There’s a lot of good conversation around creating Digital Selling Rooms. Increasingly, we see very powerful ways that sellers and customers can engage in their buying process and learning.
Typically, sellers invite customers to Digital Selling Room. The rooms enable sellers to provide relevant content for use by the customers. They can track how this content is used, which content the buyers focus on. Digital Selling Rooms are a convenient way to convene meetings between sellers and buyers, track what’s going on, keep notes on next steps we and the customer might take. Some Digital Selling Rooms provide capabilities for the buying team to “talk” privately among themselves.
Without a doubt, Digital Selling Rooms can be very helpful in our customer engagement strategies, as we and the customer engage both digitally, virtually, and F2F.
But think about this from a customer point of view. In an “ideal world,” they are participating in Digital Selling Rooms for each of the suppliers they are considering. It’s convenient for the sellers, but not so much so for the buyers. There is probably a lot of redundant activity across each of the platforms. For example, they consume different content at each selling room, but where do they share ideas across the different vendors they are considering, how do they coordinate those learnings and their buying journey across multiple Digital Selling Rooms.
It turns out, we’ve created a tool that makes it much easier for sellers to engage buyers across multiple channels, we’ve not made it any easier for buyers.
What if we flipped the model around? What if rather then sellers inviting buyers to their Digital Selling Rooms; buyers had the capability of inviting sellers to a Digital Buying Room.
What If buyers had a tool they could easily manage the content they see from all sources, the communications they have within the team and with the suppliers they are considering? What if there were a Digital Buying Room, making it convenient for the buyer to coordinate everything they are doing? What if this Digital Buying Room provided an easy way for them to assess and compare alternatives?
Perhaps the supplier of this capability might provide tools to help customers navigate the buying process. Maybe project management tools, evaluation tools, and others. They might even be able to see some of the things similar buyers considered in their purchases (anonymized, of course).
Maybe the suppliers of procurement tools, could embed Digital Buying Rooms into their tools.
Alternatively, maybe there might be an independent platform, offering the basic capability for free to buyers, charging sellers who want to participate in this platform.
We create all sorts of tools to make it easier for sellers to engage their customers through their digital and other channels, but maybe it’s time for some organization to focus on buyers, helping them more effectively manage their process.
There are some other capabilities one might embed into these offerings, talk to me 😉
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