For manufacturers of custom products, long sales cycles are a common challenge. Unlike standard products, custom product sales cycles typically involve more dialogue with customers, from the initial design phase, into quoting, pricing, and order confirmation.
Technology solutions such as design automation, CPQ, guided selling, and 3D product configurators, are enabling custom manufacturers to streamline their processes and shorten their sales cycles.
Use design automation to cut down on repetitive tasks
For custom manufacturers, designing each new product often involves reworking the same base designs to fit unique customer specifications. This can be slow with a high risk of errors, especially when done manually. Design automation, using rules-based programming, enables design engineers to automatically generate custom designs based on specific inputs.
With design automation, you can:
- Automatically create accurate design variations without manual intervention.
- Instantly generate files for manufacturing and CAD drawings based on unique customer specifications.
- Reduce design engineering lead times, enabling sales teams to provide accurate quotes quickly.
Removing repetitive tasks that typically slow down the sales cycle ensures that you can respond to customer requests faster with accurate design configurations that meet their needs.
Implement a CPQ solution to streamline pricing and quoting
One of the biggest bottlenecks in custom manufacturing sales cycles is the quoting process. Traditional quoting can be complex, often needing input from different departments, approval layers, and manual calculations. With a CPQ (Configure, Price Quote) solution, manufacturers can streamline this process significantly.
CPQ enables sales teams to:
- Configure products according to customer needs and automatically calculate prices based on those specifications.
- Generate accurate quotes quickly without waiting for approval from engineering, production, or sales managers.
- Reduce pricing errors by automating discounts, and other pricing adjustments.
By implementing a CPQ system, custom manufacturers can speed up the time it takes to deliver accurate quotes to customers, improving the customer experience and reducing the time from the initial inquiry to an order being placed.
Empower your sales team with guided selling
Custom products often require a large volume of complex specifications, making it difficult for sales teams to have accurate and complete product and pricing knowledge. Guided selling tools simplify this process by guiding sales reps through each stage of the configuration process and ensuring they can configure and price custom products accurately.
Guided selling works by:
- Providing a set of questions or configuration options to help sales reps and customers build accurate specifications.
- Providing recommendations and alerts if specific configurations aren’t possible or may require additional costs or lead time.
- Ensuring that every quote is feasible from both a design and manufacturing point of view, reducing time spent on design revisions and rework.
With guided selling, your sales team can accurately configure complex custom products without the need for extensive training. This boosts sales efficiency and empowers your sales team to close deals faster.
Use 3D product configurators to enhance customer experience
Customers increasingly expect to see what they’re buying—and for custom products, this can be challenging. A 3D configurator allows customers to see real-time visualizations of their product with each custom option they choose.
3D product configurators provide several benefits:
- Enable customers to visualize the product with each customization option, reducing uncertainty and increasing buying confidence.
- An interactive purchase experience that can be embedded in your website, enabling sales reps, customers, and distributors to configure your custom products anywhere, on any device.
- Streamline the process of configuring and ordering custom products without the need for extended back and forth dialogue.
3D product configurators can significantly enhance customer buying experience, reduce quote-to-order times, and reduce the amount of costly rework.
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