Biggest issue for manufacturers: Matching the selling approach to customer demands
Through every industrial revolution, from 18th-century coal and steam to today’s 21st-century digital cloud, manufacturers have adapted their operations to the modern technological standard. Today, with e-commerce rapidly transforming how consumers shop, manufacturers face an urgent need to shift their traditional sales strategy and services to meet rising expectations for a seamless buying experience -- especially for complex enterprise products.
Sales teams have addressed this pressure for the past decade with popular configure price quote (CPQ) platforms. However, the more options and buying channels customers seek and companies' products fulfill, the more burdens CPQ software faces in connecting these complex buying cycles. To improve time to market, sell solutions more effectively and gain competitive advantages through customized selling experiences, a significant upgrade in CPQ technology is needed to mesh businesses' and customers’ multiple needs.
Standards change
Business-to-business buyers are evolving fast. They choose to shop at their convenience, no longer just 9-to-5 but 24/7 and on the go. They’re becoming more comfortable making major self-service decisions online and purchasing even big-ticket manufactured items at a simple point-and-click when available.
If there’s a standard across industries, buyers simply want to buy items on their terms -- whether that’s completely self-supported or led step-by-step by a product’s sales professional or the places in-between. Manufacturers need to transform their selling strategy to match this flexibility customers seek digitally. That transformation must also keep the seller in mind.
It’s no secret that even the most talented sales pros spend up to a third of their time laboring away on repetitive or menial tasks or managing cumbersome sales systems. Online platforms keep failing these users when the tools don’t simplify sales’ efforts to offer complex products and multiple options.
To help mitigate this and meet the needs of today's sellers and buyers, CPQ solutions need to evolve to become truly guided selling tools. They need to operate less like wandering through a wide-open marketplace and instead help drive decision-making, matching customers' custom solutions with even highly complex products that companies build.
While many CPQ systems claim guided selling is embedded in their solution, a more intelligent, guided CPQ is needed for manufacturers – a more intuitive tool that leads users through translating customer requirements and interpreting their use-cases, then offering product solutions that meet those needs. We call that more intelligent guided selling tool a Commerce Logic Engine (CLE).
Driving Omni-Channel Selling Success
A commerce logic engine augments and extends the capabilities of traditional CPQ platforms to create a guided buying experience across all channels. It gathers the specifics that customers need resolved and configures product options and features to match the best solutions.
Guiding intuitively, the CLE gets to the core of what buyers need and how they intend to use the solutions they choose. Simultaneously, it handles an entire enterprise catalog of products, easily accepting new versions or entire lines, then offering solutions that best match products with needs.
Made to be immersed in complicated transactions, CLE operates by presenting simple paths to reach users' goals. This opens up companies’ entire catalogs to online buying -- at any time from anywhere -- and speeds up purchasing so the lag time between choosing and paying is eliminated.
With a CLE handling complicated tasks and eliminating snags, a company’s sales interaction with buyers can focus on growing customer satisfaction and building value rather than wrestling with buying problems. The advanced guided selling simplicity establishes a favorable relationship at the onset and builds customer loyalty so that sales pros can flourish.
Simplifying UI, UX
E-commerce is a two-way street, and CLE technology manages the complexities involved in selling enterprise products as intuitively as it assists buyers. Its design simplifies managing the extensive product lines that enterprise businesses offer.
Productized solutions like CLE keep companies agile, giving them the power to bring products to market faster by reducing sales software coding, maintenance, and administration. This freedom releases sales staff from performing tech-heavy tasks every time product catalogs change, or product features expand, minimizing bottlenecks.
Customers want more now
Henry Ford popularized the assembly line a hundred years ago, yet showrooms stayed the same for the next century-plus. Until today. There’s a new world order to online buying and selling modern enterprise products to the highly variable, tech-savvy customer.
The CLE platform surpasses traditional CPQs serving 21st-century e-commerce so far. Guided-selling technology relinquishes the burden of taking buyers through rote processes that fall short of modern expectations. Instead, it makes complicated products easy to sell and buy, intuitively leading buyers to dynamic offerings that meet complex needs and closing significant sales transactions.
This level-sets customer satisfaction from the start, improving companies’ customer relationships and freeing up sales pros to hone in on value-added propositions rather than repeatedly intervening on manual tasks.
As buyers evolve and demand more from increasingly competitive sources, their patience grows thin. So the B2B customer experience must quickly adapt. Guided-selling technology is the logical evolution of buying and selling in this rapid, omnichannel e-commerce marketplace.
Image Credit: Syda Productions / Shutterstock
Chris Shutts is co-founder and chief executive officer of Logik.io. He also co-founded and sold the CPQ pioneer BigMachines to Oracle. Previously, Shutts was business unit manager for Case New Holland. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and two mechanical design patents.