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Sales Product Configuration

Sales Configurators and Advisors


Using VisiRule, you can easily build sales configurators and advisors which help prospects find the right combination of products and features which best fit both their functional requirements and budget. Configuring the 'right' set of products and add-ons can be a very demanding and complex process. Often there are engineering rules or commercial restrictions which affect the choices available in terms of compatibility. These can be captured and expressed within your VisiRule chart.

 

Non-programmers can create charts which encapsulate the configuration process. VisiRule will automatically construct a network of questions directly from the chart and ensure that users are only asked questions that are relevant to their search for a product or service. In this way, you can supply your customers the pre-sales knowledge they need to make informed purchasing decisions. Your staff and prospective customers can access an interactive system from their device, answer some questions and get accurate and personalised product-specific advice and suggestions that previously would have required talking to a specialised product engineer.

 

By allowing VisiRule authors to concentrate on the logic associated with the answers to questions rather than how to organize the asking of questions, VisiRule makes it easier to design and build interactive systems. VisiRule charts will typically ask different sets of questions as a result of someone answering, say, 'Male', as opposed to, 'Female', or 'Smoker' as opposed to 'Non-Smoker'. VisiRule supports a wide range of question types and integrates with web technologies for displaying graphics and links to external pages and resources for, say, explanations.

By coupling VisiRule to the Flex rule engine, you can use business and product logic to configure a product proposal ensuring that all the right logic is used for both inclusions and exclusions. You can capture the logic and process of a top sales person, and offer an interactive web-based session for each prospective customer. The system asks each customer about his or her requirements and planned uses, analyses all of the available products to find the best overall items for that customer; and then can generate a detailed written explanation of each recommended item and how they will combine to meet the customer's needs. Once a customer knows a product is right for them, they are much more likely to quickly make a positive purchasing decision.

You can link VisiRule charts to a database of components or modules to produce accurate and reliable quotations as part of the CPQ process. You can export the results to report writers to produce high-quality proposals.

 

Of course, you could use Excel. But in Excel, user interface forms typically present all possible questions and drop-down boxes, whether needed or not for a particular case, and are likely to overwhelm users. Excel solutions do not scale well beyond a small department - it's hard to make sure everyone is using the latest spreadsheet, particularly when deployed to hundreds or thousands of agents. Even the best Excel-based decision suite won't scale to customers. And the knowledge encoded within the Excel cells as formulae is often mangled and hard to understand and almost impossible to manage and maintain going forwards.

 

As many visual tools have shown, organizing ideas and logic in a graphical manner can help refine your own understanding of the subject matter. The difference is, with VisiRule, these diagrams are directly executable, and can be used to construct active and valuable applications.

Use VisiRule to build systems which deliver automated expert knowledge at the pre-sales and point-of-sale moment in time. This will, in turn, give you more sales, less problems and happier customers.

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