How To Accelerate Your Sales Operations With Visual Configurators

By Ketan Panchal, Hitech CADD Services

Visual product configurators play the role of deal negotiators. By engaging the customer with an array of options and greater control over end-product design, visual configurators increase a customer’s ownership in the design process and skyrocket the chances of sales.

A visual configurator integrated with design automation can send instructions directly from the point of sales to the shop floor and to smart machines to ensure an error-free, optimized manufacturing process. It helps to automate a major portion of sales operation tasks and pre-manufacture tasks, cutting down overall lead times, ensuring in-time order delivery, and better customer experience.

Whether a company is in industrial product manufacturing, metal fabrication, building product, or furniture manufacturing, it’ll fall behind if it can’t adapt to the growing trends of mass customization and personalization and short delivery times. So, design automation coupled with visual configurators has become indispensable.

Conventional ways of displaying products on paper catalogs, use of paper-based technical drawings, preparing quotes according to RFQs, and filling tenders using papers and excel sheets consume days to months and loss of opportunity. The use of digital tools and e-commerce technology in sales operations and every other part of a business provides the efficiency and cost optimization needed in today’s markets.

Ecommerce tools help manufacturers push their products through all digital channels, on buyer-friendly portals, and to display them in spaces where the target B2B or B2C audience can easily find them.

Due to the shift in consumer habits brought on by COVID-19, Gartner predicts that by 2024, 80% of ordering and replenishment will be touchless for most organizations.

A visual configurator offers all-in-one solutions for sales teams and manufacturers. They speed up B2B sales functions by putting products online and offering 360-degree visualization. They allow sales teams to capture accurate customer requirements and close the deal, irrespective of the channel where the customer accesses the configurator.

Challenges To Sales For ETO/CTO Products

A customer with 100 times more options at his or her fingertips can daunt any salesperson who can offer in counter only the options available with his company. Dealing with today's informed digital customers is the greatest challenge for any salesperson. Sales face challenges from dealing with competitors’ pricing, margins, customer back office functions, and making sure that engineers design the product per need, while manufacturing delivers quality on time.

Increased Trend Of Digital Ecommerce

The rise of e-commerce has irrevocably changed the buyer approach, and even B2B customers are adopting B2C approaches. Customers now look for a virtual experience of products and simultaneously compare competitors' products against features, specifications, costs, and delivery schedules.

According to Forester, the B2B e-commerce market is growing rapidly with over 1.8 trillion USD and accounts for more than 13% of total B2B sales.

As most B2B customers are now digital savvy and aware in real time of product trends, manufacturers need to strengthen their sales functions with technology that covers omni-channel market insights and helps sales close deals ahead of competitors.

Traditional product launches spend enormous time in preparing sales and marketing toolkits based on paper and PPTs. This delays time to market. But product launches based on modern digital tools and visual configurators provide a faster way.

Trend Of Personalization Growing Strong

With more options at hand, every customer wants personalization. A salesperson has to capture detailed requirements and changes to be made to off-the-shelf products to effect customization. For ETO and CTO manufacturers, even small levels of personalization can create enormous workloads in developing the specifications.

The conventional way of capturing customization requirements is a highly tedious job for sales and also for the customer. This often leads to deals being lost. Conventional methods of capturing requirements also diminish chances of cross-sell and upsell, as without advanced guided selling tools, meeting even the first level of customization demands becomes cumbersome.

Dealing With Back-Office Functions

For ETO/CTO manufacturing, all customization specifications have to be captured and passed on to stakeholder teams. Most of the time, it demands a higher level of decision making and communication with engineering and manufacturing. Much time is lost in conveying the right need, and in displaying products.

Lack of visibility into inventory and shop floor situations on production makes manufacturers unable to commit up-front on delivery schedules and order quantities with certainty.

Legacy product customization workflows create conflicts among teams, errors in specifications, and finally, customers dissatisfied by delay in quotes, mismatched specifications, and wrong/higher pricing.

Dealing With Sales Resources

For ETO/CTO manufacturers, the product mix varies from simple to complex. To know the product in totality requires a salesperson to be more knowledgeable in terms of functions and usages. Sales teams need to be thoroughly prepared with a detailed level of specifications, catalogs of all product mixes, and their applicability, if they are to close deals by putting forward the right product to fit customer needs.

This requires detailed training of salespersons. And any attrition in the sales team disrupts the closing of deals, causing loss of opportunity, requires fresh training for new resources, and weakens overall sales functions and output.

