Gartner defines digital sales rooms (DSRs) as a digital channel designed to increase buyer and seller engagement throughout the customer journey via a privately formed persistent microsite. It uses a combination of revenue enablement content, e-commerce and workstream planning capabilities that align with buying jobs that need to be done. Customers or prospects can go through an entire buying cycle without speaking to a seller, but most tend to interact either asynchronously or live at critical decision points. With DSRs, the seller can provide personalized and relevant insights at various touchpoints to help the customer drive their buying journey. The primary purpose of a DSR is for suppliers to provide a superior and more personalized buying experience when completing transactions, which improves revenue-generating outcomes. DSRs allow suppliers and customers to interact digitally presale, initial sale and post sale. All information pertaining to the purchase history of the solution or service remains intact and readily available. Seller and customer resources can swap in and out — for instance, the seller can leave the channel and have an account executive or customer success manager take over. Similarly, the customer’s buying executives can exit and their project and ongoing operations team comes in. This way, collaboration continues with a firm understanding of the history associated with an account. The buyer-seller relationship is strengthened, providing better lifetime value.
Interactive demonstration applications enable the creation of easily customizable substitutes for live product demonstrations and production product experiences. They save time and reduce demo failure risks by providing a simulated product experience and (sometimes) synthetic data that can be tailored to specific scenarios or use cases. Typically, four primary approaches offer different levels of product fidelity: interactive video, sequenced screen captures, application “cloning,” and customizable overlays for production products. These products offer prospects the ability to choose paths and/or features and, in some cases, click-through as if they were using the actual product. Interactive demonstration applications provide low-code/no-code customization, as well as hot spots or guides to showcase key features or capabilities. They also often collect analytics on demonstration usage and distribution to understand buyer engagement and aid the discovery of additional stakeholders