(This is the sixth in a series on The Power of Choice – Leveraging Configuration Technology to Differentiate, Simplify, Perform and Win, by Mike Shields, Co-Founder and CEO of eLogic Group.)

The First type of Mixed-Mode we’ll discuss is Standardized Products – this type is fully pre-designed and ready for Self-Service…

BUT what does today’s and even tomorrow’s self-service model need to offer? The Power of Knowledge at the point of Demand…

For Consumers it is becoming a selling process that is guided by current and past choices and historical preferences…

The new experience leads to greater and greater degrees of cross-selling, up-selling, pricing differentiation, other service offerings.

These practices are making their way into the B2B markets…

Guided Selling is replacing or augmenting sales calls… with smart dialogues and well-developed knowledge bases, even complex products can be surveyed, assessed, quoted and ordered. The key is to encapsulate the knowledge of the best solution sales person and the entire support team into that guided selling process.

Role-centered/Context aware… this is the key step toward truly effective dialogues with a diverse audience for specialized products and services. These dialogues need to be developed to accommodate the needs of various types of users with differing levels of expertise in the relevant domains. They must be knowledge-based – and they must anticipate what each user needs to accomplish, and keep them within their authority limits and capabilities. In the early models for guided-selling, and sales configuration, product selection, etc. there was most commonly a single user interface for each application… and this restricted its effectiveness and reach to a subset of the entire target community. Each User Interface need may have spawned a unique application, and a new data repository, etc.; and in turn creating an overly complex environment with disparate views of solutions.

New models are now emerging that enable multiple categories/classes of users to experience these dialogues as far more ‘personalized’ and more ‘intelligent’. The knowledge base includes identification of the user’s role and privileges – and the dialogue is always in the context of the users specific needs at that point in time. For technical and complex products and services this is the most effective manner of presentation.

So, even for standard products, this guided selling approach is relevant to help each user find and evaluate all of the available choices in fulfilling demand. It is the starting point for an efficient and effective selling process.