What is Guided Selling?

Guided selling is a powerful sales strategy that leverages technology to streamline your customer’s buying journey. It’s a dynamic process combining intelligent workflows, AI, and customer data to provide personalized recommendations at every sale stage. By implementing guided selling tools, you can help your customers navigate product comparisons, understand pricing structures, and select appropriate add-ons or features. This approach enhances the customer experience and empowers you to close deals more effectively and efficiently.

With guided selling, salespeople work with potential buyers to bring them the products and/or services that best suit their needs. Naturally, this means that sales teams utilizing the guided selling method must be able to uncover how purchasers intend to use their products so that they can best advise them. Furthermore, since no two use cases are the same, guided selling is a highly individualized process that requires significant time and resources to be successful.

To utilize and be successful with guided selling, sales teams must first understand exactly what it is, then learn how to use it, and finally adopt the tactics, techniques, and technology required to remain successful.

Definition of Guided Selling

In today’s saturated markets full of similar and competing products, combined with the mass amount of information freely available, buyers are easily and quickly overwhelmed with data. This huge amount of information, which can be both honest and dishonest, may lead a buyer toward a product that is not the best for them.

Guided selling remedies this by connecting the buyer with a genuine consultant who delivers the products and services that best fit their needs.

To provide the purchaser with the most accurate recommendations possible, the salesperson acting as the consultant must prepare a thorough line of questioning to uncover the buyer’s true needs and pains.

Guided Selling in B2B Sales

Just because you or your sales reps work for a particular company does not mean you cannot act as a valued consultant when practicing guided selling. There are two levels to which reps can be consultive sellers. The first is within your organization’s hierarchy. Reps need to be their subject matter experts, especially when working at large enterprises with many products with multiple versions and uses. These sales reps should be able to guide buyers to the product within their organization that best fits their needs and not seek to oversell just for the increase in revenue.

The second level of guided selling is when reps become experts on the entire market of products available, including competitors. They are also unafraid to present a competing product as a purchase option, meaning they are confident enough in their own offering to secure the win. These sales reps position themselves as valued advisors rather than sellers and earn the trust of the buyers that they work with.

These consultative are masters of guided selling because they have their prospect’s best interest in mind. If they need a simpler, less complex product, or one that offers a feature set more gear for a specific use case, a recommendation for another product earns massive trust. Typically, these reps also get calls back once they prospect outgrows the service that was recommended to them, and now wants the rep’s advice on their best next step.

Guided Selling in B2C or eCommerce Sales

For the purposes of this explanation, guided selling will be broken down into brick-and-mortar and e-commerce experiences.

In retail stores or other shops, guided selling happens person-to-person. Salespeople should be knowledgeable and confident enough to speak about products face-to-face and be able to give recommendations and advice to customers during their purchase process.

In an eCommerce situation, the virtual nature of shopping, combined with the sheer number of visitors, requires another approach. Digital sellers use AI, chatbots, and shopping experiences to sort through customer needs and bring them the best product.

The Guided Selling Process

The guided selling process begins with assessing and understanding the buyer’s needs. This can be a formal process through an evaluation or an informal one done via a simple conversation. Once complete, regardless of the method used, the seller should have a complete picture of how the buyer intends to use their new product or service, what complementary products they are already using, how it fits into their existing stack, what it is replacing or adding, what integrations are required, and what their requirements goals are for it.

Based on this information, the sales reps will gather a select product group that best fits the buyer’s needs. They then present their prospect with the options and thoroughly review each offer. Acting as a subject matter expert, the seller helps the prospect make an informed decision about the best fit based on the information that the purchaser provided.