How Do Visual Configurators Speed Up Sales Functions?

Visual configurators incorporate 3D CAD platforms like SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Inventor, Creo and use plug-ins and API from technology tools like DriveWorks and Tacton. It integrates with most business legacy systems of CRM, ERP, and MES, along with CAD and PLM.

A visual configurator with CPQ capabilities automates many sales and manufacturing pipeline tasks, improves workflow from sales to order and manufacturing, and improves productivity across these functions.

Provides The Ability To Visualize, Customize Products

3D and 2D visual configurators allow manufacturers to put all their products in digital 3D format and 2D drawings and image formats. 3D product views, 2D drawings, and images are backed by real time CAD data and integrated with PLM.

Manufacturers can create simplified product structures to configure their complex ETO and CTO product mix.

In 3D immersive experiences, customers can visualize products in a 360-degree environment. As a customer selects options, end-product specifications are generated in real time, without any intervening time and effort losses for sales personnel.

It generates documents on specifications with product images and required technical drawings for all stakeholders. This allows sales and customers to visualize products, make customizations, see changes visually represented in real time, and decide immediately on specifications.

Reduce Time To Market And Build Omni-Channel Presence

Since visual product configurators are linked to 3D CAD data of products, sales and marketing toolkits are generated almost concurrently. It reduces time to market from months to days with ready 3D product designs and virtual marketing toolkits.

Also, visual configurators can be accessed on any device like a tablet, desktop, laptop, or smartphone. They are web-based and cloud-based, so customers and salespersons can access them from anywhere. Thus, they allow omni-channel presentation of product customizing facilities and increase market reach.

Quick Quotations And Closure Of Deals

As part of its CPQ functionality, a visual configurator incorporates pricing strategy and margin strategy of all possible configurable combinations and options. It provides insights on market competitions and in-house inventory and production levels, allows sales to provide accurate quotes with order quantity and dispatch time. This reduces a lot of time in researching markets and also commitment from manufacturing. Deals are closed in hours and not in weeks or months.

Offers Guided Selling Through AI

An advanced visual configurator allows the capture of buying trends from past and online behavior of customers. Through AI and data analytics, it enables sales to offer similar products and configurations to boost cross selling and upselling.

Reduces Sales Team Dependency On Engineering And Manufacturing

Since most of the products are available on a configurator, sales teams have minimum or no dependency on engineering and manufacturing for approval of sales processes. They can provide 100% accurate quotes and margins intake. Only for highly specific needs for ETO requirements, sales teams need to consult engineering and production for specifications and lead times.

Accelerated Workflow From Sales To Manufacturing

A visual configurator allows integrating all functions of manufacturing and helps to share data as a single source of truth about product customization.

Within no time, all verticals notice any new order and what needs to be manufactured, and when to dispatch. This accelerates the time from order to manufacturing from weeks to days, and manufacturers can even quote for next-day deliveries.

Cuts Dependency On Skilled Sales Personnel

A visual configurator provides real time insights on product specifications and functions. It employs user-friendly formats to get the quote ready and formatting per customized orders. So new salespersons can be onboarded swiftly and sent to the field with a small level of orientation. This removes the dependency on salespersons in case of attrition.

According to Gartner, some of the major KPIs that are boosted by a visual configurator include:

• Reducing time to quote from weeks to hours
• Reducing the order fall-out rate
• Implementing a new marketing offer within hours
• Increasing the opportunity to close rate
• Increasing the average margin for online products
• Increasing the average order value
• Accelerating time needed to introduce a new product in the ordering system from months to weeks
• Eliminating the need for face-to-face training classes when launching a new product
• Reducing the time required to train a new sales representative from weeks to days

Conclusion

Since digital e-commerce is growing exponentially, product display, offers, and presentation before customers are also changing rapidly. A few years ago, a customer was happy to see just product images and text-based specifications to choose from. But today’s customers demand near real-time virtual experience of products to choose from available options. They also demand personalization options like color and additional features that enhance the value of usage. As a tool, the visual configurator provides one of the best tools to cater to current customer expectations, while streamlining sales and manufacturing workloads. In smart factories, automated production can begin as soon as the customer finishes customization on a visual configurator and places an order. And it’s a tool that sales teams of manufacturers can’t do without anymore.

About Author

Ketan Panchal, a Design Manager at Hitech CADD Services, promotes engineering excellence through design automation. He, with his team of automation specialists, develops winning and user-friendly solutions for complex customization engineering projects by leveraging technology innovation in the manufacturing space.