Using Guided Selling for Products and Services
04.07.2022
-5 min
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Kevin Craine
04.07.2022
-5 min
Sales teams have always needed to be agile, but today the pressure is on. Teams are faced with a massive shift to remote selling, digital experiences, and virtual onboarding. The old ways of selling with phone calls, spreadsheets, and email follow-ups are no longer adequate as the capability for real-time response is essential to compete. To stay ahead of the curve, sellers must find ways to adjust to these evolving buyers’ expectations or risk being left behind.
The need for improved agility and response was made more pressing during the COVID pandemic and continues to be the number one sales challenge. Sellers across all industries have been forced to adapt much faster than expected. In-person meetings and demonstrations have all but disappeared and sales leaders have been pressed to quickly reskill their reps; all while learning to manage their teams, and their customers, remotely.
Sales teams have always needed to be agile, but today the pressure is on.
What is Guided Selling?
How can you adapt and sell more? One way is by using a guided selling strategy. Guided selling is a software-driven process that is designed to help reps navigate and respond more quickly in an increasingly complex and high-paced sales environment and increase their conversion rates.
Guided selling is quickly becoming table stakes for any sales team. According to Gartner, 51% of sales organizations have already deployed guided selling – or plan to do so soon. Furthermore, Gartner predicts that 75% of B2B sales organizations will augment traditional sales playbooks with guided selling solutions by 2025. Will you be outmaneuvered by your more agile competition?
How Does It Work?
Guided selling is similar to the recommendation engines you’ll see on platforms like Amazon or Netflix, which use historical data, demographic information, behaviors, and other insights to recommend products or content. Now, extend that same approach to internal sales teams who now use software designed to guide sellers through the entire sales cycle, enabling reps to consistently close deals faster and with fewer missteps.
By actively guiding sales teams during their interactions with customers and recommending the best content, actions, and pricing configurations for any given sales situation, team success soars. Companies that have embraced the techniques, on average, have a 9% increase in revenue creation and a 26% increase in profitability. Organizations across the business spectrum, including e-commerce, brick-and-mortar business, manufacturing, and much more all benefit. The technology equips sellers with specific information during the sales process that enables them to work faster, effectively engage buyers, and close more deals more quickly. This reduces the time and effort required and substantially grows conversion rates.
Sales reps juggle a long list of tasks -- from prospecting and lead nurturing to cold outreach and social selling -- and they need all the help they can get. Guided selling software automates playbooks to support consistent sales performance and make it easy for sellers to follow along with the plan and reliably move deals forward. The real-time response is adaptive and dynamic and cuts hours and days off of deals. All that adds up to higher revenue velocity and can be the difference between winning the deal and being outmatched by your competitors.
How can you begin to take advantage of guided selling? One solution to consider is XaitCPQ, innovative and intuitive software that captures all of your complex product, pricing, and business rules in one central place for automating and streamlining actions in real-time. You can quickly and accurately price combinations of interdependent products and services.
XaitCPQ allows you to win more deals at better margins by making it easy to correctly build and price combinations of products and services, and to do so at scale. It’s a perfect solution for sellers in a variety of industries, especially those in fields like manufacturing, energy, renewables, and high-tech.
XaitCPQ actively guides sales teams during their interactions with customers by recommending the best content, actions, and pricing configurations for any given sales situation.
Moving Forward
The time has come to adopt a guided selling approach. Tools like XaitCPQ help to dramatically boost your sales success. You’ll have a more robust and responsive process that increases the chance of making the sale, landing it ahead of the competition, and closing the deal with higher revenue than ever before.
Related articles: How the Right Tools Create Sales Enablement
Kevin Craine
Kevin Craine is a writer, technology analyst, and an award-winning podcast producer. He is the host of "The Xait Factor" podcast and has listeners and readers worldwide. He was named the #1 Enterprise Content Management Influencer to follow on Twitter.