The 9 Best Digital Sales Room Software Compared (2024)

The Dock Team
Published
October 2, 2024
Updated
November 7, 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTs
TABLE OF CONTENT

If your sales reps are: 

  • Sending demo follow-up email threads with a ton of links and attachments
  • Manually customizing and attaching proposal PDFs (or waiting for the design team to do it for them)
  • Trying to personalize each deal by starting from scratch every time
  • Managing complex deals in janky spreadsheets that the client doesn’t even want to look at, let alone fill in
  • Sending a quote, and then another revised quote, and then a proposal, and then another proposal

…it’s probably time to start looking for digital sales room software

Of course, not all deal room solutions are created equal. Some lean toward sales content, others are more about sales L&D with a deal room tacked on, and others are mainly a CPQ tool with some content on the side.

Others (like Dock) let you build a customized workspace that guides your customers all the way through the deal, the purchase, and on into implementation. And others are just expensive slide deck software. 

In this guide, we’ll share what we’ve learned about digital sales rooms, from trying the tools out ourselves, talking to customers, and researching the market while building Dock. 

Here's the quick TL;DR of our top picks: 

  1. Dock: Collaborative workspaces for the entire customer lifecycle, transitioning seamlessly from sales deal room to onboarding to customer portal to renewals 
  2. GetAccept: Sales proposal tool with some content features 
  3. Accord: Mutual action plan software that helps reps use standardized sales methodology
  4. Allego: Sales LMS with video-centric deal room software added on
  5. Aligned: Prescriptive deal room tool for small teams, with limited customizations 
  6. Dealhub: CPQ software with some sales room features 
  7. Trumpet: Point solution deal room for startups and individual AEs
  8. Seismic: Legacy sales LMS with a sales room added more recently
  9. Vidyard: Video tool for sales teams with new deal room features added last year  

What is a digital sales room? 

A digital sales room is an online workspace that B2B sales teams use to collaborate with their buyers during the sales process. 

Sales reps can use sales rooms to upload and share sales enablement assets (like proposals, demos, or technical documentation) and collaborate with the buyer on a mutual action plan

Digital sales rooms (or deal rooms, as we prefer to call them) are on the rise. (See, for example, the digital sales room heading up the side of Gartner’s 2024 hype cycle below.) 

Souce: Gartner.com

Why are sales rooms so hot right now?

Deal rooms solve the three biggest challenges affecting today’s B2B sales teams: 

1. B2B buyers want to self-serve

According to a pre-pandemic survey from Gartner, only 17% of a B2B buying team’s time is spent talking to Sales. The rest of the time, they’re reviewing content and discussing options internally. 

That turns the B2B sales game into a competition through content. Whoever gets their content in front of their prospects—and keeps it there by making it easy to find—wins the deal. 

Sales rooms let you curate your best content and surface it for your prospects, so it’s easy for them to find the information that will convince them to buy from you. In particular, it puts your content in the hands of your buyer champion so they can sell your solution internally. 

2. B2B sales teams need to offer personalization at scale

B2B buyers expect a personalized touch—but personalizing at scale can be a heavy lift for busy sales teams. 

The digital sales room is the perfect solution. You may not have much face time with the client to build a personal relationship, but you can still recreate the white-glove experience by using a customizable template (for instance, this B2B sales room template) and adding in the client’s logo, specific pain points and challenges, and any content that’s particularly relevant for their use case or sector. 

3. B2B buying is harder than ever 

Buying B2B software has never been more difficult. Every deal involves more decision-makers, often working in distributed teams. Budgets have been slashed. Every purchase needs CFO approval. Purchasing cycles are slower. 

Over 75% of B2B buyers described their most recent purchase as “very complex or difficult.”

Send help.

Today’s sales teams need to prioritize buyer enablement—creating the content, tools, and processes that make it easy for your buyers to buy.  

