Personalized product recommendations are key to making more deals.

Smart tech helps salespeople guide customers to the best products, making things easier even with confusing pricing and options.

By automating recommendations and simplifying the sales process, CPQ helps guide sales efforts more effectively.

Let’s explore how CPQ-enabled guided selling helps sales teams create tailored solutions, improve accuracy, and increase conversion rates in this blog.

What is Guided Selling?

Picture this: you work for a B2B company.

You need solution A to solve for problem B. So, you start doing some research online for the best products and services to fit your needs. 

This stage is known as independently going about the buying journey, where you’re doing all the decision-making.

You’re not speaking to any reps yet, you’re not walking into a brick and mortar store or calling companies to get information. You’re doing it all on your own.

The guided selling process is the opposite of that. It’s a more interactive way to optimize your sales through guided selling tools.

With guided selling, a customer receives personalized recommendations based on their needs and what they’re looking for.

This takes a lot of the time, energy, and guesswork out of looking for your solution.

When it comes to B2B, offering guided selling and showing your potential clients why your solution is the best for their needs is a massive advantage and helps to streamline your messaging to the right people, for the right product.

Why Guided Selling is the future for B2B

Gartner estimates that up to 75% of B2B sales will be conducted through guided selling by 2025.¹

Sellers can no longer exclusively rely on intuition-based selling to push a deal over the finish line. Tomorrow’s sellers must learn to use data today to effectively manage their sales cycles as the use of information will become more critical to their success over time.

Steve Reitberg, Gartner Expert.²

How does guided selling work?

Guided selling is similar to what’s known as solution selling.

Both take into account the customer data to help provide personalized solutions for customers.

By analyzing customer behaviors and prior sales metrics, you can better recommend a tailored product or service and why they meet their needs.

Guided selling solutions rely on collaboration.

Rather than individual sales people working in silos to close deals, interdepartmental teams are encouraged to work together throughout the buyer’s journey to help provide information to close the deal.

This process also helps establish trust and rapport with the customer, increasing their loyalty by helping with their purchasing decisions.

Here’s some key tactics to take into consideration when approaching guided selling.

1. Timing

You don’t want to rush the customer, but you also don’t want to risk drawing it out and losing them in the process.

Have a clearly defined buyer’s journey with information and follow up check points.

Use data to adjust as needed.

2. Tutorials

If you’re able, set up a demo or provide video and image tutorials as a part of the buyer journey.

This can demonstrate firsthand how your solution works and answer any lingering questions they may have.

3. Guide

Though it’s in the name, it can be easy to pressure or direct customers instead of guiding them.

Guiding is a gentle and confident approach, building trust with the customer.

Guided selling examples

Think back to our non-guided selling approach, you do some research and click through a few sites, but are left on your own to make a decision.

That decision may be to exit the site without having made a purchase.

With guided selling, you can close more sales and leave the customer feeling confident and catered to in their decision.

In B2B, guided selling sales strategies happen between account managers or those responsible for business purchases. 

For example, say you’re in the market for a template creation tool that also tracks customer data, helps you generate quotes and proposals, and keeps teams aligned, all in one solution.

You do some research and up pops PandaDoc.

You can see on the homepage we offer a free 14 day trial, a demo, and conversations with our team to help walk you through your needs and how we can help.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but this is a great example of a B2B guided selling approach.

We would rather help potential customers with demos and conversations than leave you to your own devices.

Perhaps there’s more to our tool than meets the eye.

We work with a wide variety of industries and chances are, the thing you need help with, we’ve successfully done.

Benefits of guided selling

Guided selling is a strategy that benefits both the seller and the buyer.

• Easy decisions: Heard the phrase analysis paralysis? It’s the fight or flight response to an overwhelming amount of options to choose from, and it’s real. Guided selling removes the overwhelm, the overthinking, and the seemingly endless amount of options.

• Personalized recommendations: with a personalized approach as to why solution A solves for your problem B, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from you.³ Addressing specific needs improves both customer engagement, and the customer journey.
• Data driven: with the help of tools like CPQ, your B2B can interpret vast amounts of data to determine buying trends, customer needs, customer preferences, and more to help guide you into closing the sale with them.
• Consistency: a solid guided selling approach can be replicated consistently with new incoming customers. All you need to do is adjust the information to customize for each use case, but the teams and steps involved in the buyer’s journey will be fairly similar along the way.
• Customer-oriented: this approach is all about the customer. Who they are, what they need, and how you can help. When done right, this builds positive reviews, referrals, and loyalty. After all, customer relationships are the lifeblood of revenue.

Automating product recommendations with CPQ

CPQ, which stands for Configure, Price, Quote, is a great option for guided selling software.

With pre-defined rules and logic, CPQ automates quote generation, minimizing manual effort and human error, ultimately leading to more accurate quote.

This increased functionality pairs with your CRM to pull customer data in real-time and keep it one one, easy location for team collaboration.

CPQ is especially helpful for complex products and quotes for product configuration.

By minimizing mistakes when generating quotes, sales reps can deliver precise and tailored proposals, enhancing customer satisfaction.

Guided selling is particularly helpful when it comes to complex products.

When your business is able to clearly lay out product options, product details, and valuable insights of the various product offerings, customers will feel a sense of trust with sales representatives.
This also contributes to faster sales, and even more opportunity for cross-selling.

Sales reps can quickly generate precise quotes, saving time on manual setup and accelerating deal completion.

Conclusion

Guided selling helps your sales team consistently provide the perfect solutions for each customer.

By automating recommendations, reducing errors, and accelerating the sales process, PandaDoc CPQ empowers businesses to close more deals with confidence.

Using CPQ’s guided selling features can enhance customer experience, improve quote accuracy, and drive higher revenue for your business.

Level up your sales process by giving your team PandaDoc CPQ.

Disclaimer

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