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What is Guided Selling?
Guided Selling is the act of completing a customer's order based on the few inputs they give you. You can think of it similar to a good Concierge at a hotel. Based on a simple request like "Help me find an good yet inexpensive seafood restaurant within walking distance", the concierge will not simply tell you all the restaurants possible, they will suggest only those that meet your requirements, without asking you 20 more questions about it. The concierge is able to do that based on a long-term working knowledge of all the restaurants, but also of what his past guests have mentioned to him based on their experience there. By leveraging the past experience information his recommendations are more valuable to future customers.
Benefits of Guided Selling:
- Reduce clicks for order completion - by leveraging the buying patterns between choices of historical order, EmcienMatch can complete an order with very little input, but the value isn't just completing it, it's completing it so it's "best" for the customer and for the company.
- Become a "trusted advisor" to customers - Customers want you to "know" what they want and aren't looking to specify every choice. Customers expect you to be the expert and help them with the "right" choices for them, leaving it up to them risks customer confusion or irritation, in many cases a lost sale.
- Improve sales productivity - Even a new sales person will be able to recommend the best configurations just like your most seasoned sales people!
EmcienMatch provides this ideal functionality to sales and customers directly in a simple web user-interface that only needs the user to select those attributes the customer wants, then based on the buying patterns of "other customers that bought those same attributes or abilities" provides the best full-configurations that should be suggested to the customer that meets their needs, but also is "good" for the company in one or more key metrics such as revenue, margin, inventory, etc.
To provide this capability EmcienMatch, auto-detects the buying patterns of customer purchases and optimizes the product configurations then exposes this new offering as a simple product explorer and quote/ordering system. Essentially EmcienMatch reverse-engineers the product from your product sales data and uses those strong buying patterns to guide current orders, quotes and requests to the best configurations for both the customer and the company.
How it Guides your Sales:
1. Sales people or customers start by selecting only the attributes the customer cares about (any attributes, in any order). In addition, user can enter price restrictions to fit into their budget.
2. Real-time, while each click is made, the system refreshes to show the top 3 configurations that match the currently requirements. At any point the customer can stop entering requirements and choose an ideal configuration.
3. Unlike all other ordering systems or configurators, EmcienMatch NEVER leaves a customer at a dead-end with "no matching results" or where a choice they wanted on a specific feature wasn't available because it conflicted with an earlier requirement. Like a good sales person, Match is able to ALWAYS offer up the best alternatives, even if the requirements conflict with one another, the essence of guiding sales.
EmcienMatch
Customers want to buy your products, either directly or via a Sales person, but why aren’t they? As many as 4 out of every 5 quotes are lost because of simple sales issues including:
- Complex Ordering Process
- Engineering has to validate many of the orders
- Lack of Product Knowledge for large Product Lines
What you want is to have your sales team quickly help the customer order exactly what the customer wants and make you the most money, either by increased margins, reduced SKUs and inventory, or cutting out a lengthy quote to order process via Engineering validation. With EmcienMatch, you can.
EmcienMatch is the ultimate sales effectiveness product. With it, even a brand-new sales person will be selling what the customer asks for and selling the highest margin products. It’s abilities include:
- Make it easy to buy your products
- Guide customers and complete their spec
- Sell customers what you want them to buy
- Reduce SKUs
- Increase Margins
- reduce quote to order times
- Competitive quotes for any configuration
Automated Selling
EmcienMatch takes the guesswork out of selling complex products. It does this by taking advantage of the fact that your customers are the best guide into what sells and what doesn’t. If you don’t “listen” to what they are already telling you, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
Customers “talk” to you when they buy your products. What people search for is one thing, but what people ultimately BUY is another. Lots of people search for high-end super-cars, but they ultimately buy something less exotic, more in their price range that serves their needs better. If you want to sell your products more effectively, you need to leverage what people are already buying.
