Guided Configuration – Key for Quick and Error-Free Configuration

Guided configuration is not a new term in the world of configurators, but with augmenting complexity of products and services, it is playing a critical role in reducing the configuration time and improving error-free quotation process.

So, what is Guided Configuration & How is it different from Guided Selling?

Guided Configuration is the mechanism of using attributes, not as adjectives to product, but as questionnaires to help sales reps reach to a configuration which is near to final. These logical and relevant set of questions help system to narrow down the configuration options and auto-include or exclude product components and set quantities based on answers.

While Guided Configuration is to narrow down product components within the configuration, Guided selling helps sales reps or customers narrowing down the product catalog. By answering guided selling questions, user gets the sub-set of product catalog, which is more relevant to the customer and has better chance of selling.

In nutshell, Guided Selling works on Product Catalog, while Guided Configuration works on underlying Product Configuration.

So, the next question is Why Guided Configuration?

In the competitive sales world, 2 critical factors to increase your sales probability are quoting time and error-free quotes. The increasing complexity of products and services imposed adverse effects on these 2 factors. Guided Configuration is a powerful, yet easy to use, technique to narrow down the configuration process, increase sales rep efficiency and helps generating error-free quotes. The logical and relevant questions ensure that incompatible components are excluded, while mandatory ones are auto-included. Also, if underlying CPQ system supports, it ensures that correct quantities of components are included. As example, while configuring a hosting solution, the set of questions regarding security, protocols, accessibility, backups etc can help sales reps reaching to a near final configuration in quick time.   

So, let’s consolidate the list of advantages of using Guided Configuration.

• For complex products and services, it helps quickly reaching to nearly final configuration. Which means less time for complex configurations.
• It eliminates the incompatible components and ensures addition of mandatory items. This assist in error-free quotes, from composition perspective.
• The Guided Configuration questions are assume to be simple and lucid. Which enables even the naïve sales reps and users from other channels to configure and sale effectively.
• If underlying CPQ system supports, Guided Configuration can also helps in setting correct quantities of product components.

Conclusion

With increasing complexity of products and services, along with urge for speed and error-free configuration, Guided Configuration could be an effective technique to quote faster and error-free.

Advance CPQs like Apttus, provides out of box extensive support for Guided Configuration.

Please wait for my next article on how the new Attribute Based Configuration (ABC) framework of Apttus CPQ, brings Guided Configuration to a much higher level.