Why Your Deal Room Setup Time Is a Buying Signal

A recent G2 review of a competing digital sales room describes a first-week experience worth reading closely, because it’s a buying-cycle cost dressed up as an onboarding annoyance:

“It’s extremely slow to update pods if you have a lot of widgets, which is extremely annoying. Setting up custom widgets gets really difficult if you don’t have a design mind or understanding of how to set it up correctly, making the lag even more frustrating. For me, the initial setup was extremely frustrating because it took a long time to load everything, which could be due to large, image-heavy templates. It took about an hour and a half to set up my first pod, and that was very frustrating.” (Verified User, Mid-Market, G2 review, 8/21/2026)

Ninety minutes to configure a single pod is not an edge case worth dismissing. It’s the first real signal a buyer gets about how the tool actually behaves once the sales call ends and someone on the team has to make it work.

Why does setup time matter at all?

A deal room’s whole value depends on it existing before the moment it’s needed: a proposal has to be live before the follow-up call, a case study has to be in the room before the buyer’s second stakeholder joins. A setup process measured in hours, not minutes, competes directly against that timeline. Every extra step between “I want to send this” and “the room is ready” is a chance for the rep to default back to attaching a PDF instead, which defeats the point of having a deal room at all.

This is a cost that compounds, too. The first room a rep builds sets their expectation for every room after it. If pod one takes ninety minutes because the templates are heavy and the widget layout isn’t intuitive, room two and room three don’t get faster just because the rep has done it once. A tool that’s slow to configure on day one usually stays slow to configure on day thirty, because the friction lives in the tool’s own design, not in the rep’s unfamiliarity with it.

There’s a second cost hiding in the same review, easy to miss on a first read: “if you don’t have a design mind.” That’s a complaint about the skill a rep needs to configure the tool at all, not about time. Widget layout, image sizing, template structure, these are design tasks, and most AEs and SDRs were hired to run a sales process, not to lay out a page. A setup flow that assumes design competence quietly narrows who on a team can actually build a room well, which means the burden either falls on whichever rep happens to have an eye for layout, or on a manager, or on marketing, none of whom have time to be the deal room’s unofficial design department.

Multiply that across a team instead of one rep. A five-person sales team where every new room takes ninety minutes and requires layout judgment isn’t losing ninety minutes once, it’s losing that cost every time a rep opens a new deal, for as long as the team uses the tool. A setup problem that looks like a one-time onboarding tax in a demo turns into a standing operational cost once real reps are building real rooms under real time pressure, week after week.

What does a slow setup actually cost you?

Picture an AE with a call in twenty minutes and a request from the prospect for a proposal, a pricing breakdown, and a case study, all in one place. If building that room means dragging in widgets one at a time, waiting for image-heavy templates to load, and fighting a layout that “gets really difficult if you don’t have a design mind,” as one reviewer put it, the AE has two options: burn the twenty minutes on setup, or skip the room and send three separate attachments instead. Most reps, most of the time, will pick the attachments. The deal room that was supposed to replace the scattered-email problem quietly becomes the thing that gets bypassed under time pressure, which is exactly the scenario it was bought to prevent.

What should you actually ask a vendor about setup?

Three questions surface the real cost before you’ve committed to a contract:

• How many steps does it take to create a room from nothing? Not “how many features exist,” how many discrete actions a rep has to take before the room is shareable.

• Does setup get faster the second time, or does every room start from the same friction? A tool that requires manually configuring widgets or pods each time doesn’t get meaningfully faster with repetition; a tool with a small, fixed number of steps does.

• What happens when a call is in twenty minutes? Ask to watch someone build a room live, on the spot, not in a pre-recorded demo. That’s the honest test of whether setup time is a real cost or a footnote.

How does Projetly handle this?

Projetly’s Deal Room is created through a manual, 2-step flow. That’s a structural fact about how many discrete actions stand between “nothing” and “a shareable room,” not a timed speed claim; no vendor’s setup time, including Projetly’s own, is something this post has wall-clock data to compare precisely. What it does mean is that setup isn’t a widget-by-widget assembly process the way the review above describes: there’s no separate configuration pass for pods, no per-widget layout step that depends on “having a design mind,” per the reviewer’s own words.

Worth being direct about a limit here too: Deal Room templates, the kind that would let a rep start from a pre-built layout for a specific deal type, are on Projetly’s roadmap but not live yet. The 2-step flow is what’s real today.

The argument here is for treating setup friction as a real evaluation criterion, the same way you’d evaluate any other part of a deal room, instead of assuming every vendor’s onboarding experience is roughly equivalent until you’re already a customer, not for a stopwatch contest with any one competitor.

See how a deal room that goes unused quietly costs you the deal too, or explore the full Deal Room.

Book a Projetly demo and watch a room get built live, or start a free trial.

FAQ

How long should it take to set up a digital sales room?

There’s no universal benchmark, but setup time is worth evaluating directly rather than assuming it’s roughly the same across vendors. A process that involves configuring individual widgets or pods one at a time tends to take meaningfully longer than a fixed, small number of steps, especially the first time a rep does it.

Why did one G2 reviewer say deal room setup took 90 minutes?

A reviewer of a competing digital sales room described spending about an hour and a half configuring a single pod, citing slow widget updates and large, image-heavy templates as the cause. It’s a useful reminder that setup friction is a real, documented buyer complaint, not a hypothetical concern.

How many steps does it take to create a Deal Room in Projetly?

Two. Deal Room creation is a manual, 2-step flow today. This is a structural fact about the process, not a timed comparison against any specific competitor’s setup time.

Does Projetly have deal room templates?

Not yet. Deal Room templates are on the roadmap but not live. Today’s 2-step creation flow doesn’t depend on a template library to be usable.