Guided selling

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Guided Selling is a concept that enhances the sales process of customer specific products and services. Guided Selling enables organizations in an automated fashion to analyze customer needs, determine the proper features, products and services and to translate the result into a fitting proposal for the customer.

[edit] What does Guided Selling do exactly?

Guided Selling simplifies and automates the maintenance and deployment of all company knowledge and information that is required to effectively analyze customer needs, define the right solution and generate a proper and relevant proposal. A functional definition of the solution is provided to the customer, complete with commercial aspects of the proposal, such as prices, margins, texts, illustrations, lay-outs etc. In addition, the technical specification of the solution (such as bills of materials and routings) is generated for manufacturing and distribution.

[edit] How does Guided Selling work?

Guided Selling is put in practice by means of an information system that supports the central management and maintenance of company knowledge and that supports the use of this knowledge by customers, dealers or sales representatives. Such company knowledge is stored in models, which are published to users by means of interactive questionnaires. The knowledge stored is related to functional, commercial and technical aspects of the customer needs and the solution. The proposal specific functions of Guided Selling are product configuration, technical calculations, commercial calculations and document generation.

[edit] What are the benefits of Guided Selling?

Guided Selling ensures a simpler, better, more efficient, error free and faster sales process. Since customers, dealers and sales representatives have direct access to all relevant knowledge and information, the dependence on others, such as technical specialists, is reduced. Sales representatives using Guided Selling techniques or systems require less specific sales or product knowledge. Guided Selling greatly reduces errors and provides consistency in needs analysis, solution definition and proposal generation. Company knowledge is applied in a better and more consistent way. Quotations are made with less effort, in less time and at lower costs. Success rates of quotations increase due to higher quality quotations including propositions that better match customer needs at prices that are calculated more precisely.