Using Guided Selling for Products and Services

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.

Today’s Tools Boost Sales Results

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.

A Solution to Set the Pace

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.

The Benefits of Guided Selling

• Real-time response - Imagine a situation where a prospect mentions that their company has specific technical requirements. Who is more likely to keep the deal on track—the rep that has industry-specific content immediately at their fingertips, or the rep that promises to look into the options and get back to you? That’s just an open invitation for the customer to go somewhere else.

• Visibility into the pipeline – Making the most of your pipeline is essential. With XaitCPQ sales teams can see the next steps scheduled for each active deal, the estimated close date based on deal progress, and the time and effort they’ve invested thus far. This allows managers to quickly size up pipeline status, understand and act on opportunities, and ultimately identify what’s working – or not – in your current sales process.
• Integration with your CRM system – Integration is key to providing a complete picture of everything that could potentially impact a deal. By syncing sales communications, equipment and services configurations, pricing, and ongoing engagement analytics, sellers know immediately what is most effective at each stage. Recommended next steps save sellers time and boost sales results.

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.

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