Jinal Jhaveri

Having difficulty sharing sales content dispersed across online platforms, email, and chats? Lacking visibility into when prospects read and engage with content? If the answer is yes, this is what traditional B2B ecommerce sales look like.

Now consider the typical sales process: It involves sales reps asking prospects questions to determine if they have the budget, authority to make decisions, need for a solution, and an appropriate timeline to take action. The conversations aim to get information from the buyer instead of a B2B seller providing information and value to prospects.

Today, buyers do want to interact with sellers — but only if they follow a more bespoke and consultative sales approach. B2B buyers are skeptical of sales reps that don’t innovate, and they want immersive experiences where they can interact with products in their own time to make more informed purchasing decisions.

Forrester Research also predicts that more than a third of millennial and Gen Z business buyers will purchase through self-guided digital channels in two years. That’s why online microsites, known as digital sales rooms, have taken off in the last few years, offering unified hubs of information, invaluable buyer insights for sellers, and unmatched personalization. They will be essential to help sellers customize sales content for the B2B buying experience in 2023 and beyond.

Digital sales rooms mean centralized communication 

Campaign Monitor reported that 64% of small businesses use email as the primary channel for acquisition and retention. But while email marketing can be effective at driving sales, multiple unorganized attachments and a lack of strategy can cause einformation to get easily lost into the ether of multi-thread email chains.

This doesn’t sound like a buyer-centric solution.

Digital sales rooms provide salespeople with a customer-facing digital portal where they can share relevant marketing content and craft custom buying experiences for prospective buyers, removing buyer friction. It helps B2B sellers centralize customer interactions with their brand and streamline purchasing by keeping all relevant information in one convenient location via a personalized hub.

The idea is that customers can examine content through a single shareable link, which they can access on their phones, desktops, or wherever, as everything is embedded. Plus, it isn’t a one-way experience or conversation; customers can ask questions about content or material through a chat functionality on the portal.

Access to invaluable intelligence with digital portals  

According to G2’s 2022 Buyer Behavior report, 68% of those surveyed indicated that the person responsible for making decisions always or frequently changes during buying processes. And 71% of these respondents reported that other stakeholders are added throughout the buying journey too. This buying behavior is one reason why it is increasingly important to streamline knowledge sharing for prospects and their teams.

For example, with what I call the “email black box,” you wouldn’t know if a prospect sent the presentation to another colleague or how long they spent reading a case study. Despite email software having excelled over the years, it still requires a key ingredient to increase prospect responsiveness: It needs to inform B2B salespeople about what the next action to take should be or when.

However, real-time sales room analytics can kick salespeople into gear, as they’ll see who is receiving, opening, and viewing content — and the moment another person becomes involved in the deal-making. The metrics available include view rates, share rates, and user behavior.

For example, a global SaaS company operating in the civil construction and mining space was able to see if a prospect shared a blog, whitepaper, or even product information with another decision maker. This view enabled them to pinpoint areas for improvement and strengths to efficiently target project managers, engineers, contractors, and suppliers.

The same can be done at the top of the sales funnel: the outbound sales and marketing. Instead of creating a digital sales room for each prospect, B2B sellers could use one duplicated room for a targeted persona. The moment a prospect clicks on the link, the digital portal could notify sales reps and start tracking the user’s activity.

Digital portals have removed the need for one be-all-end-all sales meeting. Now, it’s all about how easily a prospect can access each chunk of information to piece together the puzzle of a B2B company’s offering.

Deeper personalization for the win

Wunderman Thompson’s Future Shopper Report 2021 showed that 92% of B2B buyers expect a B2C experience when making online business purchases. In other words, they want the buying encounter to be asynchronous, delightful, and quick.

For example, suppose a B2C customer wants to purchase a new pair of shoes from Amazon or Nike. They’ll navigate a retailer’s website, browse available styles, select a pair, choose a size and color, add the item to a cart, and complete the purchase with a few clicks.

However, the purchasing process in a B2B setting is always overcomplicated and complex, involving multiple stakeholders. For example, if a business needs to purchase a new piece of software, the process will involve many meetings and negotiations with a vendor, as well as input from various departments within the company. It can take months.

The B2C experience is characterized by faster decision-making and user-friendly design. But today’s B2B buyers also demand a more personalized, self-service journey.

Since companies can grow revenue up to 40% faster with personalization than without, this growth opportunity encourages B2B sellers to adopt customizable digital portals. The sales rooms are shared through a single, evergreen link that enables prospects to easily access, engage, and share content. Companies can choose to include proposals, testimonials, case studies, recorded demos, white papers, and even welcome videos recorded by a sales rep.

With the global B2B ecommerce market predicted to grow by another 20% by 2030, it is time for B2B sellers to be more efficient by leaning on digital sales rooms for more personalized buyer experiences.

Jinal Jhaveri is the CEO and founder of Enable Us, a sales enablement technology provider. He has also been involved in founding and leading such companies as SchoolMint, an online enrollment for schools, and Mismo, a provider of remote engineering and customer success teams in Central America.