Again, deal rooms are an invaluable asset to B2B sales teams. The right deal room software lets you help your buyers (and shorten the sales cycle) by: 

  • Giving them one link to a deal room with everything they need to buy (like the quote, proposal, contract, legal documentation, deal plan, demos, and sales collateral) instead of a bunch of links and janky Excel sheets spread across multiple emails 
  • Surfacing all the sales collateral they need for decision-making, so they don’t have to go looking for it 
  • Capturing all the information they gave you during discovery so they don’t need to keep re-explaining what they want 
  • Letting them model their own pricing and figure out what option makes the most sense for them instead of getting stuck in email back-and-forth with your reps
  • Providing them with a straightforward, interactive mutual action plan so they can track where they are with the deal and avoid any irritating delays

Types of digital sales rooms

Of course, not all digital sales room solutions let you do all that. Here’s how we’d break down the category: 

1. Content repositories 

Many sales enablement platforms—like Seismic, Highspot, and DocSend—have added a sales room feature more recently. 

The deal room features are typically fairly inflexible—essentially just a way of sharing sales collateral externally as well as internally. Think of a prettier Google Drive folder rather than an interactive workspace for collaborating with buyers. 

2. Repurposed internal tools 

Speaking of Google Drive, some smaller companies just re-jig internal tools—like Notion, Google Slides, or ClickUp—to share content, proposals, and mutual action plans with customers. 

3. CPQ extensions 

These tools are primarily Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions, but they’ll also let you upload sales content alongside your proposal—we’d put DealHub, GetAccept, and PandaDoc in this category. 

4. DSR point solutions 

A relatively new category, these are tools built specifically to create digital sales rooms—tools like Aligned, Flowla, and Trumpet. They have a more modern, web-based approach to creating deal rooms, so you can add things like interactive checklists to help project manage the deal.

5. Mutual planning tools 

Then, there are tools that lean heavily on the project management side of the deal room. They’re primarily mutual action plan tools that you can use with prospects to manage the stages and tasks involved in getting the deal done. We’d put Accord and Recapped.io in this category. 

6. End-to-end revenue enablement solutions 

Finally, you have tools that let you manage the entire customer lifecycle. So you can create a digital sales room, add a mutual action plan, add a quote calculator, add a proposal, collect the e-signature on that proposal, then transition the workspace into an onboarding platform and finally into a customer portal, all with the same link. 

In this category, you pretty much just have Dock. 💅

Okay, let’s take a look at all these solutions in a bit more detail.  

1. Dock

G2 Rating: 4.9/5 

What it is: 

Dock is a customer-facing workspace that you can use to build flexible sales rooms. You can then convert that workspace into an onboarding platform or customer portal from the same link. So it means the sales-to-customer success handoff becomes totally seamless, making for a far better and easier buyer experience

In category terms, Dock is a yes/and solution—you get a flexible, modern deal room tool and CPQ features and mutual action plan/project management features and sales content management tools, and also customer portal features. 

So it lets you manage the whole customer journey in the same place. 

Who it’s for: 

The entire Revenue team (Sales, CS, Marketing, and RevOps), in everything from startups to enterprises.  

Key features: 

  • Flexible deal rooms—Design sections to look how you want and embed video, Calendly links, PandaDoc contracts, case studies, and any other content formats you’d like.
  • Pre-built widgets—Add project plans, price quotes, contact cards, etc., with a couple of clicks.
  • Deal room templates—So even the newest rep can give a premium demo follow-up, templatize the entire deal room and each of the sections within the deal room. 
  • White-label solution—Use your own domain, logo, images, and colors so your deal room feels like an extension of your brand.
  • Embedded project management tools—Help keep the deal on track with checklists, Kanban boards, phase timelines, custom stages and calls-to-action, due date reminders, relative due dates, and global task management.
  • CPQ tools—Use quote builder, interactive proposals, order forms, and digital signatures.
  • Customer communication tools—Communicate with in-line comments, task comments, and internal/external messaging. 
  • Customer engagement analytics—Track exactly which stakeholders are using the deal room, how often, what they’re looking at, and how likely they are to buy. 
  • Integrations—Get two-way sync with Salesforce and embedded Gong calls. 
  • Transform the deal room into a customer portal—Just hide and unhide content as the deal progresses and keep the link the same.

