Why Guided Selling increases the performance of your sales teams and your dealers
The idea behind the job of a sales representative is simple: help your customer find the best solution that fits their needs. However this task is a lot harder in a B2B environment in which companies are often struggling to explain complex products. This is where guided selling comes into play, a powerful strategy to regain control over your solution offering.
The concept of guided selling has been around for a very long time. It describes the process of guiding a customer through the selection to find the right solution, managed by a sales representative asking a set of (predetermined) questions. This idea is fairly simple to implement in real-life shopping experiences, but the online equivalents often seem to lack a proper guided selling strategy. The same way a customer shouldn’t be left alone lost and confused in the store, an online guided selling approach should help customers to find and purchase the optimal solution for their needs.
This will have significant benefits for both sides. On the one hand, sellers will no longer feel the pressuring need to hire the most experienced and expensive sales reps. A junior profile will be able to come closer to the performances of experienced sales representatives, using an elaborate tool that helps them in every step of the way for the process. The sales teams will require less training too, and will be able to reduce mistakes. This allows sellers to cut costs considerably.
On the other hand, customers are experiencing a much more smooth and pleasant buying process. Guided selling will lead even a layman to the fitting product in an easy way, but will also let him navigate through and explore the entire product range, increasing awareness and product knowledge. A good platform is completely dummy-proof: anyone can find a needle in a haystack when guided selling is well executed. However, it is important to keep in mind that a long, elaborate list of complex questions will bore your customers away. Therefore we highly recommend using product visualization, to keep the buying process interesting for customers. This is a rather unique, but very effective approach to guided selling.
In HiveCPQ, we have embedded an elaborate guided selling mechanism. Predetermined questions are presented in a clear overview, and our product store is equipped with a large selection of filters, helping customers navigate to the optimal product. An atypical guided selling feature in Hive is detailed 3D visualization of products. This reduces any mistakes or misunderstandings and keeps customers enthusiastic. On top of that, we have installed a unique spare parts system that allows users to find the correct spare parts in a matter of seconds based on serial numbers and interactive product visualizations. HiveCPQ is therefore a powerful platform for guided selling.
Research from McKinsey (2018) has shown that guided selling throughout the online platform can significantly increase the revenue. This does not come as a surprise, considering it improves the customer experience and allows customers to browse easily through the entire product range, while simultaneously improving the performance of sales teams. Spend less time trying to find the right product, and more time selling it!
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