s needs with personalized content to avoid internal conflicts at later stages of the sales process.

Why use Digital Sales Rooms?

In digital sales channels, deal cycles are fast-moving and complex. The sheer amount of information available online and the number of competitors to compete against means that buyers are more informed, and decision-making processes are less linear than ever–especially for B2B.

According to Gartner, there are six “buying jobs” that buyers need to complete before making a purchase, which means you need to ensure you’re addressing them:

• Problem identification
• Solution exploration
• Requirements building
• Supplier selection
• Validation
• Consensus creation

Unfortunately, buyers don’t often achieve them in order; they’re likely to move erratically up and down for a variety of reasons until the deal is closed. For example, the buyer may make it all the way to the end, realize their choice is missing a critical feature, and have to start all over again. Alternatively, multiple stakeholders may be clashing and halting progress at the final stage, forcing them to reevaluate their requirements.

There are also a variety of touch points throughout the sales process that can complicate a buyer’s journey. The average B2B deal takes 27 touchpoints and over three months, which leaves a lot of room for changing minds and forgetting important information.

Buyers also no longer follow the traditional sales funnel, and they may disappear and reappear multiple times before finally contacting you. 90% of B2B buyers visit 2-7 sites before making a deal, so it’s common for them to enter and exit multiple times. Once they’ve entered the deal cycle, they’ll often do more research to uncover other requirements, ask questions, and generally take their time to decide.

Fortunately, Digital Sales Rooms make it easy for buyers to loop back to the content they’ve received as part of the sales cycle so they can answer their own questions or get answers to new ones. All assets are stored and accessible 24/7, giving you a chance to stay in contention throughout the deal cycle no matter how many times they go back and forth.

Benefits of a Digital Sales Room

Digital Sales Rooms provide the ideal environment for building relationships, progressing deals, and refining your sales process. Here’s how they can help your sales team succeed.

Better buyer experience

Buyers will often revisit content, demos, calls, and other assets you provide during the deal cycle. Email communication can lead to long, hard-to-navigate threads and insecure file attachments, so you need an alternative.

A Digital Sales Room holds all of the content in one place. You can organize the assets within tabs for easier navigation and access to conversation histories to avoid miscommunications. Plus, the content can be customized to make it easier to use, like interactive elements or integrated chatting for fast answers to new questions.

Increased efficiency

Many buyers do most of their research and communication online, and 75% of B2B buyers prefer to make purchasing decisions without sales reps. They don’t want to have to wait around for a sales representative to be available to get answers–they want asynchronous sales.

With a self-service resource like a Digital Sales Room, your reps can add any deal-specific content to the DSR so it’s accessible at any time. Prospects can then easily revisit the sales site to compare your answers to the competition or double-check specific information without waiting to hear from a sales rep, improving deal efficiency.

Improved win rates

According to McKinsey’s research, 76% of buyers get frustrated when their buying experience isn’t personalized. They want to feel like they’re working with a human to find a solution to their problem, not being sold something that won’t work– and personalizing your sales enablement content helps show you’re listening.

With DSRs, you can create unique, personalized experiences with each private site through video replies that answer specific questions, recorded demos that highlight a core feature they need, and more. Plus, you can engage them with stakeholder names, prospect branding, and proposals or solutions built for that client specifically to show they aren’t just a number.

Shortened sales cycles

Sales cycles are already fast thanks to the speed of information and accessibility of communication. However, a Digital Sales Room can take it to the next level, along with adding benefits that help improve your win rates.

DSRs shorten sales cycles by creating a single contact point to increase communication speed, collecting all sales content in one place to lower information-gathering times for buyers, and providing clear instructions for how to progress deals within the microsite.

Enhanced seller and content intelligence

Historically, the sales cycle has been hard to evaluate. Traditional sales processes can’t give you much insight into your sales performance outside of winning or losing a deal. However, Digital Sales Rooms are controlled environments that can collect and analyze interaction, engagement, and usage information from prospects. You can see who has viewed the microsite, what they’ve clicked on, how long they’ve interacted with a certain piece of content, and other key insights that help you shape future DSRs and sales processes. Watch the video to learn more about buyer engagement data.

Improved sales and marketing alignment

Inconsistent marketing and sales messaging can be frustrating and alienate potential customers early in the sales process. To avoid this, marketing teams need to ensure they’re creating content that helps sellers sell, and sales teams need to help guide marketing content based on what’s working during sales cycles.

Digital Sales Rooms simplify coordination between sales and marketing teams. Marketing can avoid outdated information by consistently ensuring they’re keeping the content folders that sellers use in their microsites up to date. They can also use the insights from engagement data and sales teams’ conversations to see which content needs to be updated to become more effective.

