How to Build a Perfect Deal Room: Hands-on Guide

As difficult as it is to pick and buy new software, the adoption process poses a new challenge once the purchase is completed. No matter how intuitive the product is, there’s always some learning curve to go through. What’s more, even experienced users might not be using the software to its full potential.

That is why we created a three-step hands-on guide to help you get the most out of Flowla and create THE best interactive, personalized space for your potential customers. 

Whether you're new to Flowla or you are an experienced user, here are some tips and tricks to build a perfect deal room. Let’s dive right in!

Step 1: Laying the foundation

Let’s start with the foundation for dealing with your digital room. All your resources, action items, and stakeholders will be in one digital room, so make sure to lay a proper groundwork for it.

Start with a welcome

We all love a warm, personalized welcome, even though 54% of customers expected to have a personalized experience. With Flowla, we offer you two ways to greet the stakeholders entering your deal room:

• Add a short welcome note and your photo.
• Record a video. You can use a built-in video tool or embed recordings from any other tool you prefer (Loom, Sendspark, Gan.ai, and Videocom are just some of the many available integrations).

Set a branded background

The key is to increase brand awareness every step of the way, and one key ingredient is to add a personalized background that aligns with your brand identity. You can use solid or gradient colours, or even better, add pictures from your library or search from Unsplash directly. Selecting the one that reflects your target company's field of activity is even more impactful.

Assign a target company for personalization

Awareness of the target company is one thing; showing your awareness is another. Assigning a target company to your deal room will make it even more personalized. This personalized touch captures their attention and highlights your dedication to a tailored experience. When prospects see their branding in your flows, it enhances connection and builds trust.

Once you add your target company, our editor automatically brands your deal room with their logo, name, and colors. You can always make custom edits to change the logo to a different one (like the one used on their LinkedIn profile instead of their website).

Save time with reusable templates

You don’t need to do the same thing every single time. We offer you the Templates section that includes Flowla suggestions, where we generated some example templates or ones that include your perfect deal rooms. To add your flow to the templates, just click the save it as a template button — it’s that easy!

💡Pro tip: Use variables in your template names. When you assign a target company to a deal room, the company name will be automatically pulled from your database and populated in the title.

Step 2: Layer on the navigation and make it actionable

Once our foundation is ready, it is time to work on your deal room's navigation and functionality. This step focuses on making your deal room user-friendly and intuitive for your buyers. So, let’s dig into how to organize content inside a deal room.

Navigate using deep links

Deep links allow customers to jump straight to the related link without hassle. Adding hyperlinks, like this one about our digital sales rooms, creates a smoother experience for your customers, saves their time, and makes your content more engaging and easy to navigate.

💡Pro tip: Using deep links in the welcome stage or process timeline will create shortcuts and help customers reach more information.

💡Pro tip: Using deep links in the welcome stage or process timeline will create shortcuts and help customers reach more information.

Personalize using variables

Dynamic variables prevent you from manually inputting things every single time you deal room, making your deal room dynamic. Every time you assign a target company to a flow, its name will get populated automatically using variables.

💡 Pro tip: Create templates which include variables. Instead of titling your deal room Your company’s name <> Your target company’s name, use the variable target_company.name and watch it capture the name of your new target company in each room.

Use annotations for guidance

Annotations are perfect when you want to add more information to your flows but don’t want it to stand out and take over an entire stage. You can add these comments in your deal room section and provide clarity, valuable insights, and notes. And while you are doing that, you won’t disturb your customers since they can easily toggle the annotations on or off.

How do you use Mutual Action Plans inside a deal room? 

1. Add timelines and objectives

You should gather everyone on the same page to discuss the next steps and the roadmap. You cannot be on a road trip where everyone is debating the next destination, right? Your customers should see their path clearly and be confident about what comes next and when. Hence, you should specify the timeline and objectives to create transparency and alignment in your process.

💡 Pro tip: You can create charts within Flowla to capture the timelines and objectives by adding dates or deep links to steps corresponding to key phases in your process.

💡 Pro tip: Flowla offers Mutual Action Plans to help with the timelines and objectives step. By breaking down your process into stages, defining the actions, adding resources, and getting everyone on the same page, you will turn your entire deal room into a collaborative workspace.

2. Assign actions

We told you we are helping you create a collaborative environment, so it wouldn’t be possible without actions. Add and assign actions to your deal room to clarify tasks by defining assignees, responsibilities, and timelines. Actions ensure that all stakeholders are working towards the same goal. So, here are some types of actions you can add:

• Go to URL: Direct your room viewer to a specific web page with a single click.
• Watch video: Embed a video your room viewer must watch to complete the action.
• View document: Share a document for your room viewer to review.
• Download a file: Your room viewer is required to download a file to complete the action.
• Fill out a form: Collect crucial information by having your room viewer complete and submit a form.
• Book a meeting: Seamlessly integrate your calendar, prompting your room viewer to schedule a meeting.
• Sign a document: Leverage Flowla’s built-in signature feature to request document signing exclusive to Team Plan users.
• Invite contacts: Encourage your room viewer to add key contacts to the room by entering their email addresses.

💡 Pro tip: We also send notifications on your behalf to the assignees when an action is assigned and on the due date to remind them that it needs to be completed.

Step 3: Use advanced features and security settings

Now, let’s explore your deal room's advanced features and improved security as the third essential step for creating a perfect deal room. These tips will help you increase the functionality of your deal room and be well-organized.

How do you know who’s viewing your sales materials?

In the world of decision-making, information is power. To stay ahead, you need to know exactly who is engaging with your deal rooms. That’s where the email gate comes in. 

