Digital Sales Rooms (DSR) - The Modern B2B Buying Experience

What is a digital sales room (DSR)?

A digital sales room is a collaborative interface for sellers and buyers that allows both sides to align on different elements of a successful deal.

According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers describe their last purchase as difficult.

We live in a world, where accelerating technologies increase the difficulties in purchase decisions. Today, there are 6-10 different stakeholders involved in a deal as well as 4-5 different content pieces for each one of them. On top of that there are numerous suppliers, products, and services to be considered when making a decision.

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Why you need a digital sales room (DSR)?

Up until today, these B2B sales were still handled using email. Sellers start by having an introduction / discovery call. As a next step, they send an email with attachments to the buyer and wait. They literally hope for an answer, because if there is none, they can only send a follow-up or call.

Those are the only 2 tools that sellers have to drive the deal and engage the buyer.

None of them understand what happens after the email is sent. A CRM like Hubspot allows you to see if the email was opened, but due to antivirus software checking incoming mails the rates can't be relied on. Beyond this, sellers have no idea what happens on the buyer side - they don't know who looks at what, forwards the info where, loops in whom, etc.

Not a single seller fully understands the buyer journey!

A digital sales room allows you to align all aspects of a deal such as stakeholders, content and other information or details in a single interface. By working with a digital sales room, you create a single point of reference for all members of the deal allowing you to assure that no misalignment or confusion can occur. It is a solution that finally includes buyers as the major decision makers of a deal and enables them to make smooth purchases without doubt. As a direct extension of the CRM, a digital sales room enables sellers and buyers to ultimately collaborate in an interface that keeps them constantly connected.

The trend of using a digital sales room is already in full speed and by 2026, 30% of all B2B sales cycles will be managed through a DSR.

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What is included in a DSR?

Digital sales room can include a lot of different functionalities and features. They range from solutions to align stakeholders, improve content or material sharing, tracking user behaviour of sellers and buyers or creating repeatable and scalable sales processes through the usage of templates and playbooks.

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Mutual Action Plan (MAP)

A core functionality of a digital sales room is a Mutual Action Plan or MAP that essentially features a shared task list including next steps for sellers and buyers. You use it to create a roadmap of the deal together with your champion and provide a guideline of what needs to be done on both sides in order to make the deal successful. In B2B sales, both parties (sellers and buyers) have a natural intent to find a successful solution. In order to reach that solution, both parties need to fulfil tasks to drive the deal forward.

A Mutual Action Plan (MAP) essentially allows everyone to fully understand when they have to do what is expected from them. Based on the MAP, all stakeholders, content pieces and other details of the deal unfold and both sides eliminate the risk of being stuck. It also allows you to think through the deal before executing on it and preventing hidden issues at a later stage.

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Sales Collateral / Material

Another important part of a digital sales room are content pieces like sales material or collateral. A seller usually uses those to educate the buyer as well as to convince them of the solution they are trying to sell. Before digital sales rooms existed, a seller would share this information as attachments in emails, often resulting in it being forgotten or never even looked at.

Using a digital sales room allows you to structure the content and provide it exactly at the touch point where it is needed. Sellers can also create specific materials for individual stakeholders, enabling them to directly address points or answer questions for the responsible person instead of sharing generic materials with everyone.

Often, content is just pushed to buyers without real guidance in the hope they would look at it and magically receive the right answers to their individual questions. Think of emails that are filled with presentations, case studies, testimonial links and other information that usually just overwhelm the recipient.

A digital sales room is your solution to share the content structurally and to make sure no information is lost, misunderstood or forgotten.

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Interactive Media

On top of the ability to share content more structurally and organised, a digital sales room also allows you to share media in a different form besides emails. Due to the nature of a digital sales room being browser-based and in the cloud, users can share media in a rich form.

Examples here are:

• Embedded videos, PDFs, tables or presentations
• Hyperlinks with bookmarks
• Call to actions (CTAs)
• Images and gifs
• Questionnaires and other typeforms

Users can also directly consume the media in the tool and don’t have to leave the destination or be guided to a different place. A digital sales room keeps all media in a single place and allows everyone to interact with it directly at all times.

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Integrations

Working with digital sales rooms enables users to also integrate other tools into the interface. An average company in today’s world uses 110 different SaaS applications and the trend is accelerating. Using a digital sales room allows you to connect other tools in your workflow to the interface and seamlessly integrate the solution in your day to day work.

In contrast to Emails, which are disconnected and work in a ping-pong style, a digital sales room enables you to control all aspects of the deal in a smoothly connected flow.

A typical sales process in a digital sales room could include the following steps:

• Sharing information in the interface and directly integrating material from your Google Drive, your Dropbox, or any other source where you have saved collateral
• Share proposals or offers with Pandadoc or Qwilr in the solution
• Directly integrating a Typeform from another tool to be filled out in the DSR
• Providing an integrated ability book a call via Calendly
• Schedule a task and integrate with Google Calendar, Cron or Amie
• Sign a contract in the interface using Docusign

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Different Stakeholders

Aligning different stakeholders in a B2B sales cycle can be a daunting task. Not only for the sales reps pre-purchase, but also for the customer success team in the post-purchase workflow.