How to use a Digital Sales Room

If you want your Digital Sales Room to have the biggest impact on your deals, you need to engage buyers, streamline the sales process, and provide complete information to help them make decisions.

Templates are one of the most valuable tools for scaling your Digital Sales Rooms efforts. These pre-configured microsites ensure all of your critical sales enablement content is included by default and presented clearly in an effective format. From there, your sales reps can add more content to the structure of the page as the deal progresses and the template is reused for the next deal to save time.

Another key benefit of a DSR is your ability to tailor the experience to your specific buyer, which you can accomplish in a few different ways:

• Brand your microsite for a consistent experience.
• Add interactive content to boost buyer engagement.
• Create content that addresses buyers’ questions and pain points.
• Include all deal cycle communications for easy reference.

These personalizations help improve engagement and humanize your sales team as problem solvers, not just salespeople. You can also better address their needs more quickly, making you stand out from the competition.

You should also take advantage of the insights that Digital Sales Rooms can provide. The controlled environment tracks things like:

• The number of visits someone makes to the DSR to gauge deal health
• Who is being invited to the microsite to identify decision-making stakeholders
• Which content prospects are interacting with the most

With this information, you can tailor your content and communication to help increase win rates and deal velocity. Watch the video to learn more about the benefits of digital buyer engagement.

Digital Sales Room use cases by role across the customer journey

Digital Sales Rooms drive efficiency and effectiveness at all stages of the customer journey for all roles on the go-to-market team. From finding new prospects to keeping existing customers to providing valuable insights for your partners, the possibilities are endless. Digital Sales Rooms aren’t limited to just the middle of the customer journey–they can also help kickstart a deal as a marketing tool for sales development.

Prospects access information they need without searching through emails, checking content folders, or waiting for your sales team to respond. Monitor engagement and buyer sentiment to adapt content to fit your customer needs, minimizing friction and resolving obstacles before they appear.

Here are a few ways you can use a DSR at every step of the sales process.

Sales Development Representatives (SDRs)

Purpose: Lead generation and sales prospecting

1. 1. Introduction and pitch delivery:
      • Use DSRs to send personalized video introductions and pitches to prospects.
      • Share engaging content like infographics, whitepapers, and videos to generate interest.
   2. Resource sharing:
      • Provide access to case studies, product overviews, and testimonials that prospects can review at their convenience.
      • Track which materials prospects engage with to tailor follow-up conversations.
   3. Scheduling meetings:
   4. Use integrated calendar tools to streamline the scheduling of discovery calls and initial meetings.

Account Executives (AEs)

Purpose: Managing sales cycles and closing deals

1. 1. Mutual Action Plans:
      • Co-create collaborative Mutual Action Plans with milestones and compelling events to empower buying teams to make informed decisions faster. Here’s an guide on interactive and collaborative Mutual Actions Plans.
   2. Proposal and contract management:
      • Upload proposals, pricing documents, and contracts to the DSR for review and approval.
      • Enable e-signature capabilities to expedite the contract signing process.
   3. Customized content delivery:
      • Share tailored presentations and product demos based on the prospect’s specific needs and pain points.
      • Monitor engagement to understand which content resonates most with the client.
   4. Interactive communication:
      • Use chat and video conferencing tools within the DSR to answer questions and address objections in real-time.
      • Collaborate with multiple stakeholders in the client organization to ensure all decision-makers are involved.

Digital Sales Rooms excel as a sales tool by enabling seamless communication and simplifying collaboration throughout the deal cycle. As an all-in-one hub, DSRs provide access to conversations, meeting logs, sales content, demos, pricing, and documentation, all in one place.

Account Managers (AMs)

Purpose: Client retention and upselling

1. 1. Onboarding materials:
      • Provide new clients with onboarding documents, training videos, and implementation guides.
      • Track client progress and engagement with onboarding materials to ensure they are set up for success.
   2. Ongoing communication:
      • Share updates, newsletters, and new product features within the DSR.
      • Maintain a repository of frequently used resources and FAQs for easy client access.
   3. Renewals and upsells:
      • Present new opportunities, additional features, and renewal proposals.
      • Use analytics to identify potential upsell opportunities based on client engagement and usage patterns.

Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

Purpose: Ensuring customer satisfaction and maximizing value

1. 1. 1. Customer onboarding:

• • Use DSRs during the onboarding process to remind customers how your solutions can solve their problems. You may have conducted a demo or put together a presentation of specific use cases they want to use, which they can continue accessing from the microsite.