The buying patterns in your sales history is a gold mine of product knowledge that any great sales person would realize could drive higher sales, higher margins and reduce the overall number of configurations you build.
EmcienMatch leverages the existing buying patterns in your sales history to complete partial specifications and guide users to the optimal configurations for their needs. When a customer tells you they are looking for one of your products that is ‘Blue’, if you knew that 85% of past customers that wanted a ‘Blue’ product, also wanted the ‘Leather’ option and the ‘DVD’ option you could quickly guide them to the small set of more probable configurations to match their needs. This knowledge is there, EmcienMatch leverages it and guides customers based on what they want to what you know they will buy and is good for both of you.
Closest Match Searching
Selling sometimes comes down to just having the right product at the time of sale. If a customer asks for product X and you are out of it, the customer could be lost to a competitor.  But in the land of configurable products, being out of one configuration doesn’t have to be a deal killer. If you can offer up the “next closest” configuration, there is an opportunity to satisfy the customer and complete the sale.
But what is the “closest” configuration to what the customer is looking for? It turns out that each of the attributes of your product carries a different weight of importance to the customer, and if they have specified a subset of features they care about, looking for alternatives that differ on the features they HAVEN’T specified is the secret.
EmcienMatch uses this to the advantage of the both the customer and the manufacturer. It starts by matching on what the customer has asked for, usually a small set of key features they care about, then it ranks the matching configurations based on the defined business metric (ie. Margin, Inventory Turns, etc.) and offers up the best choice. If it turns out you are out of that item, then it will show the configurations that are closest to this one, differing on features that the customer hasn’t chosen or are of lower importance first. This meet the customer’s needs even if you are out of any one specific item!
Competitive Selling
It’s tough enough for customers to buy configurable products based on the number of choices they have to make, but learning your catalog make it even more difficult.
This gets more complicated when you have direct competitors who have similar catalogs that offer the same functional products, but use their own terminology for the capabilities. If a customer knows what they want in terms of your competitors product they may feel inclined to order from them just for the ease of ordering. EmcienMatch can level the playing  field in this area too. EmcienMatch allows you have any number of alternative names for every feature and option your product has. This means you can enter all of your competitor’s terms from their price sheets or website that map to your terminology and the EmcienMatch will let you select products in any terminology, but always show your optimal configuration that the customer should sell So now instead of just making your sales force fluent in all of the best configuration choices from your catalog, they are now the best at selling using your competitor’s terminology as well! You can switch from one terminology to another on the fly, so even if your competitor provided a bid to the customer before you did, you can compete head-to-head by entering the quote choices, in the competitor’s terminology, even set the price limit to their quote and come up with the best configurations that you can offer to win the deal!
Reduced Quote to Order time
In some industries, the amount of time it takes to convert a customer quote to an order is hours, days or even weeks. The time is usually spent in Engineering to determine if the product the customer is asking for is Engineering valid. That time can cost your company many deals if the competitors can respond quicker than you can. The main problem is the fact that in many cases the customer is ordering something “new”. A new configuration that hasn’t been built before does require Engineering to confirm that it’s possible to build it. What’s interesting though is that that many of the “new” orders that come in, never had to be “new”, they only became new because of the existing ordering process forced the customer to choose or specify every feature for your product, even features they didn’t care about. Even if 99% of their order looks like your top seller, if the last choice they make causes it to be unique, you have to send it thru Engineering. EmcienMatch reduces this problem dramatically by changing this process. By asking the customer to specify every choice you make their ordering process difficult and slow and increase the chance that you will have a new, one-off configuration to build and support. Customers prefer to order with a subset of product attributes that they care about, if you match on those and their price limits, the rest of the configuration is your opportunity to reduce new configurations and make more money. EmcienMatch solves this problem by matching on what the customer cares about, staying within their budget limits and trying to offer existing configurations that satisfy their needs and make the manufacturer more money. And it does it real-time at the time of sale, so instead of hours or days, you can close the deal instantly.
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EmcienMatch Product Overview