What are digital sales rooms?
Traditional digital sales rooms are private microsites where sellers share marketing and sales content with their buyers in lieu of emailing them. The market is changing to include new entrants, e.g., external collaboration tools, which add features for collaboration and communication, further improving engagement across the entire sales lifecycle.
According to Gartner, digital sales rooms are “privately formed persistent microsites”—or invite-only custom websites—where sellers share materials with potential buyers. Sellers place relevant or customized sales and marketing content into the microsite, which buyers can access at their convenience. Digital sales rooms aim to improve buyer engagement by keeping materials provided by the seller organized and available.
The value proposition for digital sales rooms is that the microsite creates a more personalized experience for the buyers, which helps foster more buyer engagement (and quicker closing). Sellers can control what kinds of content appear on the site, ensuring that only relevant content is shared instead of having the prospect search their website. And sellers can distribute all those materials without needing to barrage the prospect with countless emails and attachments. This helps ensure that the materials don’t get lost in the thicket of emails that the buyer will be receiving from competing sales teams.
The requirements for digital sales rooms are changing because B2B sales is changing. As we pointed out above, digital sales rooms are “persistent microsites” or customized websites designed to share sales and marketing content with the buyer. However, with changes to B2B buyer behavior, does this approach still meet the mark?
For example, recent studies show prospects are engaging sellers later in their buying process. Gartner found that the majority of buyers engage sellers well after they have performed their self-guided research and analysis. Bain Consulting echoed these findings pointing out that 80% of buyers have already defined solution specifications and requirements well before first contact with sales teams. Or, by the time buyers get access to a seller-created DSR, they have likely already seen most of the materials provided. This helps explain why some sellers report lower engagement—and even frustration—from their buyers. It’s not the digital sales room itself that’s the issue; it’s the content being shared through it.
Moreover, because buyers come to the table increasingly prepared, their expectations for sales interactions have increased. Many B2B sellers report that buyers want to move directly into solution mapping—focusing on how a supplier’s solution meets their unique business, technical, and economic requirements. This need for deeper collaboration is one reason why Forrester reports buyers rank discussions with product experts as the most meaningful interactions in the sales cycle. However, this also means that DSRs need to be more than glorified content-sharing tools. They need to include features to support joint problem-solving collaborations as buyers and sellers work to assess solution fit.
Finally, other studies show that even the last stages of the sales process—negotiation and close—are increasingly going virtual. McKinsey, for example, has found that 90% of companies are now willing to complete entire deals worth up to $100,000 without in-person interactions (27% for purchases over $500,000, and 15% for deals exceeding $1 million). The implication is that DSRs need to include capabilities to support these commercials-oriented collaborations that are present in the later stages of the sales process including contract negotiations, onboarding, and even vendor risk assessment, etc.
The upshot is that traditional digital sales rooms have not kept pace with evolving buyer behaviors, falling short of meeting today’s B2B sales demands. As buyers delay engagement and arrive more prepared, basic content sharing no longer adds value and may even create frustration. Current DSRs lack the collaborative features to support solution mapping and contract negotiation. With more sales stages going virtual, digital sales rooms need to evolve from content-sharing tools to external collaboration platforms that support the entire sales journey, from pre-engagement to close.
Unlike traditional digital sales rooms (DSRs), external collaboration platforms, such as TakeTurns, build on the file-sharing capabilities of DSRs and add features to collaborate at arm's length. Sellers create a TakeTurns Flow—a single, centralized place where buyers can access all customized sales and marketing content. However, TakeTurns includes a wide array of collaboration features that are designed to address many of the functionality gaps found in traditional DSRs.
TakeTurns recognizes that today’s buyers engage later in the process, often after completing extensive self-guided research. To meet this shift, TakeTurns enables sellers to share only the most relevant, prospect-specific content, reducing redundancy and helping buyers stay engaged. More importantly, because the platform is bidirectional, prospects can share their requirements, success criteria, and gap analyses. Both buyers and sellers can make formal requests of each other—asking for additional documentation, or review—further deepening the interaction and engagement. All this helps both teams hit the ground running as they collaborate on solution mapping.
In addition, these same capabilities help TakeTurns supports the later stages of the sales process, where virtual negotiations and closings have become the norm. With tools for version control, contract negotiation, and communication, TakeTurns enables smooth collaboration through every phase, from onboarding to vendor risk assessment. In short, with TakeTurns the digital sales room becomes a dynamic external collaboration FlowTM, fully aligned with the changing landscape of B2B sales.
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