Quoting B2B products, especially those that are complex and highly customized, has traditionally required extensive manual efforts, including the collection of customer requirements, internal expertise, and cross-departmental collaboration to reach a final quote for purchase.
But traditional B2B quoting is rife with inefficiencies. There are a variety speed bumps in the selling process that delay the time between first contact and the final quote including:
- Tedious, manual data collection and input
- Slowdowns due to a lack of seller expertise or buyer product knowledge, requiring communication with product experts
- An inability to filter for best-fit solutions in a product catalog
Delays in the selling process and lengthy quoting processes prevent sales teams from actually selling. It puts an unnecessary burden on the seller to do administrative work, when technology could be doing more of that work for them.
In the past several years, AI has been applied to many enterprise selling tools to reduce the inefficiencies of manual processes, but very few advancements have been made in the realm of CPQ and quoting.
Until now.
How AI Can Boost Quoting Efficiency
Why should a sales rep start with a blank slate every time they quote? You have hundreds, or thousands, or millions of quotes that you’ve created for your products. In short, you have the data to make predictive quoting possible.
If your data shows patterns in the selections that your sales reps or customers make when quoting, AI and Machine Learning can inject that data, and provide intelligent predictions that help save your sales reps steps when going through the product configuration process of quoting.
Adding AI to your product configurator helps to remove friction from the selling process, allowing your sales teams to focus on the parts of the job that require human intervention, creativity, or connection.
While other CPQ players have moved slowly on incorporating AI into this experience, Logik.io has already begun investing in AI for both configuration administrators and sales end users to ensure that our customer’s offer the best possible selling experience.
Our AI can anticipate inputs based on initial selections, provide embedded guidance, and speed up the time to market for new product offerings, improving overall sales efficiency and customer experience.
Discover Cosmo SmartPredict
Cosmo SmartPredict is the first sales and eCommerce customer facing AI offering from Logik.io in the Cosmo AI suite of functionality. Cosmo SmartPredict analyzes historical configuration and order data and uses machine learning and AI to determine and recommend options to an end-user as they are making selections in the configuration experience. With the help of Logik.io’s Cosmo AI capabilities, sales teams can pair their own expertise and nuanced product knowledge with AI-powered product recommendations to ensure the best possible experiences and outcomes for customers.
How Cosmo SmartPredict Works
1. User Makes Selections in Configuration Experience
A sales rep, dealer, eCommerce customer, or distributor will begin to make selections in their configuration experience.
When Cosmo AI recognizes that recommendations are available, an icon appears next to the fields where recommendations are available.
When a user clicks the icon, relevant product configuration suggestions are shown in three columns: good, better, and best.
Field values auto-populate when a Cosmo SmartPredict recommendation is selected.
The rules engine will validate the inputs from Cosmo SmartPredict to ensure validity and the end user can change the fields to better suit their needs at any time.
How Can Cosmo SmartPredict Benefit You?
Provide Embedded Expertise
Sales professionals, partners, and eCommerce customers alike benefit from guided selling embedded in the configuration experience. Cosmo SmartPredict is like having your best product expert analyzing the initial data input and taking over the configuration experience to ensure accuracy, compatibility, and confidence on every single order.
Ensure Customer Satisfaction
Cosmo SmartPredict’s proprietary machine learning and AI technology use your saved configurations to go beyond general suggestions to make granular and relevant suggestions for field values. The accuracy and granularity of Cosmo SmartPredict will prevent mistakes in orders and increase customer satisfaction with perfect fit solutions.
Speed Up Time to Configure and Quote
With Cosmo SmartPredict, you can decrease the time your customers have to wait to see their custom-configured solution. Cosmo SmartPredict auto-fills in the object fields to speed up the overall time to configure and quote to ensure your team can handle more orders in a week and customers are getting what they need in a timely manner.
Benefit to Admins:
Cosmo AI will ingest the previous sales data you provide for the fields of your choice and make appropriate suggestions without the need for declarative rule writing. Cosmo SmartPredict’s machine learning capabilities require only point and click administration to provide better suggestions for user selections.
Benefits to End Users:
Cosmo SmartPredict analyzes initial user selections and provides good, better, best options for configuration based on previous purchase data to speed up the time to complete configuration and help end users make informed selling and buying decisions.
Learn more about Cosmo SmartPredict and how Logik.io’s purpose-built AI offerings can support your selling processes today.