What people say about it: 

  • “The biggest thing I love about Dock, now that I've used it and now that I manage how a team uses it, is it's just elevated the quality of follow-up.” —Andrew Hollis, Director of Sales at Nectar, explaining how Dock helped his sales team increase their win rate by 31%.
  • “Dock makes it a lot easier for me to manage a lot more conversations as only one person with only so much time. Of course, the cherry on top is when customers say, ‘Wow, I'm impressed. This is super personalized[…]’ We've actually had customers doing a business case to their CFO pull up the Dock and just scroll through it.”— Stephen Ruff, Co-Founder of Champify 
  •  “My aha moment using Dock was when you were actually able to see what someone was clicking on and who came in and clicked[…] It’s really helpful to see that type of activity and also gauge: Are they interested? Are they not? It answers that question for me, too.” — Helen Ralowicz-Chapman, Mid-Market Sales at Marqii
  • “We can see in the Dock backend that they’re going into it and looking at it like 25 times before making their purchasing decision. So we know how helpful it is.” —Dr. Ingrid Murra, CEO and Co-Founder of Two Front 

Here's a full demo of Dock's sales rooms from our founder, Alex:

2. GetAccept

G2 Rating: 4.6 

What it is: 

GetAccept is a combined deal room, content management tool, and CPQ tool, making it one of the more comprehensive options on the list. They divide the platform into a Deal Room (from first meeting to proposal) and a Contract Room (from proposal to signed deal).

Who it’s for: 

B2B sales teams who need a deal room that also lets you manage contracts, proposals, and signatures, and who don’t need much flexibility or customer onboarding tools

Key features: 

  • CPQ tools
  • Electronic signatures 
  • Proposals and contracts (with templates) 
  • Sales CMS
  • Analytics on proposal views 

What people say about it: 

Reviewers on G2 say that GetAccept is “user-friendly,” “easy to use,”  and that it “simplifies the contract process by making the contracts easy to send out for digital signature to the end customer as well as the follow-up process when the contracts or offers are sent out.” 

Some reviewers complain that it needs to be “more customizable,” that the setup is “overly complex,” and that they “would love to ‘white-label’ the send-outs more.” 

3. Accord

G2 Rating: 4.8/5 

What it is: 

Accord calls itself a “deal execution platform,” and its goal is to help sales teams standardize processes and workflows with mutual action plans, sales enablement tools, and account-planning features.  

Who it’s for: 

Although it does have some deal room functionality, Accord leans toward sales enablement and sales training in its messaging—as in, it’s more about internal tooling and revenue ops and less about buyer enablement. It’s right for sales leaders who want to implement a more standardized sales methodology and who don’t need proposal or contract tools. 

Key features: 

  • Mutual action plans 
  • Stakeholder mapping 
  • Sales training and standardized playbooks
  • Sales CMS 
  • Onboarding checklists 

What people say about it: 

Reviewers on G2 like that Accord is easy to set up and that it lets them “build a step-by-step timeline with my prospect to help them visualize and agree on a path to partnership.” Several reviewers also mention that the interface is “easy to navigate,” both for their own team and for their prospects. 

4. Allego

G2 Rating: 4.6/5

What it is: 

A former Sales L&D tool with AI-supported sales coaching tools that has since added content management and DSR functionality. 

Who it’s for: 

Mid-market and enterprise sales teams that need a strong sales coaching platform that also comes with some limited DSR features. 

If you’re looking for a sales enablement tool that will help upskill a large sales organization, then Allego could be a strong choice. However, if you need a tool for the entire customer journey in terms of CPQs, mutual action plans, and sales-to-CS handoff, then this probably isn’t the most cost-effective option. 

