9 Reasons Why B2B Sales & Revenue Teams Should Use Digital Sales Rooms

Today, more and more B2B transactions are occurring in digital channels than ever before. And Gartner predicts that this trend will continue, noting that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales transactions will occur in a digital channel.

It’s no secret that modern buyers are researching ways to solve their problems online as much as possible, delaying speaking with a sales rep until absolutely necessary. This reality has largely removed sales teams from the buyer's evaluation process, limiting their influence over deals. To reach the modern buyer, B2B sales teams must change their approach – or risk losing to competitors at a rate that will force them out of business. 

Digital sales rooms are an integral part of adapting to the modern buyer's journey, optimizing the buyer’s experience while giving sales and revenue organizations the engagement and insights needed to turn opportunities into won deals.

What exactly is a digital sales room? We’ll cover that in the next section.

“The consumer shopping experience has changed radically in the last 5 years. But for whatever reason, the business "shopping" experience hasn't. And the person that's shopping on Amazon in the evening, is the same person that's buying your SaaS tech during the day.” - Michelle Martinez, Global Customer Experience Executive

What Is A Digital Sales Room?

A digital sales room is a virtual environment that brings the modern buying journey and traditional sales process together under one roof. It allows potential customers to access content to support their evaluation while having a direct channel to interact with the sales team when they please.

Additionally, digital sales rooms provide sales organizations, and the individual reps, insights into buyers’ behavior and engagement – insights that reps use to provide relevant support to the buyer and revenue leaders use to create accurate pipeline forecasts.  

What a digital sales room is not: An effective digital sales room is not a microsite, or an extension of your website, where Marketing or Sales throws the kitchen sink at a buyer and puts the onus on buyers to navigate through it. It is also not simply a file exchange center. These functions do not help the buyer buy. In fact, they add more friction to the buying process. As the saying goes, “too much information is the same as no information.”

Effective digital sales rooms make the B2B buying process resemble B2C. How? Similar to Google or other search engines, digital sales rooms allow buyers to ask any question they want in a search bar and have the digital sales room provide the answer through specific segments of content. This is important because searches are much more revealing than clicks when it comes to buyer intent. Searches show you why somebody clicked on a certain piece of content, vs. simply the fact that they did click.

Digital sales rooms allow buyers to choose how and when they want to engage with a vendor. Buyers can choose what content to consume, allowing them to go down their own buying journey, instead of being subjected to a standard, one-size-fits-all sales process. In essence, digital sales rooms give sales teams the ability to offer a buying experience that adapts to each unique buyer, and provides value to both sides of the buyer/seller relationship.

In the next section, we’ll cover more specific reasons why Sales & Revenue teams should use digital sales rooms.

9 Reasons Why B2B Sales & Revenue Teams Should Use Digital Sales Rooms

1. Effective Multi-Threading for Growing Buying Committees 

Today, one of the challenges for B2B sales teams is that buying committees are expanding. Complex B2B sales generally involve five to ten decision-makers, each of which may approach the buying process with different priorities in mind. Digital sales rooms make it easy for buyers to enroll decision makers into the buying process, allowing new stakeholders to view materials and catch up on the buying process on their own time.

In addition, it allows sellers to track who engages with what material. Digital sales rooms give “champions” of the deal a much easier way to sell internally on the vendor’s behalf. 

2. Increased Prospect Engagement

Gartner's research shows that B2B buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors. That means if they’re evaluating three vendors, sales reps will get less than 6% of a buyer’s time. Such a small slice of the buyer's time limits the seller’s ability to influence the deal, build value, and mitigate risk. This lack of time with buyers is due to two reasons – buyers want to do their evaluations without sales reps present and they don’t have time to evaluate products during the work day (when sales reps are on the clock).

Digital sales rooms, however, provide vendors with a way to engage buyers when their reps are not working (nights and weekends) and are designed to compound buyer engagement by providing relevant product videos & information and the ability to ask questions and get answers immediately.

34% of portal visits happen on nights and weekends for Omedym customers.

3. Capture Buyer Data

Much like B2C or ecommerce sales interactions, digital sales room algorithms learn customer behavior and preferences over time, allowing Sales and Revenue organizations to refine how they set up their rooms to increase win rate, shorten sales cycles, and increase average sales price. By pulling all of this data together, sales teams have a more comprehensive picture of their buyers and what each buyer cares about, giving sales reps the ability to know when and how to support a deal and guide buyers to a confident decision.

Buyer data is also the key to improving forecast accuracy, allowing Revenue teams to anchor their forecasts in buyer behavior (for example, if the CFO has viewed the proposal in the digital sales room) instead of seller intuition (“we had a good meeting and they said they’d review the proposal next week”).

4. Integration With CRM

Effective digital sales rooms have integrations with CRMs, allowing the automatic passing of buyer behavior data in the digital sales room to corresponding opportunities in the CRM. The beauty here is that integration bypasses the need for sales reps to enter anything into the CRM themselves, eliminating any chance of erroneous or incomplete data and returning time to sales reps to spend on selling.

