What is Guided Selling and how does it work?
Find out more about digital advice on your website
What is Guided Selling?
Guided Selling allows websites to advise and guide their customers to make quick and easy buying decisions. At first, customers are led through a series of question stages to understand the exact nature of their needs. Based on the answers, intelligent Guided Selling tools then get to work and recommend products which really match these needs. Hence, Guided Selling allows every individual customer to receive personalized advice and recommendations.
What are the different types of Guided Selling solutions?
Guided Selling solutions come in many forms and differ slightly in the way they work. The common types of Guided Selling solutions are as follows:
Product Guides, Product Advisors and Product Finders
These types of Guided Selling solutions advise your customers about products and guide them to find the best recommendations. They ask a series of questions to understand the customers' needs and make technical product data more understandable. Customer needs are matched perfectly with the AI recommendations.
Product Configurators and Product Selectors
Product Configurators and Product Selectors allow customers to configure a customized version of a product. These are useful when presenting a product that is capable of providing several variations that a customer can select. Product Configurators are used for complex products while Product Selectors can be used in combination with cross-selling features.
Gift Finders and Quizzes
Gift Finders are useful tools designed specifically to recommend the best-suited gifts for a person. They are useful when targetting recurring holidays and special seasons such as Valentine's day or Christmas. Quizzes on the other hand drive customer engagement and can provide a unique user experience.
When does my website require Guided Selling and Online Product Guides?
Guided-Selling technology can help tackle specific problems such as large product assortments and products that require detailed information for customers to arrive at a buying decision.
Product Advisors often act in the same way as an in-store sales advisor would, and hence are a great form of customer service. Guided Selling can help your business in the following way:
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Large product assortment = increased demand for advice
Large product assortments are difficult to navgiate through and prove even more difficult to define and present.
The rule of thumb for Guided Selling is that if you have more than 10-15 products which are suited to different requirements, your customers will most likely need advice. Some Product Guides have almost 100,000 products — but even with fewer than 10 products, a set Guided Selling mechanism allows customers to know more about their actual requirements and leads them to make the right purchase decision.
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If your customers ask, "What was the difference between those products again?"
If your shop has products which require explanation, not every customer knows which products will fulfill their requirements. This means customers need to carry out extensive research which they are not prepared to do. They want to make a buying decision quickly and easily.
Products which particularly require a lot of explanation are products which offer many technical features and characteristics — the kind of features which can be easily forgotten about but can make a difference to whether a customer makes a purchase or not.
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Easily manage thousands of products
If you have a dynamic assortment where products routinely keep changing, a Guided Selling system will keep up with such changes and helps salesmen to be up-to-date with product specifics.
Digital Product Guides clearly have an advantage here, since they can remember infinite numbers of products and all their details. Therefore, Guided Selling is ideal for an ever-changing assortment of products and can also serve as a handy support system for sales staff.
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Different target groups - different demands
Those who sell to different target groups need to adequately present their products to each. Target groups can be:
- First-time buyers versus experienced repeat-buyers, who have different levels of knowledge
- B2C versus B2B customers, who are buying with completely different requirements in mind
- younger versus older customers who have different demands when making a buying decision
With Guided Selling, you can successfully serve different target groups. Product Guides pose intelligent questions which interactively adapt to the needs of each target group. This provides every customer with the information that is relevant to their individual purchase decision.
When is Guided Selling not necessary?
There are of course scenarios in which online advice is not particularly useful. For example, if you have a simple product selection or a very small product assortment which rarely changes. In these situations, it's best to explain your products through statistical content (e.g. with product descriptions). With a small product assortment, buyers have enough time to read through the details of every product. In most other cases, interactive product advice is much quicker, more user-friendly and effective when leading customers to a buying decision.How does Guided Selling work and how does it increase my sales?
What do our clients say?
Test out our Camera Guide
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Your customers want to have it as easy as possible. With intelligent Product Guides, you simplify buying decisions for every visitor on your website:
Your customers get the sales advice they need, thanks to digital Guided Selling online, chatbots or in-store solutions.
