What's a Digital Sales Room and Why Every Team Needs a DSR Platform
Accelerating digital transformation shook up established B2B sales processes in every industry. Gartner predicts that 80% of sales interactions will occur in digital channels as soon as 2025. Sales teams increasingly rely on digital sales rooms to help them adapt and thrive in the new environment.
What's a Digital Sales Room
The digital sales room (DSR) is a persistent virtual collaboration space shared by people involved in a complex B2B sales process.
The process participants, buyers and sellers, use the room to collaborate synchronously, e.g. by sharing live chat messages, and asynchronously, e.g. by sharing comments, video messages, and documents.
To understand the role of digital sales rooms in the ecosystem, it helps to compare them with other tools supporting the sales process.
| Digital Sales Room | Zoom | Microsite | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Persistent | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Synchronous | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Asynchronous | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Personalized | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Interactive | Yes | No | No | No |
| Context-aware | Yes | No | No | No |
In addition to supporting both synchronous and asynchronous modes of communication, a digital sales room can be used to share interactive content, such as surveys, ROI calculators, product configurators, pricing calculators, and others. At Morebell, we call them microapps.
Digital sales rooms are context aware, that is, the nature of interactions and content shared in a digital sales room changes as the process evolves.
Microsites, for instance, are static and one-way. Digital sales rooms, on the other hand, are dynamic and bi-directional. A microsite targets a segment of customers. A digital sales room targets buyers involved in a particular sales opportunity.
Why Every Team Needs a DSR Platform
To appreciate the value of a digital sales room, let’s review the stages of a typical SaaS sales process, commonly referred to as AARRR, the pirate framework:
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Retention
- Revenue
- Referral
The framework is often discussed in isolation, which is a big mistake. After all, enterprise sales is a discipline that requires deep “thinking about the thinking of others”.
When purchasing a solution, enterprise buyers follow their own process:
- Problem recognition
- Solution search
- Solution evaluation
- Purchase decision
- Solution deployment
On the buyer side, the process has several stakeholders: initiators, influencers, champions, end users, compliance officers, economic buyers, and even saboteurs. In the course of the process, they interact with numerous other vendors executing the steps of their own AARRR frameworks.
By aligning the two views of the sales process, seller-centric and buyer-centric, we can vividly illustrate the difference between two approaches, DSR-based and legacy.
This diagram leaves little doubt in most people's minds as to which team, vendor A or vendor B, is going to win in the process. DSR is a powerful tool that tremendously improves not only sales performance but also buyer experience.
Always, always use the right tool for the job.
