According to Gartner’s Current and Emerging Technologies in Sales report, about half (51%) of sales organizations today plan to deploy, or have already deployed guided selling for the next five years. But what is guided selling, and how does it work?
Guided selling gives sales reps and buyers a clear path to a highly complex sales ecosystem. It guides them along a step-by-step path to purchase, giving intelligent recommendations throughout.
As we’ll see, guided selling can be used in different industries and various selling scenarios. This article focuses on guided selling for B2B companies dealing in engineer to order product solutions. Read on to find out how to harness guided selling technology to get more B2B buyers to “yes” more quickly.
Guided Selling
Guided Selling
The concept of guided selling is not a new one. It’s a process that salespeople have traditionally used to understand their customers’ needs and match them with optimal products and services.
Guided selling systems work by guiding the customers step-by-step through a series of decisions that come together as an informed purchase decision. Customers are asked a succession of targeted questions about their preferences and opinions regarding the purchase at hand. And their answers reveal increasingly granular information about their product requirements.
Guided selling technology is very valuable for B2B and B2C, but it’s most beneficial to companies that se ll complex products where many technical choices need to be made. It completes the role of a knowledgeable, seasoned salesperson – an increasingly rare commodity in the world today.
How Does it Work?
While the concept is always the same – guiding the buyers to an optimized product selection from massive catalogs – the best practices for guided selling vary as per the selling scenario.
With in-person sales, the salesperson asks the customer a series of structured questions designed to elicit critical information about what they want to buy. As the salesperson enters the answers into the guided selling system, it narrows down available choices and configures the most appropriate product.
In low- and no-touch sales models, such as B2B eCommerce, the guided selling process must be automated. Guided selling technology offers customers a series of product choices and leads them step-by-step through the selection and configuration process via automated product recommendations.
The path through these choices can be based on simple algorithms, where choice A always leads to product B, and so forth. But more advanced guided selling systems employ artificial intelligence (AI) technology to provide more accurate product suggestions.
AI-Based Guided Selling
AI-guided selling is very sophisticated and leads to higher conversion rates and higher ticket values.
This system makes the use of natural language processing (NLP) (here’s a good introduction) and machine learning to analyze historical sales and customer data. This data analysis allows the system to make highly accurate predictions of customer behavior in situations and then offer recommendations to help the sales staff close more sales.
You can think of it as a combination of four key stages, which are broken down by Gartner below:
- Customer engagement, where a system detects initial customer interest
- Customer verifiers, where it collects the signals from customers
- Correlations and benchmarks, where buying signals are linked with all the dependent variables
- Next best actions, where the system generates this data and turns it into prescriptive selling suggestions
Effectiveness of Guided Selling in B2B Sales
B2B companies have a huge amount of data about their products, customers, and sales. But they lack the tools to get the most valuable data-driven insights. Guided selling solutions help in realizing this hidden value. And it’s a win-win for both sellers and buyers.
Benefits for B2B Sellers
By building analyses and recommendations from existing data sets, AI-based guided selling has the following benefits for B2B sellers:
- Solves sales challenges
- Reduces sales complexity
- Boosts the process efficiency
- Boosts upselling and cross-selling
- Helps new sales reps get up to speed more quickly
- Allows sales reps to adapt quickly to change
- Reduces rogue pricing
- Provides clearer understanding of consumer needs and behavior
- Better visibility of data for both- reps and sales managers
- Offers real-time guidance
Benefits for B2B Buyers
Guided selling benefits B2B buyers, as well, in that it:
- Gives more intelligent product recommendations
- Reduces the ordering mistakes
- Greatly reduces sales cycles
- Allows sales reps to become advisors
- Boosts customer satisfaction
Guided Selling for B2B eCommerce
According to Sana’s B2B Buying Process Report, about 75% of B2B purchases are made online – and buyers look to move to B2B eCommerce. They want to self-serve, regardless of product complexity and price.
For those self-service online B2B buyers, then, guided selling is important. Without a trained sales rep, they need all the guidance and advice needed from the website itself, which is where guided selling comes to the fore.
Some AI-based guided selling solutions lead online buyers through a series of calibrated questions and subsequent options that narrow down huge product catalogs in perfect customer-specific selections.
Others use visual product configurators. Rather than answer questions, buyers interact with a 3D visual representation of product options and assemble products visually per advanced product and pricing rules. Buyers get to see a lifelike product rendering before they click the Buy button, which increases their confidence in the process.
When done properly, guided selling is smart and seamless. It lightens the load on your in-person sales teams and provides valuable customer feedback for B2B sales management.
Guided Selling in CPQ
Guided selling is an essential component of every robust CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solution. It is the core of KBMax Epicor e-commerce CPQ, designed to help sales reps and buyers configure complex, engineer-to-order products.
With KBMax, manufacturers start with the programming of a product series and pricing rules into the software’s back end. It sounds tough, but it’s not. Even non-technical users get to build the most advanced rules with the Snap rules engine – there’s no coding needed.
For online sellers, product rules guide the eCommerce sales process as well. Manufacturers embed a 3D visual product configurator into their website that allows buyers to configure highly complex products without any help from sales or engineering. KBMax holds their hand the entire way while maintaining the illusion of total freedom of choice and flexibility for the buyer.
Once the guided selling process is complete, the CPQ system calculates dynamic pricing and generates price quotes. Sales reps no longer have to use product pricing formulas in Excel spreadsheets; instead, everything is completely automated
Contact KBMax today and learn more about how guided selling helps your business sell more and better.
