Collaborative Virtual Workspace: How To Create Engaging Workspaces To Navigate Changing Buyer Engagement

What does your current sales process look like? Maybe you send a few emails with stacks of links, follow up with more emails, and make an occasional phone call if you’re feeling eager. It takes weeks to make progress, if you get anywhere at all with your prospect. You probably even notice high drop-off rates. 

If this sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. With 70% of B2B buyers preferring a digital buying experience, sales teams struggle to adapt. After all, it’s not easy to deliver an engaging buying journey in a digital environment.

To complicate matters, the constant back and forth with reps has frustrated buyers with inefficient, impersonal exchanges. Nothing is engaging about an email with a stack of links; it’s not a valuable experience.

It doesn’t take much to arrive at the heart of your trouble. How can you boost buyer engagement, reduce the time spent in the sales cycle, and convert more sales in the digital world? 

Collaborative virtual workspaces, like Forward’s digital sales rooms, solve these problems for B2B sales teams. You can enhance buyer engagement, create seamless interactions, and reduce the back-and-forth. Your prospects experience a personalised, interactive, and engaging buying journey. 

What Is Virtual Selling?

B2B sales used to involve face-to-face conference room meetings, boardroom presentations, and phone calls. Working in a traditional office environment made nurturing relationships with interpersonal interactions easy. Then, the world changed.

Virtual selling is the modern B2B sales model. Gone are the days of in-person meetings and business dinners. Today, teams must use technology to reach prospects and engage buyers.

While technology can make it faster and easier for teams to convey information, a lot gets lost in the virtual sales space. Emails feel far less personal than a business dinner where you can win prospects with charm and wit. 

You also lose the seamless back-and-forth conversation of hanging around an office space. Communicating by email doesn’t demand an instant response, and it’s easy for questions to get lost in the shuffle.

The main challenge of virtual selling is leveraging technology to engage your buyer and deliver a personalised experience. That’s why collaborative spaces and virtual workspaces are a game-changer for B2B sales teams.

How Collaborative Virtual Workspaces Support Digital Sales

Digital sales rooms are a collaborative workspaces that serves as a centralised deal hub. It’s an effective way to overcome the challenges presented by virtual selling and streamline the buying process for everyone involved.

Imagine a collaborative working environment where you can interact in real-time with your prospect and share documents and presentations. It’s a one-stop shop for your deal, reducing the time-consuming back and forth of emails and phone calls. Once you close the deal, handing your buyer off to the onboarding team within the same space is easy. 

A digital sales room is the perfect space to foster collaboration, giving you a leg up on the competition while simplifying the sales journey for your team. Some of the key advantages include:

• Increased efficiency: From automating administrative tasks to storing all sales materials in one place, your team becomes more efficient. They can dedicate more time and effort to complex tasks that close deals.
• More flexible and adaptive: If you look at collaborative workspace design examples, you’ll find plenty of room for customisation. You can quickly switch gears and adapt content to meet your buyer’s needs.
• Seamless buyer journey: The digital sales room serves as the deal hub, meaning everything goes through one workspace. Your buyer doesn’t have to keep track of emails or search for attachments when they have questions. Plus, they can easily roll right into onboarding from that workspace.
• Scalable: Digital sales rooms make it possible to expand as your business grows. You have the power to edit and update your sales rooms as needed to ensure they align with your current goals.
• Better security: You and your buyer operate in a secure, protected workspace to ensure optimum privacy for the deal.

Digital Sales Rooms vs. Traditional Sales Routes

Thinking back to traditional sales methods, it’s easy to see the shortcomings in a virtual sales world. Buyers want that traditional experience without the in-person meetings, leaving your sales team scrambling to deliver.

Buyers want to explore more independently but need a controlled environment to collaborate effectively. Sending emails with lists of relevant links can solve half of that problem, but it puts too much on the buyer. 

The email approach is also highly impersonal and may not provide the information buyers want. B2B buyers are more demanding than ever, desiring more data to make decisions. You must also provide the right data for each person involved in the buyer’s decision.

It’s difficult to manage all of the buyer’s decision-makers and provide sufficient information to satisfy them. Chains of emails can get lost, deleted, or simply overlooked in an overflowing inbox. It's ultimately not a method that supports collaboration. You and your buyers need a space to manage your sales materials and communications better.

How To Use Digital Sales Rooms for B2B Sales

Collaborative virtual workspaces make B2B sales teams more versatile, adaptive, and effective. The best collaborative workspace examples provide everything you need for a sales journey, from first contact to onboarding. 

As you consider whether or not a digital sales room is for you, consider how some of the top applications and collaboration tools could benefit your business.

Sales Development 

Does your current sales process feel chaotic and disjointed? If you feel that way, imagine what your buyer thinks! 

Collaborative virtual workspaces support lead generation and help teams structure their sales processes. You have more control over the sales journey and, ultimately, more oversight. 

You no longer have to worry about locating the right sales materials or wondering if your buyer gets what they need. Digital sales rooms allow you to consolidate sales materials in one personal space, and your sales team can make changes and updates as needed. 

