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Discover more on sales automation software and product configuration:
Manufacturers win more with friction-less ordering
“The solutions that we’re developing with KETIV are very cool. It’s something that the space we’re working in hasn’t seen before…it’s a differentiator.”
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KETIV + Tacton CPQ
KETIV partners with Tacton, the fastest-growing configuration, price, and quote (CPQ) solution for manufacturers worldwide, in order to power our customers’ most complex product and pricing solutions.
From visual configuration to CAD automation, KETIV recognizes Tacton CPQ software as the spearhead to enact end-to-end automation for manufacturing companies.
Automated CAD and Proposals
Data is the thread that connects digital manufacturing. Product configuration generates powerful data outputs and puts them to work, streamlining your sales and engineering processes to avoid repetitive tasks. Empower customers, partners, and sales reps with sales automation software, that generates accurate 2D and 3D CAD files instantly without the aid of engineering.
- Customer and sales reps don’t need CAD skills to generate accurate technical drawings and quotes
- Dynamically update CAD models and file outputs based on user selection for SolidWorks, Autodesk Inventor, and PTC Creo
- Compress sales cycles and improve customer satisfaction while reducing reliance on engineering
Overcome Sales, Design, and Manufacturing Challenges With Product Configuration
52% of the Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 are now extinct. Survivors have embraced digital transformation to increase resilience and harness new opportunities. They have the data and capabilities to respond more quickly to:
- Changes in the market
- Evolving Customer Expectations
- Market disruptions
- Mass customization requirements
- Manufacturing complex products
Only through automation can manufacturers meet the twin challenges of increasing product complexity and growing customer expectations.
Product configurators are the spearhead to automating end-to-end manufacturing
With sales automation software, manufacturers can automate and streamline sales configuration, pricing, and quoting-as well as the custom engineering and manufacturing process central to shipping error-free complex products faster than competitors to satisfied customers for an all-in-one sales hub experience.
Increase output, drive innovation, and grow your market share. Digitize complex configurations to make selling complex products easy.
What Is Product Configuration?
Product configuration and automation tools give buyers and sellers the ability to configure products to their exact specifications. It’s a win-win: buyers get more choice and ownership over the products they buy, while sellers can charge more and improve customer experience.
Product Configuration Simplifies Sales, Design, and Manufacturing
“The more complex the product, the harder it is to produce a quote”
Product customization and marketing automation is becoming the new standard across industries. But while mass customization solves problems for customers, it creates just as many for the manufacturers. The more complex the product, the harder it is for the sales team to drive a good customer experience by selling it and making it profitable.
Frequent Challenges of Complex Manufacturers
- Too Many Options: The sheer volume of potential product options makes it impossible for salespeople to configure products consistently, which decreases sales productivity.
- Errors: Salespeople frequently make mistakes that snowball into huge problems as data flows downstream to engineering and the shop floor,
- Slow: Quoting complex products manually (using a combination of pen, paper, and Excel) takes a long time, and constant communication with a sales representative, increases the likelihood of losing customers to more responsive competitors.
- Training Is Tough: Only highly skilled employees can even attempt to configure and quote complex products. New hires are hard to find and require lengthy training to get up to speed.
- Fragmented: Configuring products requires a manual exchange of information between the customer, the salesperson, an engineer, and the shop floor, which is slow, labor-intensive, and inefficient, which directly impacts sales performance. There are too many gaps-each hand-off risks miscommunication and misunderstanding.
- It’s Not Scalable: Every product requires custom engineering, which swamps your engineering department with menial work, robbing them of time better spent on more valuable tasks. With elite lead management and automation tools, selling is made scalable.
Speed up your product configuration management by streamlining it with product configuration software.
Product Configuration Software
Product configuration software automates the sales process to a high degree with a sales tool, allowing for straightforward customization of the most complex products via a guided experience decreasing repetitive tasks for a sales team. The software contains pre-programmed rules that dictate how products can and can’t be configured (which parts are compatible or incompatible, where the limitations of a particular material lie, etc.). With sales process automation, users keep from configuring “impossible” products (i.e., one that can’t be manufactured efficiently or won’t operate effectively in the real world).
Product configuration software streamlines the entire sales portion of the make-to-order or engineer-to-order process, turning a once slow, manual, error-prone series of events into a fast, automated, error-free workflow. Traditionally, sales reps had to sit down with customers, translate their requirements into product options in their heads, work out prices in spreadsheets, and go to engineering to get custom drawings. Today, configuration software can do all of this automatically, configuring better products faster to reduce costs and provide a superior customer experience.
