Sales is a vital cog in the wheel of most businesses. But to seize sales opportunities, sales reps need more than competent selling skills. They need to be supported to work smarter and faster.
To enable a stronger, more effective sales team, sales reps require easy-to-use solutions that help them efficiently produce accurate and detailed quotes for customers, identify customer needs and recommend relevant product offers, and respond swiftly to any cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
CPQ (Configure Price Quote) tools provide the answer, helping streamline processes and accelerating your sales. And for customers using cloud-based business suite NetSuite, we have developed Guided Selling, an application that simplifies selling complex or highly configurable products by allowing sales reps to quickly and accurately generate quotes for orders in NetSuite.
The fact that it works natively within NetSuite is important. This is because product-related data is stored in a company’s ERP system. Rather than feeding your CPQ application with all relevant data from the ERP system, Guided Selling sits within the NetSuite platform. No integrations are needed.
How Guided Selling works
The Guided Selling application is added to the NetSuite Quote and Sales Order page. The sales reps are then guided through a visual step-by-step process of entering a correctly configured and fully detailed purchase order. Once an order is entered, Guided Selling responds with a price quote that includes all the discounts, terms, and conditions for the specific customer. Once the quote is accepted, it becomes an order.
This solves a major problem encountered when configuring quotes in NetSuite, particularly when it comes to navigating complex products. When creating an order, you must first know the name or product code/SKU. This isn’t practical for businesses with many items or variations of an item, as it takes time to search through catalogues or spreadsheets to find and select the correct item. With Guided Selling, sales reps can quickly build up an order by search, categories, and other attributes in a point-of-sale-like experience – items are visualised on the user-friendly interface – and instantly create the order when finished.
Image 1: In the grid view, the user can see the images of the available products for purchase and add them to the cart
Image 2: The user can see a list of the available products in the table view, which can help to go through a long list of products
A practical Guided Selling use case
Because Guided Selling is designed to connect the front and back office, the application can be used in customer-facing situations. Take a showroom, with reps selling directly to the customer. As the customer selects the products to purchase, the rep can use the application to filter the list based on defined fields, showing the image to the customer for reference. Selected items are then added to the cart and once it is finalised, the rep clicks on the Add to Order button to add the items to the sales order.
With Guided Selling, sales reps can seize the moment to create orders at speed, trimming hours off the once-complex and error-prone process. It also ensures a more accurate quote, shortens sales cycles, and lowers operational costs.
Image 3: When selecting a product, the user can see more details. This can help with pricing discussion and additional product information.
No matter your type of business – eCommerce, brick-and-mortar business or B2B – and how you need to configure the application, the goal of Guided Selling always remains the same – to help sellers engage with buyers as effectively and efficiently as possible. It’s no surprise our Guided Selling application has attracted plenty of interest from customers looking to enable reps to consistently close deals faster and with fewer missteps.
- Learn more by visiting Apps by Annexa or request a demo with a member of our sales team.
Annexa is a leading NetSuite partner with extensive experience designing and implementing comprehensive and customised business systems, including payroll solutions, financial management, warehouse management and ecommerce solutions.