1. 1. Performance tracking:
      • Monitor client engagement with the product and identify areas where they may need additional support or training.
      • Use data analytics to track KPIs and report on the value being delivered to the client.
   2. Resource hub:
      • Maintain a centralized hub for all client-related documents, including usage guides, best practices, and support resources.
      • Ensure clients have easy access to the information they need to maximize their use of the product.
      • As time goes on, your customer success team can continue to update the DSR with information about product updates relevant to that account, gather feedback about other features customers want or questions they have, and help customers get the most out of your products and services.
   3. Feedback and support:
      • Collect feedback through surveys and direct communication to continuously improve the client experience.
      • Provide a space for clients to log support requests and track the status of their issues.

As the initial trial or contract term ends, sales reps can revisit Digital Sales Rooms for account insights to boost renewal odds. They can send renewal reminders, upsell offers based on usage, and special offers to secure the deal.

How to choose Digital Sales Room software

Using Digital Sales Rooms effectively requires the right software with all the capabilities you need to engage buyers and optimize your sales process. Without them, your content won’t have the same impact, so look for these key features.

User-friendly interface

Digital Sales Rooms are meant to be convenient. If your sales reps have a hard time creating effective templates or microsites, or your buyers can’t easily find the information they’re looking for, you won’t benefit from using one.

Collaboration tools

The sales cycle is a collaborative process, so your DSR software needs to make it easy to communicate. Look for live chatting, conversation storage, interactive content, and simple document sharing to address buyers’ questions quickly.

Content and contact analytics

Using a centralized, software-based selling environment means you can track interaction more easily. You should use the metrics you receive, like which content had the most or least engagement, to adjust your templates and update sales content so it’s more effective.

Security and compliance

Private information about deals, buyers’ sensitive data, and your assets need to be protected. Your DSR software should include encryption, password protection, and compliance with any data management regulations like HIPAA that apply to your business.

AI functionality for efficiency

AI sales features aren’t as common as others, but they can help you streamline and improve your content, including transcribing calls or videos, and analyzing video messages for effectiveness.

Watch a demo to see it in action.

Digital Sales Rooms Case Study

One great example of a company using Digital Sales Rooms to drive higher win rates and bigger deals is SmartRecruiters, a talent acquisition and recruiting solution provider. SmartRecruiters struggled with managing and refining their sales enablement content. Their tool lacked visibility, content control, and data-backed insights, leading to outdated and inconsistent sales materials. This misalignment between sales and marketing hindered their effectiveness.

With SalesHood, SmartRecruiters tested Digital Sales Rooms with a small group of sellers. Shelby Powell, the revenue enablement manager, created templates with the latest sales content organized in tabs for easy access. She also standardized the Library content to prevent outdated information.

Once they began working on deals, the reps added their own custom content based on what their prospects needed. They could add video messages, call recordings, pricing information, personalized demos, and interactive presentations to help engage and inform buying teams.

As more deals used Digital Sales Rooms, Shelby’s team was able to monitor engagement data to forecast deal health, update content that wasn’t performing well, and build better templates that drove even more success.

Over time, the testers were seeing results and sharing them with other reps– and the excitement quickly spread. Soon, the entire sales team was leveraging DSRs in their daily workflow. Adding Digital Sales Rooms led to a 15% increase in deal velocity, 400% increase in deal size, and a 2x increase in win rates. Watch the story to learn more and heqar directly from the team at SmartRecruiters.

SalesHood’s Digital Sales Room Solution

SalesHood is a leader in revenue enablement, offering a comprehensive all-in-one platform that helps you sell more and sell better. Included in their platform are SalesHood’s Digital Sales Rooms, known as Client Sites, which streamline the deal cycle to improve customer experiences, win rates, and more. SalesHood’s DSRs are full-featured microsites that provide you with everything you need to engage with buyers, track engagement, and optimize your sales process.

You can:

• Build custom templates with tabs for organization and essential content.
• Communicate with buyers in real-time using the chat feature.
• Post, transcribe, and recap calls and video meetings for buyer review.
• Create and post unique content from the Digital Sales Room interface.
• Track engagement and interaction to evaluate buying intent and deal health.
• Refine content strategy based on buyer interactions.
• Receive feedback on pitches and custom content from an AI coach.

For example, talent acquisition and recruiting solution provider SmartRecruiters was able to 2x their win rates and grow deal sizes by 4x on deals that included a Digital Sales Room. DataEndure, a cybersecurity solution provider also saw impressive results: they were able to achieve a 60% lead to opportunity rate after converting to SalesHood’s Client Sites.

Choosing a complete sales enablement solution like SalesHood makes it fast, easy, and safe to use DSRs in your sales process to streamline deal cycles and increase win rates. Plus, when you commit to Digital Sales Rooms, you’re also future-proofing your selling; Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales to occur in digital channels by 2025 due to buying behaviors continually trending toward digital models.

Hundreds of businesses have become better sellers with the help of Digital Sales Rooms from SalesHood– and you can, too. Schedule a demo or learn more about the impact Digital Sales Rooms can have on your business today.