Configuring, Pricing, and Quoting Complex Products With CPQ Software
Quote on the spot with total accuracy using CPQ.
With CPQ, users interact with the product configurator automation tool that guides them through the complicated configuration process.
- Present customers with “guided selling” prompts designed to determine their unique specifications
- Provide optimized product configurations for customer’s needs and budget constraints
- Maintain manufacturing efficiency
- Generate an instant price and quote
Benefits of CPQ for Manufacturers of Complex Products
- Fast: Sales cycles can be reduced from weeks to seconds, which means higher win rates and greater customer satisfaction with a sales automation platform.
- Straightforward: Even new hires can sell a complex configurable product without seeking advice from managers or the engineering department.
- Accurate: Product configuration rules prevent mistakes on the front end that tend to cascade downstream, wreaking havoc.
- Productivity: Salespeople can serve more customers as most of their workload is automated. Manufacturers can scale capacity without simply throwing more bodies at the problem.
- Lower Costs: Reduced labor in the selling process and fewer mistakes and delays in production mean better margins and more profit.
Visual Configuration Provides B2B Buyers a Standout B2C-Style Experience
Increase a customer’s selection assurance by allowing them to view what their finished product will look like before purchase, with a sales automation tool. Then give them the ability to check out immediately to close the sale. Visual CPQ solutions empower customers to configure products themselves using a 2D or 3D model rendering in a web interface with real-time product visualizations.
Embed visual a product configurator into your website to give buyers a self-serve experience or for sales reps to leverage in the field.
Create a consistent cross-channel customer experience throughout your sales process whether with a sales rep or online while ensuring accuracy with product configuration rules.
Why Buyers Love Product Configuration
Product Configuration Can Be Highly Visual
With product configuration software like Tacton, manufacturers can provide rich, visual configuration experiences for their customers. Instead of talking through product configuration in hypotheticals or looking at generic product photography, customers can configure products in 2D or 3D environments, giving them greater confidence in their choices.
AR and VR product configuration is becoming increasingly popular. These new visual technologies make the customer experience even more immersive and compelling while improving decision-making in the sales pipeline.
Pricing Is Available Immediately
Buyers don’t have to wait for salespeople to crunch numbers, seek approvals, or request information from engineering or project management leads before receiving a price for their configured product. Product configuration software generates prices in real-time as products are configured, feeding this information to the user in real-time (depending on the seller’s preferences), dramatically shortening sales cycles.
Frictionless Ordering Process
Predetermined engineering rules constrain product configuration in such a way as to eliminate errors and back-and-forth from the ordering process, easing lead management. Every configuration is optimized and manufacturable, pricing is instantaneous, and this information flows into an accurate quote that customers can immediately access. A configure, price, and quote process that once took weeks can now take minutes with the proper sales navigator rules in place.
Why Suppliers Love Product Configuration
Sales Generate More Profit
Manufacturers that use product configuration software experience a 7% increase in sales and a 10% higher win rate. Customers get a choice of sales channels and consistency as they move between them. ales teams can serve customers with better products, more quickly, in more compelling customer experiences.
Another massive benefit of product configuration is the impact on training. At a time of chronic skills shortages in the manufacturing industry, product configuration software’s automation feature helps bring new hires up to speed in days by automating the configuration process and eliminating mistakes that allow sales teams more time for sales outreach.
Related to this struggle, onboarding new sales reps can be a considerable challenge and can hurt sales activity while training. New hires have to understand products so profoundly that they can act as sole configurators. They need to know every option and what can be, and cannot be, produced. With product configuration software, all this knowledge and decision-making is handled within the engine. It’s so straightforward that customers can even bypass sales to configure products for themselves with a sales automation platform.
Visual Configuration Provides B2B Buyers a Standout B2C-Style Experience
Increase a customer’s selection assurance by allowing them to view what their finished product will look like before purchase, a crucial section in the sales pipeline. Then give them the ability to check out immediately to close the sale. Visual CPQ solutions empower customers to configure products themselves using a 2D or 3D model rendering in a web interface with real-time product visualizations.
Embed visual a product configurator into your website to give buyers a self-serve experience or for sales reps to leverage in the field.
Create a consistent cross-channel customer experience throughout your sales process whether with a sales rep or online while ensuring accuracy with product configuration rules.