Guided selling is a powerful tool designed to streamline the sales process by providing intuitive and dynamic product configurations. Logik.io's Guided Selling for CPQ integrates with Salesforce CPQ, offering a flexible, AI-driven solution that ensures fast and accurate product setups. This tool simplifies complex product configurations with a user-friendly interface, improving sales productivity and customer satisfaction.

Guided selling is a sales strategy that leverages advanced algorithms and intuitive interfaces to assist customers and sales teams in selecting the right products. It transforms the traditional sales approach by providing dynamic, real-time recommendations based on customer needs and preferences.

Key Components of Guided Selling

1. Algorithm-Driven Recommendations: Guided selling software uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze customer inputs and provide tailored product recommendations. These algorithms consider various factors such as customer preferences, past purchase behavior, and current trends to deliver the most relevant options.

2. Interactive User Interface: A crucial aspect of guided selling is its user-friendly interface. This interface guides users step-by-step through the product selection process, making it easy to understand and navigate complex product configurations. It often includes visual aids and prompts to help users make informed decisions.

3. Personalization: Personalization is at the heart of guided selling. By leveraging data from various sources, guided selling tools create a personalized shopping experience. This ensures that each customer receives product recommendations that are specifically tailored to their unique needs and preferences.

4. Real-Time Adjustments: Guided selling systems can adjust recommendations in real-time based on user interactions. As customers provide more information or modify their requirements, the system dynamically updates the product suggestions to reflect these changes, ensuring the most accurate and relevant options are always presented.

Let's take a look at some examples.

We've seen how car companies use guided selling for eCommerce. Now let's take a look at guided selling examples from the other side of the equation – sales reps. Often, it isn't the end users who need to be able to build and configure products on their own. The effectiveness of a sales team is heavily dependent on each representative’s ability to quickly configure, price, and quote company products for their buyers. Of course, this is such an important part of the job that configure, price, quote (CPQ) software is readily available and popular as an assistive tool.

CPQ software gives salespeople many of the tools they need to configure a product for customers and generate a bill of materials along with a quote for the agreed-upon configuration. If every part of this process works the way it should, the idea is that it will result in a quickly closed, fully satisfactory deal. While these CPQ software setups often come with some rudimentary guided selling tools, they often barely rise above the level of a filter system for the product. For something more advanced, dedicated guided selling apps are required. 

With external tools for guided selling, CPQ software becomes even more powerful than when deployed alone. Companies like Logik.io provide such a tool, including not only the back end AI but also a guided selling UX that provides an easy and intuitive interface to that platform for sales staff. If sales reps are meant to be the subject matter experts for a specific product or catalog, the way they navigate the system needs to reflect that level of expertise. This ease of use helps to guarantee the product will be an asset in closing more deals, rather than another piece of technology that never gets used, or worse – one that ends up impeding the sales process rather than enhancing it.

Although relatively new now, AI guided selling solutions are rapidly being adopted across the sales sphere. Gartner has issued a report stating that 75% of B2B sales organizations will be using the technology to augment their sales efforts. This will allow those companies to more quickly build out a product to the exact specifications of the businesses they have as customers. It also means that organizations that do not take the time to establish a guided selling experience for their reps and/or buyers will quickly fall to the bottom of the market, with the majority of competitors continuing to develop.

Guided selling, as Gartner points out, isn't just about providing advanced configuration options. Guided selling apps also use the power of AI and the knowledge of each customer provided by big data to alert sales staff of recommended content and upsell to present to the customer. Armed with these tools, sales staff will be able to convert more sales for higher average amounts with less time and technical energy required.

How Salesforce does Guided Selling

One of the biggest examples of guided selling inside a CPQ platform is Salesforce Guided Selling. This is a built-in guided selling tool that helps users of Salesforce CPQ more effectively perform the configuration part of the CPQ software's job. For basic configuration needs, Salesforce Guided Selling will likely get the job done. For configuration needs outside of the ordinary, though, there may be other avenues to explore.

As products become more complex and configuring them requires more sophistication, external tools are available to enhance the guided selling experience. Logik.io's Salesforce CPQ product configurator will let you create a much more advanced set of rules and logic for your product configuration than the default Salesforce Guided Selling tools will allow for on its own. 

To learn more about the guided selling tools provided by Salesforce, you can visit the Salesforce CPQ Trailhead. From there, you'll be able to find extensive training on how all Salesforce software works, focusing on CPQ and guided selling. The Salesforce CPQ Guided Selling Trailhead will provide you with information specific to the company's guided selling tools and the opportunity path Salesforce provides. To see some Salesforce CPQ examples or learn more about Salesforce CPQ pricing, you can visit the main product page on their site.

Guided Selling with Salesforce CPQ

For those of you who'd like to see a bit more about how guided selling in Salesforce CPQ works, there are some extra resources at your disposal. In addition to the Salesforce CPQ Guided Selling Trailhead mentioned above, the company has a video overview on its YouTube channel: Guided selling with Salesforce CPQ. You can also browse other videos on its channel to see additional Salesforce CPQ examples play out in real time.

If you learn more easily through reading than watching, or if you want a more detailed overview of the Salesforce CPQ quote process and Salesforce CPQ pricing, the company has written and published an extensive Salesforce CPQ tutorial in PDF format. This Salesforce CPQ guide will tell you nearly everything you'd like to know about the software and provides guided selling examples for Salesforce in great detail.

If you've learned all you can about Guided Selling in Salesforce through the provided resources and have still decided that it doesn't have quite enough flexibility to handle the complexity of your product configurations, we invite you to check out Logik.io's Salesforce CPQ product configurator. This product will provide you with advanced features and more complex configuration possibilities while maintaining an easy-to-use interface. While designing it, we focused on how we could augment the tools already available in Salesforce CPQ and make the configuration and quote processes easier while still providing increased flexibility. The Logik.io goal is to help you sell more, sell faster, and maintain less, so we figured out a way to leverage pre-existing tech stacks to make that reality more attainable. 

Benefits of Guided Selling

1. Streamlined Decision-Making: By simplifying the product selection process, guided selling helps customers make faster and more informed decisions. This reduces the time spent on choosing the right product and enhances the overall buying experience.

2. Increased Sales Efficiency: Sales teams benefit from guided selling as it reduces the complexity of configuring products and ensures compatibility. This efficiency translates into higher productivity and the ability to handle more sales in less time.

3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Customers appreciate the personalized and efficient shopping experience that guided selling provides. By receiving accurate and relevant product recommendations, customers are more likely to be satisfied with their purchases, leading to increased loyalty and repeat business.

4. Reduced Errors: Guided selling minimizes the risk of errors in product configurations. By guiding users through the process and ensuring that all options are compatible, the likelihood of mistakes is significantly reduced, resulting in a smoother sales process and better customer outcomes.

Logik.io’s guided selling solution exemplifies these principles by integrating advanced AI-driven recommendations and a user-friendly interface. This ensures that both sales teams and customers can navigate complex product configurations effortlessly, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction.

For more information on how guided selling can revolutionize your sales process, visit Logik.io Guided Selling for CPQ.

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