Key features: 

  • Strong data security 
  • Collaboration tools—video conferencing and document sharing 
  • Some personalization options 
  • Track views and shares of sales content in the deal room

What people say about it: 

Forrester says, “Reference customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use for content creators and end users, quick time-to-launch, and scalability.” They also note that Allego’s DSRs “combine collaboration and strong security.” 

Some G2 reviewers mention that they’d like to be able to “customize templates more than I can now” and that it “can feel a little clunky during setup of the DSRs.” 

5. Aligned

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

What it is: 

Aligned is a digital sales room for small businesses. It’s a DSR point solution that keeps things simple, with a fairly prescriptive UI and defined inputs for the user. 

Who it’s for: 

Small sales teams who need a straightforward DSR with a modern interface but who don’t want much flexibility, branding, or customization and who don’t need CPQ tools. 

Key features: 

  • Solid CRM integrations 
  • Basic content management system with files and folders 
  • Limited project management based on simple checklist 
  • Pre-built widgets 
  • Embed popular tools 
  • Deal room templates 
  • Custom domain (but only limited custom branding) 
  • Some engagement tracking and reporting tools 

What people say about it: 

Reviewers on G2 like Aligned for its “super easy information sharing,” “modern and convenient look,” and “straightforward design.” 

On the flip side, some users comment on the prescriptive interface, which “restricts our ability to tailor the platform to specific requirements.” Another reviewer said, “The arrangement of tabs and sections needs to offer more flexibility.”

6. DealHub

G2 Rating: 4.7/5 

What it is: 

DealHub is a CPQ software that lets sales reps generate personalized price quotes, share contracts, collect signatures, and manage subscriptions. More recently, they’ve added some deal-room capabilities. 

Who it’s for: 

DealHub is great for teams who want a solid point solution for handling quotes, proposals, and contracts and who don’t need a lot of customization. As it’s priced a little higher than some other CPQ options, it’s probably best for teams with large, complex deals.

Key features: 

  • Automated CPQ tools
  • Contract lifecycle management
  • Subscription management and usage-based billing
  • Accounting/ERP integrations 
  • Custom quotes in any branded format 
  • Real-time insights into prospect engagement 

What people say about it: 

Reviewers on G2 say that DealHub’s “implementation was easy” and that they “find the platform very intuitive to use for quoting, and love the DealRoom feature for sharing quotes with customers.” 

On the other hand, DealHub’s deal rooms are static, hard-coded templates where clients can see assets and sign agreements. While that might be a positive for some teams who want a foolproof interface, it does bother some reviewers. For instance, one mid-market user mentions that “the DealRoom experience could benefit from a revamp. A comprehensive, self-service configuration feature set would be highly advantageous.” 

7. Trumpet

G2 Rating: 4.7/5 

What it is: 

Trumpet is a modern sales deal room point solution. Trumpet offers interactive deal room microsites with an opinionated design and pre-built widgets with limited flexibility. 

Who it’s for: 

Trumpet is right for startups and individual AEs who need a modern, user-friendly deal-room tool, basic Salesforce integration, and simple reporting.  

Key features: 

  • Custom branding controlled by admins and end users 
  • Price quote tool (per-unit pricing only) 
  • Document signing 
  • Content engagement analytics
  • Drag and drop widgets 

What people say about it: 

People say that Trumpet is flexible and easy to use: “It's SO easy to make a pod from templates, to customize widgets, and then reuse those widgets.” Users also like “how it automatically customizes the design for the customer that you're selling to.” 

On the other hand, some users say that Trumpet’s analytics could be more detailed. For instance, one review by a Senior Account Executive at a mid-market firm says, “The one feature I do wish was more in-depth is the analytics on pages. It's great to know which pages were viewed, but if we knew more about what was interacted with, what was clicked, etc., it would breathe life into this page further.”

