Build your own interactive product recommendation system in CRM with Guided Selling.
Update: CPQ was a public early access feature from March 2023 — January 2024.
Since February 2024, this is a public feature.
Since February 2024, this is a public feature.
Zoho CRM's in-built CPQ engine now facilitates Guided Selling, a setup in which the CRM system makes tailored and interactive product recommendations based on the unique needs and preferences of each customer, thereby enabling sales people to choose the most relevant products for them and create accurate, tailor-made quotes instantly.
Guided Selling — An Overview
The primary goal of any business is to cater to the ever-changing needs and preferences of their wide customer base. This could result in the introduction of new product lines, modification of existing product suites or updates to pricing. While this is a great way to accommodate the demands of your customers, what this also means is you must appreciate and acknowledge the complexity that this could bring about for your sales teams to create accurate, relevant and timely quotes for your customers.
When a customer makes an enquiry and there are over a hundred products to choose from, how does a sales person navigate the existing plethora of product choices and offer the right fit for their customer?
It could become a tedious task and slow down your sales pipeline if a sales person has to refer to a product list every time a quote needs to be tailored for a customer.
Here's where Guided Selling helps. While automated product and price rules in CPQ help you with product combinations, free products and dynamic pricing, Guided Selling goes a step further and helps you with which product to recommend to a customer in the first place. Sales managers can now guide their reps via the CRM system on which among the wide range of solutions suits a customer's needs the best.
Consider the example of Zylker Watches, which offers an exquisite collection of wrist watches and wall clocks. The watches come in all sizes and colors for men, women, and children.
For a customer making an enquiry regarding available options for watches, a sales person may have to navigate various products. The right choice of watch for the customer would depend on a multitude of factors, such as the color, warranty preference, manufacturer, gender, and so many other features of the watch. A sales person in this scenario would be bogged down by the sheer complexity involved in selecting from the myriad choices, and here is where guided selling helps.
In this case, Zylker could construct a Guided Selling flow in CPQ, where all of these factors that influence the choice of the right product can be organized as a questionnaire of sorts for the sales person to answer.
The questions in Zylker's case could be as follows:
So, originally if there were 50 watches available, once you answer each question, you could narrow down from random 50 to relevant top 10 and that makes your selection of products easier. The system now acts as a senior sales consultant trying to prod and help the sales person select the right product by asking a series of "questions".
Filtering products based on association of related modules
What's more, since the Guided Selling flow is part of Zoho CRM's in-built CPQ system, you can include not only product-based factors but also other related factors — that is, factors based associated accounts, contacts, vendors and deals (via lookup modules). This takes personalized selling to the next level and helps you build the most accurate and timely quotes.
In the same scenario, let's consider the following factors that are not directly related to the product itself.
— Say the customer prefers a particular watch Vendor only— named Titanix.
— Also, for more likely hits, the sales rep wishes to study and narrow down products previously purchased by customers similar to the one he/she is handling. For example, say the current customer is a student/homemaker. So the sales rep wishes to see which set of wrist watches were previously sold to other customers who were also students/homemakers. This would further narrow down the hunt with more likely hits.
So that leaves us with two additional factors based on two different modules in this case— Vendors and Contacts — which are related to the Products module.
This way, Guided Selling efficiently supplies the much needed sales context to the act of "guiding" a sales rep on identifying the most relevant products for their customers. Similar examples include:
- Filtering products that were <<previously sold to Indian customers.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Contact Mailing Country is India) - Filtering products associated to <<winning deals.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Deal Stage is Closed Won) - Filtering products that were <<previously sold to large enterprises.>>
(Input field here will be: Associated Account No:of Employees >= 50)
So using related modules, you filter based on additional sales context that is supplied to you by the CRM apart from the straightforward product factors present in the Products module.
In the Guided Selling setup, each question is mapped to a particular "CRM field" as the "Input field". This way, all the sales person needs to do is choose the field value and as they answer each "question", what they are essentially doing is filtering the products further and further and zeroing in on the right products based on their answers or "criteria".
Note that the questions created in this Guided Selling flow involve input fields from both Primary module (Products) and Related modules (Accounts, Contacts, Deals, Vendors). Related modules are typically those that are associated to the primary module via a Lookup field.
To create a Guided Selling flow, all you need to do is create a set of Input Fields and frame your questions to the sales rep. These input fields could be from the primary (Products) module or Related Modules (Contacts, Deals, Accounts and Vendors).
To learn more about creating your own Guided Selling flows, please refer to this Help document.
Availability and Release Status:
Guided Selling is available in the Zoho CRM Professional Edition and above. It is live now in all DCs.
Note: CPQ and Guided Selling are available on the Public Early Access* mode.
(*) Public Early Access — Refers to a the status of a feature that is available for all applicable Editions, however, is subject to changes, improvements and updates as part of continuous development.
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