Showroom: Best Practices to Help You Engage, Educate, and Sell

Aug 8, 2018 | Jeff Tow

Showroom is the content destination that defines your brand, educates your buyers, and provides the materials reps need to make a successful sale. It gives your buyers a B2C experience inside a B2B platform.

But a tool is only as good as its content. Producing great content means using space effectively, creating compelling artwork, and understanding segmentation. This approach will take an average Showroom and make it spectacular.

Below are a few tips for making the best use of Showroom. Our advice comes from years of experience building many Showrooms since the feature was launched on our platform.

Plan

Use the space effectively

Showroom is made up of two parts: the featured view, and the dashboard view.

Featured view

This is the visual frontend to Showroom. It’s the main area used to drive reps and buyers to your featured content. Think of it as a customized microsite built with a very targeted audience in mind.

1. Showroom top space: Create arresting, compelling content right out of the gate to get your buyers’ attention.
2. Key products presentation: Showcase hero products, highlight featured technologies, display add-ons, upsells, and promotions that are relevant to your buyers.
3. Brand guide: Educate your buyers about who you are and why they should be carrying your products.
4. Quick links to catalogs: Funnel users to the the most relevant catalogs with minimal friction.
5. Video: Engage your buyers with compelling video content.
6. Products: Incorporate direct links to the highlighted products found in the key products presentation.

Dashboard view

Distribute files to your team on dashboards you define. This enable users to quickly access catalogs, presentations, products, and files.

1. Organize files by season: This makes it easy for buyers to quickly see all the products from the upcoming Spring collection, for example.
2. Set up categories within each dashboard: Buyers can easily sort depending on what they want to see (catalogs, videos, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.).
3. Use expiration dates on dashboards: This is a great way to keep your dashboard clean, because it automatically hides content when it’s no longer relevant.

Design

Create compelling artwork

Good design enhances interaction and helps draw the user in to engage with the content. It’s important to step back and look at your seasonal branding and make sure your Showroom maintains a similar look and feel. Cohesive design elements strengthen your overall brand message.

1. Work with your marketing/design department to get correctly sized art. This is key, because you don’t want oddly sized/stretched images within the layouts.
2. Optimize! While our system does some optimization when your image is uploaded, it’s best to upload web-optimized images. This speeds up download time, creating a better user experience.
3. Multiple languages? Yes! Showroom artwork can be uploaded to be language-specific. Now, text and art can be in sync.

Distribute

Understand segmentation

All of the planning and beautiful artwork in the world won’t mean anything if you can’t get the right products and information in front of the right people. Showroom allows you to have multiple featured views, each of which can be assigned to any user or group of users.

1. Use a different header image, maybe a customized one for each different buyer.
2. Add links to presentations that only apply to a certain group of users.
3. Create product groupings for different countries.

Summary

If your product isn’t on the shelf, a customer can’t buy it. Showroom surfaces more of your products, and highlights your hero products and technologies with engaging content.

It’s a powerful tool that can serve content in many ways. Our team is highly skilled in setting up, designing, and implementing both the featured and dashboard views of Showroom.

We can work side-by-side with your design team or work with you directly to create a powerful Showroom that will help accelerate the selling process and keep your products top-of-mind for your reps and buyers.

Get your season started off right. Plan, design, distribute.

Showroom: Exclusively on the Envoy platform.

Jeff Tow

| LinkedIn

Chief Design Officer

For over 23 years, Jeff has provided creative design solutions to a wide range of customers. That depth of knowledge is now focused on creating innovative content and designs that empower our footwear and apparel customers to showcase their product stories.