2023 - the year digital sales rooms become a “need to have”

Digital sales rooms have been creeping up the Gartner Hype Cycle for a few years now. I think by year end, we’ll start to see the shift from these being a “nice to have” to a “need to have” for sales teams.

The data shows that buyers wish to run their buying process on their own terms within digital channels. Translation : they wish to engage with salespeople less. How much less?

According to Gartner, only 17% of buyers time is spent with salespeople live within the sales process. If you count a few vendors being evaluated, it’s more like ~5% per vendor. Let that set in. By virtue of math, 95% of time is not spent with the salesperson, but doing things like reading reviews, peer research, online research, and getting referrals, to name a few.

As the role of sales is evolving to happen more digitally, this is a new muscle for sellers to flex when they get off the Zoom and interact with stakeholders to guide them through the process instead of gatekeeping information behind meeting requests.

Luckily, digital sales rooms help make this easy for sellers to adopt. I like to think of these rooms as bringing your most delightful e-commerce buying experience to B2B sales. For me, it’s Amazon because :

• They make it easy to access in-depth reviews and comparisons
• They learn about my behaviors and serve up relevant recommendations based on my actions
• They make it easy to buy, on my own terms, in one click

As a seller, this is becoming possible to recreate this in B2B sales with digital sales rooms. Simply, you are able to create a personalized website for your buyers in a few minutes. All stakeholders in the deal can :

• Visit and consume content personalized for them on their own time
• Have one place to go to access all deal content call recordings, product demos, reviews, pricing, etc. (not generic website content)
• Engage with sales asynchronously through chat and video

In short, it removes the admin for buyers of digging through email threads filled with attachments and links, which ends up being a lot of dead time when evaluating with multiple vendors. It helps them move faster, which should pay dividends for the seller. Either they move forward or they don’t, but there’s movement nonetheless.

For sellers, the value breaks down a few ways :

• You get notified every time one of your prospects engages (or doesn’t)
• You get a detailed understand of what they are interested in to provide more relevant follow up content or next steps
• You learn about new stakeholders that you didn’t know existed who have been looped in

The results are early, but we’re seeing sales teams improve their win rates by up to 20% when they leverage a digital sales room in their process.

Obviously there are lots of variables in deals, but for one — I’ve never met a buyer who wanted to spend more time on the phone with sales in a sales process, so watch this space.