Guided Selling
Guided Selling and sales management is a process, advise on the potential buyers of products or services and are led to the purchase. Guided selling systems are software solutions that advise potential buyers and guide them through the product selection process.
The areas of application of guided selling solutions are:
- Websites of mail order companies, product manufacturers or service providers. A guided selling system can record user requirements and generate product recommendations to ensure that potential buyers can find the right products.
- Kiosk applications or computer terminals in stationary specialist shops to support customers in specialist shops in choosing products.
- Interactive product banners that initiate the consultation process within a banner.
Goal and procedure
The aim of guided selling systems is to bring customers and the offer that suits them together quickly and easily and to enable them to make a purchase decision . The customer gets to know the range and possible product features, while the seller learns to understand the customer's requirements and their decision-making criteria. Guided selling systems are used to advise customers on the Internet. The central component of guided selling systems is therefore usually an online product advisor who leads visitors to online shops and product manufacturer websites to buy.
technology
Guided selling systems require algorithms to calculate product recommendations. The calculation of product recommendations is done by recommender systems ( recommendation service ). In addition to statistical recommendations, guided selling systems should lead to a purchase decision like a specialist salesperson. To do this, it is necessary to ask the buyer about his requirements, convert the requirements into (technical) product properties and then calculate a ranking of the most suitable products. Guided selling systems thus enable an objective product selection based on specific user wishes.
Guided Selling Process
Guided selling systems represent a guided selling process. The process can include, for example, the following steps:
- Record needs and purchase wishes : The potential buyer is asked about his requirements and the essential properties of the products and their possible characteristics are explained. Since a guided selling system specifically explains product properties, interested parties can find out more about their existing purchase wishes, specify them and at the same time formulate new requirements that support them in choosing a suitable offer.
- Evaluate needs and purchase wishes : Buyers typically know their purchase wishes, but not the exact technical product properties that meet these wishes. A guided selling system must therefore use cases expressed in natural language (e.g. "a business notebook") or more specific purchase requests ("a fast notebook") in technical properties (e.g. a certain processor, hard drive size, main memory and Accessories).
- Recommend products : The technical product properties derived from purchase wishes must be compared with the data sheets of the available products. It is not enough to filter for the right products based on the purchase wishes. Rather, the products must be evaluated with regard to all product properties and their suitability for the purchase wishes in order to be able to calculate meaningful product recommendations. Advantageous product properties should also be taken into account and, if no product meets all requirements, alternatives should be calculated in order to achieve better recommendation quality.
- Justify recommendations and convince them to buy : The aim of a guided selling system is to advise the customer as objectively as possible, to build trust and thereby sell more, and to retain the customer. Product recommendations must therefore be justified on an individual basis, the advantages and disadvantages of the recommendations must be explained and the interested party must be actively led to buy.
See also
- Product finders help online shoppers to select products. While simple filter systems, which users cannot advise on their requirements and products that match them, do not count as guided selling systems, more complex product finders can implement the requirements of guided selling systems.
- Customer relationship management (CRM): Guided selling systems can use information from CRM systems to take the interests of the customer into account when calculating product recommendations. Furthermore, guided selling systems can deliver data from the advisory process to CRM systems.
- Dialog marketing : guided selling systems are automated tools that are used to address customers individually. Instead of unspecific advertising, guided selling systems, as a measure of dialogue marketing, therefore submit product recommendations and marketing messages that are suitable for the specific user.
- Sales promotion : Guided Selling is a sales promotion tool. While many sales promotion measures are aimed at one-off campaigns (e.g. discount campaigns or promotions), guided selling systems serve to continuously support sales and marketing success.
- Buying behavior and sales psychology also play an important role in online shopping . Even if the purchase decision is made online and not by a human specialist salesperson, the online product advisors, based on guided selling systems, aim to control purchasing behavior by means of sales psychological measures.
- Conversion rate : Guided selling systems aim to turn prospects into buyers and thereby increase the conversion rate (or conversion rate or click-through rate ).
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- Whitepaper: Guided Selling: How online shops and branded websites use product advice to bind customers and sell more successfully , excentos GmbH, July 2010
- Definition of Guided Selling in the Internet World Business
- Dr. rer. pole. Christin Emrich: Multi-channel communications and marketing management , Gabler Verlag, 2008, pp. 409-410, ISBN 383490855X
- Axel Schultze: Channel Excellence , published by Lulu.com, 2007, p. 215ff, ISBN 061517759X
- Sridhar Seshadri, Dana Popescu: Inventory and Ecommerce , Department of Information, Operations and Management Science, Leonard Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY 10012
- J. Lester, K. Branting, B. Mott: Conversational agents (PDF; 403 kB), Practical handbook of Internet computing, 2004, p. 3ff
- Guided Selling: On demand information for buyers , Executive technology report, IBM, August 2005, The article shows the challenges for retailers due to the increasing relocation of purchasing decisions to the Internet. It is shown how online shops use guided selling solutions to lead customers to purchase decisions, especially when selling complex products and solutions. (PDF file; 60 kB)
- Article on ZDNet about Guided Selling "Enabling the Next Generation of Online Commerce with Rich Internet Applications" . The article shows how the online shopping experience can be improved with Rich Internet Applications and which stages the guided selling process includes from generating needs and product search to purchasing.