January 6, 2024
"I haven't hit my quota in 6 quarters," Sarah mutters as she regards her fourth empty cup of coffee. "Every year I get stressed out about trying to hit it but I never do."
“Great sellers can sell ANYthing!” echoes the snarky speaker's voice from the sales seminar she attended last week. Not because she needed to but rather because she expected it to reveal the great a-ha moment that would finally turn her into the best-selling representative on the team.
Her colleague Amy watches her, unsure of what to say to soften the mood. "Well, it's B2B. Not exactly the easiest job in the world. It's too bureaucratic."
"Or maybe I'm just bad at my job," Sarah says with finality. "It feels like I'm being pulled in a million different directions. Too many people involved, too many points of contact. I just don’t think I can do my best selling like this."
"So you can sell," Amy says, her point finally coming across. "You just have to do things differently next time."
Narrator: All Sarah needed was a different process.
Why Digital Sales Aren't the Same (and How Sales Rooms Are Changing the Game)
The buyer's journey is complex in itself, regardless if we're talking about B2C sales or long-winded, multi-stakeholder, hit-your-head-against-the-wall B2B sales.
The final decision to buy anything, be it a product or service, isn't as clear-cut as sliding down the proverbial funnel. It never has been. Ever since Google came out with Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle, we know that getting people to the "yes" requires three things:
Showing up
Standing out
Giving buyers all the tools they need to make the right decision
Yes, B2B sales are complicated. However, we'd argue that sellers add just as much friction to the process with every link. Every email thread. Every superfluous follow-up, meeting, attachment.
And it drags on.
Rummaging through those puzzle pieces easily adds up a couple of hours to an already loaded workweek.
Yet, surprisingly, it remains an all-too-common modus operandi, which creates a scattered sales process that gets in the way of simplifying complex deals.
Or, rather, not making them harder than they already are.
One Link to Rule Them All: The Digital Sales Room
That would mean putting an end to making clients (or yourself!) bounce around like a SuperBall looking for resources that should be in a single place: a Digital Sales Room (DSR).
With a digital sales room, you give (potential) customers everything you'd be sending to them back and forth through the entire course of your work together. That includes:
Website pages
Embeds from your favorite tools
Paragraphs
Calendly links
Videos
Contracts and e-signatures
Chatbots
Loom presentations
And more.
Only, instead of a million tiny puzzle pieces, you give them one link to rule them all. You don't make them think for a second that they have to follow up via email at any moment. Because you've already taken care of everything by aggregating links and mediums into a single cohesive sales deck.
The main difference between your DSR and the competition’s?
Yours is beautiful.
There Are Digital Sales Rooms…and Then There Are Journeys
What's a Journey? Think about it in the literal sense of the word, and hold that thought.
A Journey is a collection of digital blocks – the individual parts of a sales deck.
We built Journey.io to be a storytelling platform where you can connect all of your favorite tools (slides, videos, docs, forms, etc.) into one centralized hub in your follow-up with sales prospects and customers.
So that instead of sending a static, insipid collection of documents, you can walk viewers through the story of why they should choose your brand. Not anyone else's.
Think of Journey as Webflow or Squarespace for sales teams. You can create unparalleled buying experiences while other salespeople stick to the comfortable status quo that involves Drive files and endless email chains that result in 1-2% conversion rates (at best).
But of course, to each their own.
We called it Journey because the sales process is about so much more than presenting information and crossing your fingers. The sales process is about showing a sequence into which the stakeholders will fully immerse themselves.
Step after step (or block after block), until the close comes around.
Why a Digital Sales Room Is the Tool You Didn't Know You Needed
A Digital Sales Room Embraces Every Step of the Buyer's Journey
As a VP of Sales, Chris Herring's job success depends on how much revenue he's able to drive through partnerships and community.
He does a good job of proving it – between tackling million-dollar portfolios and developing management teams, he uses Journey to exceed growth goals at every stage. He describes it as "the most usable and shareable storytelling tool on the market."
"I've created Journeys to stand out in interviews. For prospects. Partners. QBRs. Post-call summaries. Customer onboarding. I find it to be the best tool for sharing a story that your prospects and customers want to engage with.” (Chris Herring, VP Sales)
In addition, Herring has found that Journey allows him to create an outstanding post-call experience for both prospects and buyers. As you know, the sale isn't over after the call.
Transform the Way You Interact with Potential Clients
Ryan Ramans is known for his drive. His laser focus, according to his clients, bleeds into his unmatched closing skills. Here's another sales professional whose living depends solely on how much and how often he's able to sell, as well as the people he's able to sell to.
As it turns out, Ryan's "secret" is no secret at all. He stands out thanks to what we've been discussing up until this point – his consistent dedication to the sales process. Which, of course, Journey is a huge part of.
