But, guess what? Our world is far from perfect – and some salespeople struggle to win deals. In fact, at any given time, only 24% of sales professionals exceed their quotas.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could guide your sales team to success, even the ones still wet behind the ears?
In today’s fast-paced sales environment, time is money. Hand-holding new salespeople all the way to their goals is a luxury organizations can rarely afford. By providing a situational framework, you’ll be able to direct your salespeople through the entire buying process, regardless of who they’re selling to or what products or services they’re offering. This is guided selling.
There are two ways to go about this. You can encourage your sales team to either pick up the phone each time a deal is in progress, or you can integrate the right technology to guide the sales process from afar.
With guided selling, all sales professionals, whether they are new or seasoned veterans, are able to follow the same sales playbook. This not only streamlines the sales workflow, but it also consistently delivers 100% error-free quotes with adaptable pricing structures that support the dynamic sales environment and drives sales productivity.
Let’s look at a few ways guided selling can help your sales team excel, and how sales enablement technology like CPQ solutions can help you do it:
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to deal-making and no two deals are ever the same. In order to guide your sales professionals effectively, it is highly recommended that you provide each team member with the skills to adjust to any changes as deals progress, providing support functions, cross and upsell advice, and tailoring deals to account for the various buyer stages unique to each situation.
The problem is that this process can get tedious and time-consuming if you have to do it for every deal that is initiated.
With a CPQ solution, sales guidance starts automatically, providing real-time adjustment for each deal in the pipeline. This enables your team to replicate the best practices of the organization without having to employ a cookie-cutter system – because, as we all know, those rarely work.
Improving Sales Process Efficiency
Sales efficiency is key to business success as it empowers sales organizations to close more deals in shorter periods of time. Guided selling enables this by providing sales professionals with the ability to propose the right products and services that best align with each customer’s unique needs.
Did you know that 50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first? Searching for the right products, deciding on the best options, and then quoting a special price can take days or even weeks to do correctly – and it requires a much deeper level of product knowledge than your new salespeople (or even some of your veterans) have. At the same time, you should be helping your sales team find the ideal price and deal that makes the most sense for the customer’s bottom line without eroding your margins. Standardizing sales responsiveness can help increase your revenue, while enforcing accountability, timeliness, and improving internal communication.
With guided selling, everything is managed – upselling, cross-selling, discount management, and, best of all, salespeople can increase their response capacity with quickly approved quotes. This helps the team run like a well-oiled machine, injecting agility into the sales process, even if you have dozens of new sales professionals or a myriad of product options to choose from.
Speeding Up the Quoting Process
Quoting is often the most drawn-out aspect of the sales process. It’s also the part that is the greatest temptation for sales leaders to micromanage.
How many times have you been given a quote or a discount from a salesperson for approval, only to find everything wrong with it and spend the next several hours rewriting it yourself? Do you really want to do this for each member that requests it, slowing down lead times and overall production?
Using a CPQ with guided selling can help your teams achieve automatic quotes complete with visual product comparisons, online visual aids, and audit trails. The last point is especially important because, as a sales leader, you will be able to track the full deal lifecycle and all changes and actions taken in real-time.
With these instant and high-quality sales quotes, the quoting process is dramatically expedited, sometimes from days and weeks to minutes and hours. Your sales and channel partner professionals will be quoting like pros and the personalized quote templates will help you maintain a standardized company message, which looks far more professional in the eyes of your loyal customers.
What does this all mean for your sales organization? Fastly becoming a B2B must, an Agile CPQ solution with guided selling drives deals forward faster. You’ll also provide your customers with a superior buying experience, something your competitors won’t be able to match. You’ll save time and money, move more product, while supporting your team and culminating revenue growth.
