by Guillermo Martinez

A lot has been written on how Configure, Price & Quote (CPQ) software can make the selling more efficient for your company. When shaping one of the CPQ solutions in the market, your company needs to make the decision on how complex or how simple the products and services to be offered are going to be. In my own personal opinion, Guided Selling, can be a very powerful tool to efficiently impact the selling process of your company. However, implementing Guided Selling is a very important decision that may make the life of your channel and direct sales force very easy but, may make it also very frustrating.

Guided Selling usually walks the potential customer through a series of questions (or an interview) requesting information on the customer business needs and, makes decisions on what products and options to display to the customer. It is very important to highlight that Guided Selling does not ask for products directly but, as a result of the interview session, it produces a recommended set of products or services with a price point. Guided selling attempts to capture the “how-to” of the expert product specialists and puts it in the hands of less or non-experienced sales individuals. While experienced sales individuals may not enjoy the Guided Selling experience, because they may feel that their product experience is being oversimplified and / or there is no flexibility to fully custom-configure a product or service, Guided Selling may incentive the non-experience sales people to recommend a solution, even when do not have full knowledge of the product offer. Guided Selling may be able to produce, very rapidly, an extremely complex solution to satisfy a customer need, even when the direct sales or channels are not quite familiar with the product or service offering. Think about how Guided Selling can boost your channel sales. I am not implying that the channel is or should be less experienced than your direct sales force but, since the channel may be also selling your competitor’s products, they may not necessarily spend time becoming product specialists. What I am saying here, is that by putting the how to of product experts at the fingertips of your channel, the time and effort to configure your product can be reduced and incentivize the channel to sell your product instead of the competitors’ product.

A similar logic applies to your less or new-hire direct sales force. While your newly hired sales force is becoming acquainted with your complex product offering, they can, in parallel, produce quotes of those very complex products or solutions, potentially increasing your company sales pipeline. Above, I mentioned that a Guided Selling experience, may be a very frustrating experience, especially for those direct or channel experienced sales individuals. Take into perspective that the product experts hold the know-how and are the authority on configuring your products and solution; they know exactly what is the combination of products and services the customer needs and are perfectly capable of putting it together very quickly.

When evaluating a CPQ solution, look for one that offers a very efficient product configurator engine to custom-configure solutions and address very specific customer needs and, at the same time, can provide you with a Guided Selling experience that builds on top of your product configurator. Achieving that kind of solution, satisfies the needs of your expert sales force (either channel or direct) and provide to the novice, less or non-experienced, sales force (channel or direct) with a tool powerful enough to create complex configurations on a very fast and on a simple way; boosting part of you sales pipeline that otherwise would need to be neglected or put it on-hold until your recently hired sales force or (recently recruited) channel become product experts.