FAQs

A Smart Room is a digital workspace that brings together sellers and buyers for a branded and personalized digital experience. Customers self-direct activities—watch videos, read case studies, review proposals, and more—while sellers guide the customer journey with analytics to understand what’s working and what’s not. Everything previously shared in endless emails can now be delivered in a Smart Room. Users can also invite their colleagues to join them in the Smart Room, explore content best suited to them as they self-educate before buying a product or service, and then easily connect with account teams when they have questions or are ready to make a purchase.

Microsites, content hubs, and landing pages are often generic digital experiences that lack the features teams and customers need to navigate effective buyer journeys. Smart Rooms, on the other hand, are private, personalized digital experience spaces, built 100% Salesforce native, that are specifically designed to help teams collaborate to engage customers in interactive buying journeys.

Smart Rooms are designed for marketing, sales, and account management users. Each team can manage or join a Smart Room, depending on the use case. Marketing often oversees the early-stage development and branding of a Smart Room. Sales manages active sales pursuits. Account management typically performs account management, onboarding, customer advisory boards, and other key account activities. In all cases, each team can have visibility and access into Smart Room activity as needed.

Smart Rooms are designed for just about any B2B company. The approach to using Smart Rooms may differ by industry, but all businesses are looking to digitally engage customers. Some of the industries that leverage Smart Rooms today have prioritized digital transformation and include technology, finance, insurance, manufacturing, and professional services.

Most companies begin by deploying Smart Rooms externally, targeting prospects, customers, and partners. They often go on to apply Smart Rooms to internal efforts, such as team education, training, coaching, and growth through best practices. All Smart Rooms offer group and direct messaging as well as live chat to facilitate collaboration, both internally and externally.

No, you do not have to change the way you sell in order to use Smart Rooms. Smart Rooms are designed to work with any existing sales process, but teams that utilize account-based marketing, sales, and management strategies can make the most of these platforms. Regardless of your approach, the data obtained from Smart Rooms allows you to understand and improve your sales process on a deeper level, sharing insights on what’s working and what’s not so you can see continued revenue growth.

No, using Smart Rooms does not require extensive training or coaching. Smart Rooms are simple to launch and use for anyone in sales, marketing, or account management. Smart Rooms are web-based and mobile-ready spaces that are easy for customers to navigate and for teams to control. A quick overview of its features and settings is all your team needs to get started.

B2B companies can perform a variety of activities in Smart Rooms. Teams can add, view, and share content; invite internal colleagues and external customers; collaborate and chat with other Smart Room members and customers; personalize the appearance of Smart Rooms; automate engagement processes; and analyze user activity, among other activities

B2B prospects can self-educate on products and services using content placed in Smart Rooms. They can also invite their colleagues into Smart Rooms to share the knowledge they’ve gained with others to support educated buying decisions. Prospects can engage directly with sales team members with questions or a decision to move forward with purchases. Clients can engage with account management teams for onboarding activities or continued client relationship support. Partners can also work with account teams and gain access to resources for supporting their own sales efforts.

Branding a Smart Room to a prospect or client’s company through imagery or color palettes is a best practice that we encourage users to follow. There is a direct correlation between this branding or personalization strategy and the number of customer-to-customer invites that may occur. This small effort goes a long way to create a beautiful and engaging digital customer experience, and choosing to forgo your own organization’s scheme for a customer’s achieves a whole new level of competitive differentiation in the customer’s eyes.

Smart Rooms are designed to be intuitive and require little or no training. Once familiar with the platform, it’s not difficult for organizations to encourage their marketing, sales, and account management teams to consistently use Smart Rooms. Smart Rooms become their hub for connecting with customers and accelerating sales efforts. The software is easy to use, and JourneyDXP offers ongoing support to maximize customer engagement and ensure continued success for all involved teams.

Prospects, customers, and partners regularly praise businesses for the Smart Room experiences they offer. They appreciate the investment sellers demonstrate by using Smart Rooms and believe that the content, connection, and collaboration they provide reflect a clear, thorough understanding of their own business. The proof is in users’ active engagement and willingness to invite their colleagues.

Just about any content can be uploaded, embedded, shared, and accessed in Smart Rooms. Files include standard word processing documents and presentations, as well as website links, videos, webinars, blogs, articles, forms, meeting recordings, and surveys.

Yes, Smart Rooms offer a variety of useful analytics on customer engagement and internal team use. Smart Rooms can measure and assign a numerical engagement score to customers and accounts, which can be reviewed via dashboards and reports that provide both macro and micro analytics. Shed light on who is participating in activity and who requires more attention and guidance with valuable customer behavior insights.

Smart Rooms are highly secure spaces for teams and their customers. As a 100% native Salesforce platform, Smart Rooms leverage the security capabilities of Salesforce for system security and access control. Content in Smart Rooms can also be secured by limiting access to certain users.