A digital sales room encourages interaction, so every decision-maker on the buyer’s end can access all sales materials for the deal from one hub. Practically speaking, digital sales rooms create that collaborative environment, simplifying the sales process for everyone and creating more productive interactions and focused work. 

For example, sales reps can easily add relevant materials to the workspace, like a demo or presentation. Your buyer doesn’t have to hunt through emails for a link because it’s in the digital sales room. The buyer doesn’t have to find a way to meet with their other stakeholders because only one person can access the demo. They can each access the demo from wherever they work and pose any questions through the workspace.

Simply put, a digital sales room fosters collaboration by removing the physical barriers in a virtual world.

Hold Collaborative Meetings

Virtual selling is far more convenient because you can hop on a Zoom call without leaving your house. However, planning and scheduling those meetings takes a lot, and they aren’t exactly convenient for everyone. 

For most meetings, you need to have a lot of things open at once, including the video call. It can feel clunky and clumsy to have a bunch of tabs open and know which one to click when.

Digital sales rooms solve these struggles by bringing everything into the shared workspace. You can move the deal along faster and more efficiently when you can interact in real-time. Plus, you can keep everyone on the same page by sending agendas in advance and setting automated follow-ups and reminders. 

Collaborative virtual workspaces include additional communication features to support deals. For example, with built-in chat and comments, your team can address questions in real-time, including in the middle of a meeting, without disrupting the flow. 

Create Engaging, Interactive Presentations

What’s exciting about receiving an email with a bunch of links? Nothing. It feels just like every other sales email you get. But what if you only had one link to an engaging, interactive, and personalised presentation?

Did you know? 68% more buyers view the full sales deck when it’s personalised. Taking the time to customise your presentation for each buyer matters.

A digital sales room allows sales teams to wow a prospect at every turn. Imagine the effectiveness of sending one link to one user-friendly, personalised workspace. Then, visualise that workspace featuring an outstanding sales presentation with fun features, like real-time polls and dynamic visuals.

Working in the right collaborative virtual workspace empowers your team with the tools to craft stunning presentations and swap out sales materials as needed. 

Structure the Sales Journey

Remove the chaotic aspects of your sales process with a more structured approach. Interactive Mutual Action Plans (MAP) represent the next step in digital sales by crafting a structured approach. 

You can set deadlines and make sure everyone knows what’s expected at every turn. It moves deals along faster by holding everyone accountable at each stage. Plus, a MAP creates transparency, which builds trust with prospects. 

Collaborative Workspace Ideas to Boost Buyer Engagement

Many collaborative workspace ideas are available, but they all support a buyer-centric sales approach. Putting your buyers first makes them feel heard, understood, and valued instead of just another number receiving generic sales materials.

To create an engaging, personalised experience for each customer might sound cumbersome and time-consuming. With the right tools and software, your sales team will be more efficient while delivering a better sales experience. 

For example, Forward’s digital sales room contains all of the necessary elements to empower your team and boost buyer engagement. 

• Personalised workspaces tailored to each deal impress prospects with a customised experience. They also provide a secure, interactive buyer experience with relevant content highlighting value propositions. These attractive micro-sites are convenient and drive deals forward faster.
• Multi-media embedding allows consolidating sales materials and collaborating in real-time for an organised, streamlined buyer journey. Your sales reps can easily edit existing content and add new materials as deals progress.
• Mutual Action Plans structure and drive deals, making them a powerful tool for sales teams struggling to have an impact. It’s easy to keep everyone on the same page, including the buyer’s many decision-makers. MAPs allow you to set deadlines everyone can see and create a smoother buyer journey for every deal.
• Live chat and comments create seamless buyer interactions and reduce cumbersome back-and-forth via email.

When your sales team can collaborate in one space, they present a consistent, united front for each buyer. For example, when you make a sale, you can pull the onboarding rep into the digital sales room and continue the relationship without bringing anybody up to speed.

Enhance Virtual Collaboration with Forward

B2B sales are largely digital these days, meaning you need to do more than keep up and stay ahead of your competition. Leveraging technology, like collaborative virtual workspaces, alleviates strain on your sales team while providing an exceptional experience for your buyers.

Forward’s digital sales room does more than just empower your team to succeed. It provides the tools to impress every prospect with a unique experience. You don’t have to worry about starting from scratch with email campaigns or your CRM. Forward seamlessly integrates with your favourite tools, offering over 30 integrations. 

From the very first contact, you can craft a personalised experience that puts your buyer front and centre.

As you progress through the sales funnel, your team can provide all the information your buyers need in one centralised hub. It’s even possible to track buyer engagement with each piece of content so you know what’s working and can identify the best time to follow up.

When you’re ready to move forward with a deal, leverage the interactive Mutual Action Plans to structure the process and close the deal faster. Then, you can complete a seamless handoff to the onboarding process by pulling your onboarding rep into the digital sales meeting room.

Forward’s digital sales rooms provide your team with the tools to make an impact on every prospect so employees can work more efficiently and effectively to close deals faster.

Impress your prospects when you use Forward’s digital sales room to craft a personalised, interactive sales journey. Try it for free today!