By enabling the email gate, you gain invaluable insights into your room viewers, helping you identify key stakeholders and make informed decisions. So there will be no anonymous people surfing in your deal room.

When you enable the email gate, at the beginning of the deal room, the first-time viewers will be asked where their email is requested. As a deal room creator, you can have an email database from that deal room with additional information such as their engagement time, last seen, steps seen, time spent, rating, and number of sessions.

Can you password-protect a deal room?

Sometimes, you can add important and secret information to your deal room and want only the relevant people to see it, so you want an extra layer of security. You can easily enable password protection by opening the settings and determining the password. As the last step, don’t forget to share the password with your stakeholders.

How do you know who’s viewing your sales materials?

When you use a template with all steps or want to create all steps simultaneously but don’t want your customers to see all those steps, we've got you covered. Flowla has visibility settings that allow it to lock or hide stages or give restricted access for some or whole stages in your deal room:

• Lock stages: Keep stages visible by name but prevent deal room viewers from accessing the content. This is perfect for hinting at what's next in the process without revealing everything too soon.
• Hide stages: Completely hide specific stages from deal room viewers until you're ready to reveal them.
• Restricted access: You can control who sees specific stages by limiting access to certain individuals. Add their email addresses, and only those users can view that stage.

💡Pro Tip: You can automate stage visibility, making stages available only after all actions in a previous stage are completed. This ensures a smooth, step-by-step process for your customers.

Use relative due dates when timelines shift

We all experienced that our priorities shifted, and what started as set in stone changed in the meantime. We understand you, so we have added relative due dates to the deal room so you can easily tie a due date to specific conditions in your process.

Add Gantt charts for a big-picture view

When we are planning something, whether it is an onboarding process or a product release, seeing the process and to-dos as a big picture helps us. So, here is our favorite: the Gantt Chart. You can add a Gantt Chart view to see the long-term process and ensure both you and your customers have a comprehensive overview of the entire journey.

💡 Pro tip: Completed actions get marked in green inside the Gantt Chart. Whenever you need a quick snapshot of where you are and what’s next in the process, look at the Gantt Chart. For a closer look, double-click on any action to just go straight to the corresponding step in the deal room.

Make data-driven decisions with reports

Make data-driven decisions with detailed insights about your process. Flowla offers revenue intelligence, including information such as the most active deal rooms, involved stakeholders, how much time your viewers spent, which steps captured their attention, and potential opportunities or bottlenecks for improvement.

💡 Pro tip: From Share Settings, enable the Toggle called Require viewer's email so that Flowla can identify each room viewer.

Step 4: Set your Digital Sales Room into motion

If setting all this up sounds like a lot of manual work, here’s the good news: With Flowla 2.0, you can automate most of it and focus on what actually moves the deal forward.

How do you automate a Digital Sales Room?

With the introduction of Flowla 2.0, your digital sales room evolves into a dynamic, AI-powered workflow engine. It automates repetitive tasks, ensuring your deals progress smoothly from initial contact through onboarding and beyond.

Instead of chasing follow-ups or duplicating work in your CRM, Flowla now automatically creates branded deal rooms, sends timely emails from your connected Gmail account, assigns and reminds stakeholders about tasks in mutual action plans, and syncs everything back to your CRM in real time. This frees up your team to focus on higher-value conversations while keeping your buyers engaged with smart, timely nudges.

Plus, with enhanced revenue intelligence, you’ll gain visibility into every client interaction — what’s been viewed, what’s been completed, and where deals are stalling — so you can continuously optimize your strategy and close more deals, faster.

Before you go: Essential FAQs on Digital Sales Rooms & Flowla

1. What should I include in a Digital Sales Room?

A good DSR includes a welcome message, key resources, timelines, action items, a Mutual Action Plan, and a clear path for next steps. Flowla provides all of these building blocks natively so you can structure your room in a buyer-friendly way.

2. How do I personalize a Digital Sales Room?

Use the buyer’s branding, logo, colors, company name, and relevant content. Flowla does this automatically when you assign a target company — the room is instantly themed to their brand.

3. How do I keep buyers engaged in a deal room?

Use clear actions (watch, review, sign, submit), add timelines, embed video intros, and enable engagement signals. Flowla tracks who viewed what and sends automatic nudges when activity drops.

4. What is the easiest Digital Sales Room to set up?

The easiest DSRs to set up are the ones that build most of the structure for you. Flowla is designed to be extremely simple: choose a template, assign a target company, and the room instantly personalizes itself with the right branding. You can then drag in content, add actions, and insert a Mutual Action Plan in just a few clicks. It’s built for teams that want to get a professional, high-performing deal room live quickly.

5. What makes Flowla different from other Digital Sales Room tools?

Flowla combines personalization, MAPs, automation, analytics, and CRM sync in one place. It handles both sales and onboarding, making it a unified workflow layer rather than just a content hub. For more information, see the detailed comparison of 15 top DSR tools and how Flowla compares.

Build your perfect deal room with Flowla

Creating an effective deal room is key to driving better collaboration and moving deals forward. With Flowla, setting up those essential deal rooms can be straightforward, but we also know that getting started with new tools can sometimes feel overwhelming.

To help, we offer personal workshops where we guide you through each step of setting up your deal rooms. Our goal is to ensure you're comfortable with the process and equipped to make the most out of the platform. In the early stages of adoption, we'll be there to provide support and help you get things running smoothly.

Are you ready to take your sales and onboarding process to the next level? Get started with Flowla today, or book a demo for further support and guidance.