Assisted Selling Tools provide sales process automation to support complex offer configuration and quote generation. For some people, sales automation means managing sales leads and customer contacts. The type of sales automation Apprentice Systems focuses on is sales automation for complex products, services and systems. In this arena, the biggest challenge is configuring an offering in order to price it for the customer. Automating product and process configuration, and generating an accurate and complete sales proposal quickly, take the concept of sales automation to a whole new level.
For complex products and systems, the knowledge required to accurately select and design solutions usually resides in the engineers, not the sales people. In many cases the sales person collects customer requirements and then sends them to applications engineers back in the home office. It can take a week or more to return the information necessary to generate a sales proposal. This long cycle time can mean lost opportunities, as competitors learn to respond more quickly.
In the service arena a similar process takes place. The knowledge of what needs to be done to solve a customer’s problems often resides in the heads of internal consultants, who then consult with sales people to help them build an accurate and complete estimate. Given the time available to prepare a quote, this process may be complete (though labor intensive), or may be shortchanged to meet a deadline. If a project comes in significantly over the expected time and cost, the customer is dissatisfied. Fixed bids can lead to lost profits.
Apprentice Systems helps you build a custom Assisted Selling Tool that will enable a sales person to generate an accurate and complete proposal in front of the customer, in a matter of minutes or hours, not days.
This is done by automating the product and process configuration processes.
In product configuration, rules for product and component selection, as well as rules for how components are related, are captured easily and quickly through a visual interface. New rules are integrated with the click of a mouse, without a line of code being written. A custom Product Apprentice is then generated, which is used to capture customer requirements. A bill of materials for the configured product is generated, and solutions can be automatically documented with 2D schematics and 3D visualization where appropriate.
In process configuration, the complete process model is captured, along with rules about how tasks vary under certain circumstances. A custom Project Apprentice is then generated that allows dynamic project simulations, resource balancing and automatic sales quote creation.
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