What is an agent for sales?
A sales configurator is software B2B companies, retailers, manufacturers, and service providers use to create quotes from customized product configurations. It allows sales reps to quickly and accurately configure the product or service for each customer’s unique needs. With its ability to easily configure complex products and services, a sales configurator can help companies save time and money on quote creation and ensure that customers receive accurate pricing and correct orders every time.
With guided selling, sales configurators make it easy for companies to make unique quotes quickly. Sales configurators have easy-to-use interfaces that let users pick options from a list of parts and features to make the best answer for a customer’s needs. This eliminates the need to manually figure out prices or look for products that meet customer needs, saving time and ensuring the information is correct.
Sales configurators do more than make prices; they also have powerful reporting tools that let you keep track of customer information and look for patterns in sales orders. They are also handy for helping people make decisions by showing them the best way to combine goods or services, taking into account things like customer preferences, budgets, and more.
Other Words for Sales Configuration Software: Configure Price Quote (CPQ)
What the Sales Configurator Can Do
Sales customization software is a powerful business tool that lets businesses give customers custom sales solutions. It makes setting up and managing complicated goods easier by letting users make customized quotes, product specifications, and bills of materials (BOMs) quickly and correctly.
A sales configurator tool usually lets you choose products, set prices, and keep track of orders with little to no human work. It can also make personalized quotes and receipts and connect to other software systems like ERP, CRM, and product configuration tools.
Companies that offer complicated goods or services with many parts or choices for customers to choose the best product or service may find that sales configurator software significantly improves over traditional quotes. It helps companies set up custom solutions quickly and give accurate quotes to customers without entering all the necessary information by hand. This saves time and money for sales teams and makes customers happier because sales quotes can be sent out more quickly.
Product knowledge management, rules-based validation, setup models, and interactive user interfaces are other features that sales configurators offer. Product knowledge management gives people access to much information about a product, like its cost, where it’s available, and whether it works with other products. Rules-based checking helps ensure that orders are put together with parts that work together and meet industry standards or customer preferences. Configuration models are made using industry standards or criteria specific to the company. They make it easy for companies to handle the complexity of product configurations. Interactive user interfaces make it easy for users to choose the right parts for the setup they want with little work.
Sales configurators can be changed to fit the wants and goals of a particular business. For instance, businesses might use advanced analytics to track what customers like or make production more efficient. Another feature of many sales configurators is their ability to provide valuable data for running a business. Because of this, sales configurators can be very useful for businesses because they make it easier to handle complicated configurations.
How Sales Configurators Help Make Sure Orders Are Correct
A sales configurator is a computerized tool that helps build a bill of materials (BOM) and a correct order during sales. Customers are shown several choices and goods that meet their needs when they use a configurator. The configurator then makes a bill of materials (BOM) that includes the customer’s choices.
The configurator considers all the options the customer selects and creates a complete list of everything needed to complete the order. A catalog holds information about the parts; the customer can get to it at any point during the sales process. So, the bill of materials (BOM) and the order information will be correct.
Once all the choices have been made, the configurator puts together all the needed parts into a single package that can be used for pricing, ordering, and shipping. For example, if an auto parts shop needs to set up orders for car owners, it will use different categories, like make and model, year of manufacture, engine size, and so on, to make a correct BOM.
The setup also helps ensure accuracy by ensuring all the parts work together before putting together the final order package. This keeps you from making mistakes that cost a lot of money, like choosing the wrong product or parts that don’t fit together and might not work together or break during operation or installation. Also, once orders are correctly set up using a sales configurator, they can be handled quickly.
Why sales configuration software is useful
Sales configurator software can help businesses in many ways, not just by ensuring correct orders. It can improve pricing accuracy, improve customer service by making offers that are more relevant to them, lower costs by reducing the need for manual data entry, and boost efficiency by streamlining the sales process. It can also give you a better picture of what customers want and how the market is changing, which can help you make better choices about what products to change or add. It can also help increase sales by giving up-to-date details on inventory levels, price strategies, marketing campaigns, location restrictions, and more.
Makes the sales process automatic
The best thing about using a sales configurator is that it dramatically simplifies the sales process. This means that salespeople can spend more time building customer relationships than doing tedious tasks like making offers and keeping track of orders. It also eliminates mistakes made by people entering data into a system by hand or misunderstandings between customers and sales staff.
Sales configuration tools also make it easier for sales reps to remember prices and specs for various combinations. The software sets up, pricing, and quotes complicated goods and services, so sales reps don’t need to know about every product’s limitations, add-on feature, or price model.
Offers Consistency Across All Sales Channels
Thanks to a sales configurator, customers, sales reps, and dealers all have the same experience across all channels. This is because it unifies product definitions and prices so that all information is correct and consistent. This helps ensure that customers can get the same goods and services whether they buy from a salesperson or an online store.
It makes the buying process more interactive.
Sales configurators use advanced formulas to make the best sales quotes based on customer wants. They give people who might buy something an interactive experience with pictures, specs, prices, and other important information about the deal. Customers can make intelligent choices based on the information the customization gives them. This could help reduce the sales cycle and bring in more money.
Sets up Cross-selling and up-selling
Because sales configurators can create product solutions based on customer needs, they offer upselling and cross-selling opportunities through their guided selling feature. The configurator lets businesses offer customized deals without needing their sales team to be experts in every product or service they sell. This way, they don’t have to rely on the knowledge of their sales reps alone. This brings in more money while reducing the costs of teaching sales staff about many different goods or services.
It comes up with accurate prices.
A sales configurator can also help you get accurate prices, which is another advantage. By letting customers choose options that change how much an order costs, businesses can be sure that the total price is calculated correctly. Sales configurators can also talk to inventory systems, which let businesses know exactly how many things they have in stock at any given time and ensure they don’t place too many new orders.
It gets rid of production mistakes.
By ensuring that each order has the proper information, businesses can avoid costly delays in production due to inaccurate or missing information. With this level of accuracy, delivery times stay the same, and mistakes in production are less likely to happen.