"Journey has revolutionized how I follow up and share information during deal cycles. No more long emails with 5+ links – I've seen a significant boost in follow-up engagement when sending a Journey vs. our standard follow-up email template." (Ryan Ramans, Senior Account Executive)
If multiple stakeholders (even the ones who were unable to attend that initial call) can get access to a single source of truth, that eliminates the hassle of resurfacing links and struggling to figure out who said what.
A Journey digital sales room allows you to stay on top of deals without having to juggle multiple people like a circus act.
Know Their Intent at Every Stage
In between meetings, we could reduce ourselves to tiny house flies and hover over our potential buyers' shoulders. That way we’d finally know what they're thinking and whether this deal will go through.
We could scrutinize their screen, not only making sure they're looking at our presentations but enjoying what they see. And if they aren't, we could jump ship before we waste any more time with them.
The thing is, trying to oversee everything will overwhelm you. Focus on what you can control, instead:
Identifying roadblocks, hiccups, and red flags that may slow down the sales process as it happens.
The parts of your Journey that got most of your prospects' attention.
And don’t worry, because Journey’s digital sales rooms allow you to track the entire process with detailed insights, including viewing:
Who opened your Journey and at what exact time
How much time they've spent on your Journey, and how much they scrolled
How many times they've opened it
The percentage of your Journey they scrolled through, including the parts where there wasn't much engagement.
With those insights, you'll have more power to remove buyer friction and win more deals.
As Taylor Nielsen, Strategic Partner Management at Builder.io, explains:
"I like that I can send a company one link and track the users and what content they are consuming. This gives me 4+ hours a week back."
Imagine having those extra four hours a week. What would you do?
Personalize at Scale
Branding tells apart the pros from the rookies, although keeping it consistent across channels and materials is table stakes.
Take logos, for instance. They're instant nonverbal trust signals in and of themselves, which is why most, if not all sellers paste their logos all across their sales collateral.
We're aware of that – so we do better. We make some room for our prospect’s logo as well.
Our company's logo is a sign that we're trustworthy. Their company's logo is a sign that we care.
With Journey, you can automagically add both of them to every single Journey on the fly. Just click the “+” sign. Then, click to add the recipient’s logo, and freely fetch it from their URL.
No need to save logos as PNG anymore!
As for the rest of your branding, Journey will create branded themes for your Journeys. You can take them as they are or style them as you'd like by selecting your theme, changing colors (from your background, text, and accents), and setting your brand's colors.
All you have to do is click the little brush icon in the upper right to make the magic happen.
Undoubtedly, your content needs to be unique to each buyer and context.
But you don’t have to start from scratch for every sales room. Instead, modify previously successful presentations to fit your upcoming one, tying in multiple sources of information to present in one go.
Journey's AI capabilities add to its magic. You can write your entire sales room in seconds using AI and ditch the need to go fishing for the perfect images on Unsplash or Pexels. Create unique AI images without leaving Journey, simply by typing in a keyword.
Click on the image icon on the right-hand side, select “AI Image”, and enter a prompt.
When It All Comes Together, Digital Sales Rooms Deliver a Higher ROI
One of our users, CEO and Co-Founder Jeromy Sonne, has given us one of the greatest Journey reviews we've read to this day:
“Journey has easily driven us 8 figures in value. Ignore at your own peril.”
Sounds like a threat. It probably is. But we don't blame them – it must've been exhilarating to see their bottom line improve like that. Suddenly, you want to shout it all out. And they did.
"Journey is beautiful, simple to set up, and creates an unparalleled experience. Whether it is investor presentations, sales, partnerships, or more it creates that extra wow experience that gets deals closed," Sonne concluded.
It’s all about that “wow” factor. After all, you’re showing your prospects something novel and easy to use – not just following up via email all day long. You’re earning their attention.
Speaking of deals closed, take a look at what Alex Baker, Global Account Executive and advocate for community growth had to say about his Journey sales rooms:
“Since our entire North America sales team has started using Journey (+85% actively using the tool), we have hit our quarterly goal 3 quarters straight. In the 3rd quarter, we broke our company record on business closed.”
Imagine if Sarah from our story in the introduction could see this. Imagine if the starting point was as low as $0 for 5 Journeys.
Let Go of the Generic Sales Process. Tell Better Stories.
If we could summarize Journey in the single most repeated word from our customers, that word would be "beautiful."
And if we managed to add excitement to what turned into the world of Boring-2-Boring, we'll help you do the same. At the end of the day, you’re talking to people. And they deserve to be engaged.
Safely let go of your old process and welcome a smooth alternative.
Showing up. Standing out. Giving buyers what they need, right now.
Mastering this sequence frees up the “okay” salesperson’s workload to focus on delighting. And that’s where greatness truly lies.