Archive for April, 2019

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Information is power: talk like a ‘Techie’, sell like a ‘Tiger’

April 18, 2019

Occasionally, staff at channelcentral are lucky enough to meet our CPQ users, where they share their experiences using our CPQ Tools. Instead of guessing what our CPQ users really value, they simply tell us. Genius.

Our CPQ users generally fall in to two categories:

  1. Sales people – our key target audience. Working in the IT sector, but generalist sales people, good with people, strong admin skills and well organized.
  2. Technical people – to a lesser extent our target audience. Depth of technical knowledge. When they use our tools, we’re in some ways prouder.

For some applications Sales people are our primary target audience. Here’s why:

One of our users recently told our CEO that she loves our CPQ Applications because clients don’t expect her to know the answers to technical pre-sales questions, which she can look up quickly within product technical specifications, in our CPQ application. When she can answer almost instantly, they’re amazed; she’s triumphant.

She has worked out that knowledge trumps pre-conception. Nobody expects her to know the answer, they fully expect her to go away and find out. They expect to wait hours or days to progress their project or purchase. She can quote independently in real-time.

Provide people with the right information, in the right tool and you are enabling anyone to be expert in any industry – and to be able to deliver customers information when they need it.

Combine knowledge with sales ability. You’re a tiger.

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Configure Price Quote: Call Center Integrations

April 10, 2019

It’s pretty much standard for Manufacturers to use Call Centers to supplement the work their Distributors do, to create demand for their products. Whether that’s inbound or outbound the principle is the same: a Call Center person is talking to a Reseller (Retailer) about a potential deal, which often leads to a quotation.

In the case of a Reseller, they’ll no doubt receive an email from the Call Center with the call to action: “Contact your Distributor for stock and price.” Weeks or even months later: “Did you end up buying that product?”.

Seriously. In 2019. This is how things work.

channelcentral has a different approach:

  1. Deploy the same CPQ platform in your Call Center as in your Distribution tier. Surface stock levels per Distributor in the Call Center CPQ instance.
  2. Create a workflow to allow Call Center Users to email quotes ‘off the system’ to the Reseller.
  3. Include links to transact the quote in Distributors’ Web Stores OR to edit the quote in the CPQ application that is embedded in the Web Stores. Choose one or many Distributors for each country.
  4. Record everything and report it.

Placing the CPQ application in the Reseller tier allows the same awesome workflow, but for end user interactions.

It’s 2019. This is how things should work. Seriously.

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SIX Ways to Transform Ease of Business

April 4, 2019

Most companies would identify with this particular statement: “We want to be easier to do business with.”

It’s how to become easier to do business with; that’s the challenge, not deciding it’s a good thing. In the CPQ market we believe the following are solutions to that challenge:

1. Replace disjointed and labour intensive processes with smooth, accurate and where possible, automated processes. Moving from spreadsheets to online systems provides behavioral insights that help you improve your processes. Good sales come from good processes.

2. Open all hours. Make your ‘closed’ sign redundant. Allowing 24 x 7 access to your sales tools not only stretches the sales window, but also means customers can work when they want to, not just when you do.

3. Replace email ping-pong with slick workflows. Identify clunky processes which result in endless email replying. Who likes mail trails with 30 replies? Nobody. Deploy slick workflows to simplify more complex buying processes. If you are working on a document or proposal why not look to collaborate online instead of mailing edited files to other indefinitely?

4. Surface key buying decisions together: stock, price, promotion in your sales tools. Alt-tabbing between apps is the modern day ‘swivel chair’. Consolidate data. If it costs, say $20, to do a quote, why do five different quotes to win one deal?

5. Introduce guided buying. Don’t always expect your customer to start with a blank canvas. Use starter kits, bundles, solutions, templates etc. to save time. Apply machine learning to improve the quality of these shortcuts.

6. Utilize your Business Information (BI). Decisions based on real data is better than guessing what your customers want. Use their data to improve their user experience.

Ease of business doesn’t improve with one giant investment, it’s lots of tiny steps and the odd leap.