Today, the alignment is primarily done by using CC in Email and looping in different stakeholders whenever they are needed. Doing this for multiple people with various responsibilities or roles is far from optimal. Everyone has been in an email chain, where attachments were missing or information got lost, because the thread is too long and confusing or a person was just not looped in at the right time.

A digital sales room allows you to manage all members of a deal with role based usage rules and guided focus on what is important to them. You don’t want to waste the prospects’ time and you also don’t want them to miss a crucial piece of information in the process. It is your job to provide details exactly when they are needed and specifically with the people they are meant for.

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Tracking / Analytics

B2B Sales is heavily rooted in processes that lead towards success. A big part of processes and the improvement of them lies in generating as well as interpreting data. By 2026, 60% of B2B organisations will have transitioned from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling. Being able to understand the behaviour of different stakeholders in a sales cycle plays a big role in that. Digital sales rooms enable you to overview exactly what different users in the interface will do. This ranges from understanding when they visited the DSR, where they clicked, how much time they spend on different parts and material as well as understanding who they shared the information with.

Essentially, a DSR enables the seller to fully understand the blind spots in the buyer journey and paint a cohesive picture of the buyer’s path, interest and concerns.

On top of that, sellers can also understand the performance of their own reps and use the findings to optimize their own methods, processes and workflows.

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Templates & Playbooks

In B2B sales, you focus a lot on building repeatable and scalable processes. Finding a procedure that works well and can be used over and over again is a difficult task. A digital sales room allows you to create templates and playbooks of your best processes and scale them infinitely. You can iterate on different ideas and use the results from your tracking and analytics to fine tune the outcome. When proven successful, you can also directly teach other reps and unlock your material for them to access. A firm can have multiple different templates with very granular differences based on their ICP and varying stakeholders in the buying center of their target firms. A digital sales room is the source of a highly professional and focussed sales machine that feedbacks important findings directly into the actual process for closing deals.

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Notifications & automated workflows

A big part of B2B sales is the constant necessity to keep the prospects engaged by sending information, following-up and reminding them. All of that work counts towards non-selling time and sellers often dislike doing it. Working with a digital sales room enables you to make use of product notifications that remind different stakeholders of their tasks or naturally follow if -then scenarios, resulting in automated workflows.

Having a structured B2B sales process in a digital sales room not only enables you to control and drive the deal forward, but to also cut massive amounts of non-selling time that you can use focussing on work with a direct ROI.

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What are advantages of Along as a digital sales room (DSR)?

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Collaboration

The main advantage of Along’s digital sales room lies in collaboration. B2B Sales happens in silos, where different stakeholders exchange information in a pier to pier model instead of cooperating with each other in a seamless manner. The digital sales room as the central interface between selling and buying organisations enables everyone to sit at a virtual table and work collaboratively until the deal is done and the client is fully onboarded.

Along allows every member of the sales cycle to align on anything and agree on everything.

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Alignment between Stakeholders

Collaboration enables stakeholders to work closer with each other to create alignment and comprehension. A big advantage of Along is rooted in the connection of content, tasks and guarantors. Users utilise the solution to bring members of a deal on the same page and make sure that the deal is not slipping. By following this process you can better forecast deal conversion and understand where and when to nudge prospects in case of friction.

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Insights into the buying journey

Along allows users to fully understand the buying journey and shed lights on the blind spots in between email answers. Before Along, a buyer’s journey was only understood whenever a prospect responded. With Along, the buyers’s journey is fully understood and trackable. There are no missing puzzle pieces and sellers can analyse the behaviour of buyers asynchronously.

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What will you gain by using Along?

The digital sales room of Along allows sellers to enjoy major benefits directly to their ROI. The solution mainly enables users to save time and generate additional revenue.

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Shorten Sales Cycles

On a horizontal axis, Along allows sellers to shorten sales cycles and accelerate deal velocity. Using the digital sales room results in faster alignment and less friction, which directly translates into a massive time save.

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Increase Winning Rates

On a vertical axis, Along allows sellers to boost their winning rates and increase conversion. Removing roadblocks and potential misunderstandings early on in the sales process enables buyers to make better buying decisions and gain confidence in closing a deal.

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Simplify Onboarding

Another major benefit of Along lies in optimising the post-purchase onboarding process with the customer success team. Along can be understood as a single link along the entire client relationship.

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What type of B2B deals are digital sales rooms used for?

A digital sales room is usually used in B2B sales processes with SaaS or One-Off firms and provides benefits in 5-6 digit deals as well as above.

Sellers use a DSR also when the sales cycles include multiple stakeholders and range over multiple weeks up until months or years.

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The bottom line is: Along allows sellers to boost their own sales processes on multiple levels while providing a buying experience that makes buyers buy!