In Omedym's case, integration with the CRM allows sales reps to create branded and personal digital sales rooms in under 60 seconds.

5. Easy Personalization At Scale 

The best digital sales room platforms provide tools that allow Sales, Revenue and Marketing teams to create templates segmented by personas, industries, interests, and products. The goal is to allow sales reps to customize and personalize these pieces quickly with just a few clicks, including adding a name, logo, or a tailored message.

In Omedym’s case, as the deal progresses, sales reps can easily change the content within the digital sales room. For example, if a more technical demo or a whitepaper about the API integrations is requested by the buyer, sales reps can upload those in a few clicks. In addition, sales reps can upload previous meeting recordings into the portal to allow stakeholders that weren’t there to view them on their own time, sparing the need for repeat meetings and keeping transparency in the deal.

6. More Effective Communication & Organization

If your reps are sending materials back and forth to buyers by email, it's more likely than not that information is getting lost in inboxes and becoming difficult to find when needed. Plus, some content (like demo videos and meeting recordings) is simply too large to share via email. A digital sales room puts everything in one place, making it easy for buyers to find what they need, even if it’s weeks or months later when they re-engage.

"Imagine being able to ditch the back-and-forth emails and just share resources directly with clients" - 5 star Omedym review on G2

7. Compliment To The Sales Team

People buy from people. The future of sales is digital AND human. The real value of digital sales rooms is not in replacing the role of the sales rep. It is, however, an important part of the new buyer-focused sales process. 80% of buyer’s evaluation can be done digitally. Yet, many teams still require that a buyer goes through their rigid, step by step process of completing two or more meetings before being able to see the product.

Digital sales rooms let buyers evaluate their products in a domain owned by the seller, letting sellers control the message and receive the buyer data critical to closing the deal. This saves Sales and Revenue teams time and resources, while increasing their deal capacity.

8. Increase Deal Capacity

Because digital sales rooms can be created in seconds by sales reps, it allows reps to provide hundreds of buyers a place to evaluate and learn about products on their own. While top of funnel buyers are engaging in their digital sales rooms, sales reps can focus on negotiating and closing deals with buyers that are much further down the buying journey. 

In Omedym’s case, records of sales reps having created 500+ portals in a quarter are not uncommon. It significantly increases the sales team’s ability to work more deals without adding headcount.

9. Ongoing Digital Discovery

The most effective digital sales rooms support the entire customer lifecycle, from first touch to closed won, to onboarding. Throughout the buying journey, buyers engage in the digital sales room to review content, access sales materials, ask questions, invite stakeholders, etc – all of the actions needed to arrive at a buying decision. Sellers receive the insight into buying behavior every time a buyer takes action in the portal, providing continuous digital discovery and helping sales teams understand how to guide deals to close.

What You Need To Get Started With Digital Sales Rooms

To get started with digital sales rooms, Marketing, Sales, or Revenue teams must have a library product content. Marketing and Sales should be aligned to determine what materials need to be developed in order to maximize their digital sales rooms for each individual prospect.

Omedym customers are encouraged to use their “everyday” content – content that those teams likely already have – including product demos, sales decks, webinars, whitepapers, etc. 

Why Omedym’s Digital Sales Rooms Are The Choice For Leading Sales & Revenue Teams

Modern Go-To-Market teams rely on Omedym’s buyer-centric digital sales rooms to increase quality pipeline, accelerate engagement to close, and improve forecast accuracy. The reasons below make Omedym stand out from other digital sales room vendors.

1. Support of the entire customer lifecycle: Omedym digital sales rooms, also known as “portals” support the entire buying journey (from first touch, to closed won, to onboarding and support).
   
   
2. Google-like searchable content: Similar to AI and ecommerce tools, Omedym allows buyers to search any term or question in the search bar and receive results that answer their questions immediately.
   
   
3. Unparalleled buyer behavior insights: Omedym captures every interaction taken by the buying committee in the digital sales room, including searches, content viewed, duration of watch time, topics accessed, colleagues invited, etc., and presents the data to each sales rep. This data provides prescriptive and predictive analytics, helping sales reps take the next best action to support a won deal. Reps also receive an email with the digest of a buyer’s visit.
   
   
4. Private and Secure portals: While other vendors allow links to be forwarded and accessed by anybody, Omedym portals are invite-only, meaning sales reps know exactly who is accessing important documents. 

Omedym digital sales rooms stand out for their unique approach centered around empowering buyers to ask questions directly through search functionalities. Unlike traditional methods such as phone calls, where buyers might feel hesitant or constrained, the platform fosters an environment where buyers feel more open and comfortable in their inquiries. This openness provides valuable insights into buyer preferences, concerns, and intentions.

Leveraging advanced predictive analytics and AI capabilities, Omedym harnesses this data to forecast the likelihood of a buyer making a purchase. Additionally, the platform utilizes this information to tailor recommendations, suggesting videos that address buyer queries and enhance the likelihood of a successful transaction.

Essentially, Omedym's approach guides buyers through their journey, offering personalized support and resources every step of the way.

Follow Omedym on LinkedIn, view a demo right now (one click), or talk to our sales team.