Other reviewers miss some flexibility on features. For example, one small business owner on G2 says, “It would be nice to have more customization options in the proposal section as it doesn't currently fit our use case of a per store, per month payment structure. Also, a smart and highly customizable calculator would be incredibly helpful in clearly describing our value to customers.” 

8. Seismic 

G2 Rating: 4.7 

What it is: 

Seismic is a legacy sales CMS that recently added sales coaching and DSR tools. It’s a massive, feature-heavy sales enablement platform that leans strongly toward enterprise customers. 

Who it’s for: 

Enterprise sales teams who want a really comprehensive sales CMS with sales coaching features and don’t mind a pretty basic, static deal room. 

Key features: 

  • Drag-and-drop design tools
  • Embed video content 
  • Communication tools (tagging, commenting, and posting questions about content) 
  • DSR templates 
  • Customer buyer privacy settings 
  • Buyer engagement analytics 

What people say about it: 

Forrester calls Seismic  “high-investment, high-reward” and describes it as the “most comprehensive [sales enablement] solution in the marketplace.” 

However, when it comes to specific reviews of the deal room, a reviewer on G2 says, “I wish the digital sales room capability had more options for formatting.” 

It’s also worth noting that only a small proportion of Seismic’s G2 reviews even mention the DSR features, again suggesting that most customers are still using Seismic as a sales CMS and sales enablement tool rather than for its new DSR functionality. 

9. Vidyard

G2 Rating: 4.5/5 

What it is: 

Vidyard is a video platform designed for virtual sales. Last year, it added a digital sales room feature that lets sales teams share video content with prospects via email, create individual landing pages with sales content, and add widgets like chat features. 

Who it’s for: 

Vidyard is a prospecting tool for sales teams who want to amp up their sales video outreach efforts and get detailed analytics on video engagement, and aren’t looking for tooling for CPQ, deal management, contracts, or onboarding. 

Key features: 

  • Prospecting tools—send videos by email, social media, or CRM software
  • Automated outbound and AI-generated videos
  • Video-first digital workspaces with some content-sharing options and pre-built widgets

What people say about it: 

Vidyard is a very popular video-based prospecting tool, and the reviews reflect that. Users on G2 say that it “enables our sales team to create a more personal connection with our clients and prospects,” “create videos for social media posts and personal follow-ups,” and that it “takes seconds to set up and record a video, and a couple more seconds to share it with customers.”

The deal room features are pretty limited, and some reviews seem to reflect that. One reviewer commented that the content-sharing features are pretty basic: “Right now, it is just a long list of uploads.” 

Is Dock the right sales room software for your team? 

Okay, we’ve got to admit Dock isn’t the right deal room software for everyone. 

If you just need a one-off point solution—say you only want a tool for CPQ, you only want to do mutual action planning, or you just want to record and send really good sales videos—then Dock may be too comprehensive for your needs. 

On the flip side, if you’re mainly looking for traditional sales coaching tools with a deal room on the side, then a legacy sales training platform like Seismic or a more modern option like Accord might be a better fit. 

But if what you need is a tool that will let you improve the buying experience and close deals more quickly, then Dock’s sales rooms might just be the right tool for you. 

Dock is built for the entire customer lifecycle

Dock's deal rooms are perfect for sales teams who need to: 

  • Stand out from the competition with visually appealing, flexible deal room templates that you can fully customize with just a few clicks.
  • Streamline the entire buyer journey, from demo follow-up through CPQ to deal close and on into onboarding and renewals.
  • Centralize all your sales materials so your buyer champion can find them quickly.
  • Add structure to deals with mutual action plans, to help your buyer move step-by-step through the buying process.
  • Get truly actionable sales metrics, like exactly who is looking at your sales content, which content they’re looking at, and how often they’re looking. 

Dock is the one-stop shop for managing the end-to-end customer experience.

Start your free trial of Dock today to see for yourself. 

The Dock Team