What happens when your buyers move faster than your sales process?
That’s the question at the heart of Highspot’s recent webinar, The AI-Powered Buying Experience: How Digital Sales Rooms Accelerate Deals.
The way people buy has changed. Today’s buyers are informed, decisive, and selective about how they spend their time. If your sales process can’t keep up, your buyers won’t wait. But this shift isn’t a threat. It’s an opportunity to improve engagement across the entire buyer journey.
Featuring Forrester Principal Analyst Rick Bradberry and Tania Flagg, Director of Digital Education at SkinCeuticals, the webinar unpacked how AI and Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) are changing how sellers connect, collaborate, and close.
In this recap, we’ll walk through the highlights and what they mean for your team.
AI is changing the rules of engagement
AI and automation are changing how sales teams work. Just like the internet and mobile transformed communication, AI is transforming how sellers work deals.
Buyers today want quick answers, relevant content, and tailored conversations. That means the old playbook—static pitch decks, generic emails, and rigid sales stages—no longer works. As Forrester’s Rick Bradberry notes, sales practices must match sales realities.
So what does that look like in practice? It starts with enablement. Not just rolling out new tools, but helping sellers unlearn time-consuming habits and replace them with smarter, buyer-focused routines.
The buyer has changed. Have you?
Sellers used to drive the sales process. But now, the buyer journey starts long before the seller gets involved.
Tania sees this every day at SkinCeuticals, a dermatological division of L’Oreal that provides advanced skincare products. The company’s B2B buyers come to sales meetings knowing the market, the products, and even the competition. They don’t want generic information. They want clarity, efficiency, and for sellers to meet them where they are.
This shift inspired SkinCeuticals to change how they deliver value. When buyers expect instant access to product visuals, clinical data, and promotional details, providing a disjointed or delayed experience won’t cut it.
That’s where DSRs come in. With Highspot’s Digital Sales Rooms, SkinCeuticals creates a personalised, centralised space that makes it easier for prospects to buy. Conversations are smoother, delays fewer, and deals faster.
Don’t just share files—shape the deal.
Many teams still treat Digital Sales Rooms simply as a place to upload documents. But they’re so much more. In fact, Rick calls DSRs one of the best mid-to-late-stage tools in the funnel.
A well-used DSR becomes a dynamic workspace that helps sellers deliver the right content, track buyer activity, and work directly with decision-makers. When paired with AI, DSRs become even more powerful, helping teams identify what’s landing, what’s stalling, and what to do next.
One of the biggest benefits is visibility. Every click, every view, every moment spent on a piece of content helps paint a clearer picture of buyer intent. Your sellers no longer have to guess who’s interested or which materials are working. They can see it.
Tania’s SkinCeuticals team uses pitch engagement data to prioritise outreach and refine messaging. Instead of chasing every deal equally, the team saves time and gets better results by focusing on where interest is highest.
DSRs also keep buyers engaged. Instead of disappearing for weeks and resurfacing later, buyers stay connected in your workspace. They can comment on content, revisit materials, and even co-create solutions alongside your team. That collaboration pays off. Buyers who help shape the solution are more invested, and more likely to move forward.
But here’s the catch: none of that matters without seller adoption. And sellers resist adopting anything that doesn’t clearly make their job easier.
SkinCeuticals avoided this pitfall by giving reps hands-on access to DSRs before rollout and demonstrating value instead of just talking about it. That small shift made a big impact. Sellers quickly realised they could stop digging through shared drives, sending piecemeal emails, and recreating decks from scratch.
Today, more than 80% of SkinCeuticals’ field team uses DSRs as part of their regular sales process. The company didn’t force adoption. It just showed sellers why it made sense.
What’s coming next for AI and sales
With AI and DSRs already transforming how teams sell, it’s worth asking what’s coming next and what will soon become the norm.
Rick predicts AI-powered sales assistants will become industry standard. These tools prep sellers for meetings, summarise buyer activity, and suggest next steps based on live deal data.
Tania sees even more potential inside DSRs. She imagines a future where AI helps reps recommend content, spot missing materials, and personalise rooms based on buyer preferences.
Top-performing teams aren’t waiting for AI to evolve. They’re prioritising problems, investing in training, and building habits that support those changes. If you’re not adopting, deploying, and using AI, you’re already behind. But it’s not too late to start.
Where to go from here
Today’s sales and enablement leaders are at a turning point. Buyers are moving faster. Expectations are higher. And AI-powered DSRs give you the tools to keep up and get ahead.
See how SkinCeuticals and Highspot are modernising the buyer experience with Digital Sales Rooms. Watch the full webinar on demand.
