Guided Selling - Guided Selling-Process

Guided Selling-Process

Guided Selling-Systems put in practice the following Guided Selling-Process to advice, convince and sell (based on the need/solution-placement dynamic):

• understand the customer's needs: The potential customer is asked for his buying needs. The product characteristics that are relevant to a buying decision are explained. Since the Guided Selling-System explains product attributes and use cases, buyers are enabled to express their needs, refine existing needs and discover new needs. Helping the customer to understand his needs and then really understand the attributes important to him is key to calculate product recommendations that fit the customer's requirements.
• analyse customer's needs: Consumers typically can express buying desires, but not technical specs - a consumer knows how he wants to use the product, but not which exact technical requirements are needed. A Guided Selling-System must thus be able to translate buying desires expressed in consumer language (e.g. "I need a business notebook") or concrete, but non-technical product attributes ("a fast processor") in technical product specifications (e.g. a certain processor type, hard disk size, operating system, RAM-size).
• recommend products: The technical product specifications inferred from the customer's needs need to be matched on the fact sheets of the available products. In order to calculate valuable product recommendations, it is not enough to filter out products that just fulfill the requirements expressed by the user. However, all relevant product attributes need to be evaluated and matched against the user requirements. Product attributes that are always beneficial (e.g. longer battery lifetime) need to be treated accordingly. If no product fulfills all requirements, the Guided Selling-System needs to calculate alternatives that come close to the actual requirements.
• provide buying arguments and convince the customer: The goal of the Guided Selling-System is to objectively advise the potential buyer, create trust in the product recommendations and the products offered and thus turn prospects into buyers. Thus, each product recommendation needs to be explained using a reasoning engine and the advantages / disadvantages of each recommendation need to be shown.