Tapping Into the Potential of Guided Selling

Having progressed from navigating product catalogs and suggesting potential combinations of products to expert-level knowledge sharing systems, guided selling is going through a transformation.  The description so commonly associated with guided selling of taking the knowledge of your best salesperson and putting it online for use 24/7 still holds true.  Yet today guided selling is delivering more than that.

Having progressed to being the catalyst of knowledge sharing networks, as discussed briefly in the blog post, Creating a Knowledge Network Using Product Configuration: Lessons Learned From Toyota, guided selling holds the potential of delivering valuable insights into bundling and upsell strategies today.

Re-thinking Guided Selling

The paper Pricing Promotional Products under Upselling by Goker Aydin and Serhan Ziya makes some excellent points about how guided selling can be used as the foundation for dynamic pricing, cross-selling and up-selling.  Looking at the conclusions of this paper also underscores the following take-aways about the transformation of guided selling:

• Using guided selling systems to create knowledge sharing networks delivers high ROI. Get away from thinking of guided selling as a means to sell on price, availability or as a means to navigate product catalogs only.  Instead, challenge your organization to see them as a means to share knowledge across your distribution channel, encompassing resellers, retailers, and system integrators.

• Get away from guided selling as a sales blow-out strategy on commoditized products. Too often guided selling gets relegated to being used for products that have only price and availability as their only differentiators. This is a huge mistake and robs companies of the potential revenue gains from using guided selling for educating their channel partners, creating more thorough new product introduction strategies and in general enriching their channel partners and customers.

• Realize your company is competing with its knowledge not its production processes. It’s true, your company and every company competes not so much with its production, or its service, but the knowledge behind production and service that makes these processes unique.  Knowledge freely shared in and outside your company also makes it stronger, more cohesive, and more capable of withstanding economic stress and uncertainty.

• You can find the voice of your customers captured in your guided selling systems’ many online sessions. There is an emerging best practice that is quite frankly fascinating.  There are those forward-thinking companies including several high tech distributors, manufacturers and software companies who store the traffic from their guided selling systems to determine where distributors, dealers, channel partners, and most importantly, customers ran into a dead end when it came to navigating to what they were looking for or attempting to gain information on.  Data mining and unstructured data analysis are being used to ascertain what is missing in these guided selling systems.  The melding of social media monitoring tools that including latent semantic indexing modeling techniques and the capture of data from guided selling systems is yielding some fascinating data, as one hotel chain is finding.

• Integrating Guided Selling systems into Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO). The use of catalog management and guided selling goes back nearly a decade or more, yet the ability to bring object-level intelligence into catalogs and then have guided selling systems and their logic search for price, availability and location of the part and then order it is still not a common practice in MRO workflows. Imagine being able to have reseller technicians be able to order spare parts from a PDA showing the catalog, navigated through the use of a guided selling system that is integrated to online ordering?  Forward-thinking companies are doing this today and significantly dropping Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) their products in the field.

Bottom line: Guided selling systems have progressed far beyond being the blow-out sales channel for commoditized products and are the catalyst of entirely new approaches to creating knowledge sharing networks.

Courtesy – Louis Columbus