What is Guided Selling?

According to Gartner, 89% of businesses plan to compete on the basis of customer experience by 2016. If you find yourself in that 89%, what is your plan to improve your customer experience and use it as a differentiator? Guided selling can help.

So, what is guided selling? This post is an excerpt from our white paper, Deliver a Better Customer Experience with Guided Selling. Download the full white paper to learn more.

The Problem With Sales

It’s no secret, sales reps are missing the mark. Whether it’s a lack of training, poor engagement, or high turnover, they don’t always know how to deliver the best customer experience.

In short, reps are failing to meet buyers’ needs. And without trust, sales don’t happen. People don’t buy from reps pushing product to meet a quota. People buy from trusted advisors who listen to their needs, educate them on their options, and help them make the best decision for them, not just your bottom line.

To earn trust and inspire confidence, your sales team needs to be able to deliver a high-quality customer experience and recommend needs-based solutions every time. Typical sales enablement tools like CRMs, content management systems, and marketing automation won’t close that gap for you. Those tools are primarily rep-focused, not customer-focused.

What Is Guided Selling?

So what is guided selling, and how can it help? Guided selling uses consistent, personalized needs-based assessments to right-fit your customers with the best product or service for them. It’s the art of asking smart questions and using customer responses to drive the best product or solution recommendation. Customer experience for the win!

With guided selling, reps can:

• Deliver a high quality, personalized, consistent sales experience every time.
• Guide customers to the best solution for their needs.
• Generate the trust and confidence your customers need to make a purchase.

Guided selling builds trust by delivering an experience customers want.

Customers want consistency, knowledgeable sales reps, seamless, up-to-date information, personalization, control. Learn more about each of these in the full white paper.

Guided Selling Gets Results

The big question is, does guided selling get results? Both B2B and B2C enterprise sales teams using our guided selling tools have experienced results like these:

• 14-60% improvement in YOY sales.
• 40% increase in sales rep productivity.
• 9% increase in return visits from customers.

In addition to great sales results, both your reps and your customers will enjoy these benefits:

• Reps are more confident when engaging with customers.
• Reps get up to speed faster and start selling sooner.
• Customer satisfaction and engagement increase.
• Customers make more confident purchase decisions.

Guided Selling Technology

Needs-based selling is not new, but the technology that simplifies it is. Our guided selling technology, Unboxed Advisor, pairs a smart recommendation engine with interactive education in a simple-to-use interface. Advisor's powerful reporting engine captures everything from customer interactions and gives you access to data your CRM and other sales tools simply don’t have.
In the end, it's all about helping your reps create a better customer experience.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backward toward the technology—not the other way around.” - Steve Jobs

Download the White Paper

Still looking for an answer to the question, "What is guided selling?" Download the full white paper, Deliver a Better Customer Experience with Guided Selling, and see how adding guided selling to your sales enablement toolkit can help your reps deliver an experience your customers want and your competition will try to mimic.