At this time, Smart Rooms are natively built on the Salesforce platform and are only capable of functioning with established Salesforce accounts. The JourneyDXP team intends to support additional CRM systems in the future.

Smart Rooms integrate with a variety of business tools, including those for marketing automation, live meetings, and videos. Zoom, WebEx, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, YouTube, Vimeo, and Vidyard, among others, are compatible applications.

Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel sales strategy used to acquire new customers and cross-sell to existing accounts. It’s a unified sales effort that is laser-focused on ensuring teams and their prospects are on the same page throughout the buyer’s journey. Building deep relationships in each target company through this methodology’s relevant personalization tactics can improve sales productivity and increase revenue per account by more than 25 percent.

Account-based marketing is the use of personalized marketing campaigns to target key accounts, building awareness of your solution within a company and generating marketing-qualified leads. This strategy often precedes account-based selling. An ABM Smart Room is often driven by marketing but sales is visible in the room, monitoring activity, and engaging when appropriate.

A self-directed customer experience is one in which the customer chooses how and when they engage with people or content throughout the buyer’s journey. Modern sales and marketing tactics often bombard prospects with irrelevant emails and ads, which can cause confusion and a resistance to engage with sales professionals in the early stages of the buyer’s journey. But self-directed customer experiences allow them to educate themselves on products and services on their own time, focusing on information that’s relevant and important to them. These experiences are available 24/7, easily accessible in one space by customers and their colleagues to help them build consensus within their company and improve decision-making.

Research from Gartner, McKinsey, Forrester, Accenture, and other industry leaders suggests that the greatest challenge salespeople face today is overcoming the difficulty that customers have with completing their side of the buying process. Customers must shepherd their own team through comparing vendors and proposals and finally reaching a consensus. An overwhelming amount of phone calls, emails, and meeting invites from sales professionals makes this goal even more elusive. Self-directed customer experiences promote content sharing—direct access to the valuable content customers need to understand products and services. This empowers customers, simplifies and speeds up their education, and leads to shorter sales cycles and more sales wins.

Almost nonexistent a few years ago, virtual selling and remote selling are now must-haves for today’s B2B organizations. Virtual selling includes synchronous and asynchronous customer engagement accomplished through digital-enabled tactics. This sales method connects customers with company thought leaders inside a digital experience to support or complement self-directed customer education and simplify the overall buying process.

A digital experience platform is technology that facilitates the development, management, and delivery of engaging and nuanced digital experiences. This can come in the form of a digital sales room or digital customer engagement space like Smart Rooms. The platform should ideally help users extend their reach deeper into a target audience by first creating a beautiful, cohesive digital experience.

Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel sales strategy used to acquire new customers and cross-sell to existing accounts. It’s a unified sales effort that is laser-focused on ensuring teams and their prospects are on the same page throughout the buyer’s journey. Building deep relationships in each target company through this methodology’s relevant personalization tactics can improve sales productivity and increase revenue per account by more than 25 percent.

Account-based marketing is the use of personalized marketing campaigns to target key accounts, building awareness of your solution within a company and generating marketing-qualified leads. This strategy often precedes account-based selling. An ABM Smart Room is often driven by marketing but sales is visible in the room, monitoring activity, and engaging when appropriate.

A self-directed customer experience is one in which the customer chooses how and when they engage with people or content throughout the buyer’s journey. Modern sales and marketing tactics often bombard prospects with irrelevant emails and ads, which can cause confusion and a resistance to engage with sales professionals in the early stages of the buyer’s journey. But self-directed customer experiences allow them to educate themselves on products and services on their own time, focusing on information that’s relevant and important to them. These experiences are available 24/7, easily accessible in one space by customers and their colleagues to help them build consensus within their company and improve decision-making.

Research from Gartner, McKinsey, Forrester, Accenture, and other industry leaders suggests that the greatest challenge salespeople face today is overcoming the difficulty that customers have with completing their side of the buying process. Customers must shepherd their own team through comparing vendors and proposals and finally reaching a consensus. An overwhelming amount of phone calls, emails, and meeting invites from sales professionals makes this goal even more elusive. Self-directed customer experiences promote content sharing—direct access to the valuable content customers need to understand products and services. This empowers customers, simplifies and speeds up their education, and leads to shorter sales cycles and more sales wins.

Almost nonexistent a few years ago, virtual selling and remote selling are now must-haves for today’s B2B organizations. Virtual selling includes synchronous and asynchronous customer engagement accomplished through digital-enabled tactics. This sales method connects customers with company thought leaders inside a digital experience to support or complement self-directed customer education and simplify the overall buying process.

A digital experience platform is technology that facilitates the development, management, and delivery of engaging and nuanced digital experiences. This can come in the form of a digital sales room or digital customer engagement space like Smart Rooms. The platform should ideally help users extend their reach deeper into a target audience by first creating a beautiful, cohesive digital experience.