Technology is permeating every aspect of our lives, automating tasks that are mundane, repeatable, and time-consuming. Yet without a clear vision of how each technology works alongside the next and without a clear understanding of which technologies offload which task best, technology’s cacophony can be deafening and confusing.

Similarly, we find the sales technology stack vitally important, yet confusing. Several technologies’ capabilities overlap, and each claims to solve more and more of the sales efficiency and productivity equation. Enter dynamic guided selling (DGS). Put simply, dynamic guided selling is about placing your sellers at the center of your technology strategy by giving them the benefit of the data you collect. It’s about collecting the automated seller and buyer interactions, both human and nonhuman, that happen throughout the customer lifecycle. Thus, your technology is optimized to give your sales team a competitive advantage.

DGS Capabilities 

There are six core capabilities within dynamic guided selling, with data predictability underpinning the six. Without trusted data, the insights your tech stack can deliver will be diluted or cloudy and, therefore, less actionable. These are the capabilities:

  • Digital insights: information about customers, products, and your business environment from various sources like websites and mobile applications.
  • Contact cadences: a sequence of actions taken with the expectation of advancing and/or closing a deal.
  • High-impact content: insights gleaned from each piece of content’s historical performance.
  • Predictive activities: With the use of AI, these activities reduce the reliance on reps to enter data manually. The next-best activities that are most likely to advance or close the deal can be predicted and the salesperson prompted to take action.
  • Optimized solutions: analysis of the configurations of solutions presented to customers.
  • Customer insights: information that increases the transparency of buyer relationships by enabling organizations to gain a complete picture of their relationship with customers and prospects.

Deploying Dynamic Guided Selling

By understanding the insights these capabilities provide and the technologies that capture the associated data, you can begin applying these insights to impact four key sales metrics: opportunity volume, deal velocity, deal size, and win rate. On the basis of the capability you’re looking to leverage, it’s important to also understand which technology (e.g., sales engagement platforms, content management systems, quoting tools) enable which capability and impact which metric, and to what degree.

In our upcoming webinar, “Accelerate Sales Rep Performance With Data And Insights,” Seth Marrs and I will dive deeper into these capabilities and enabling technologies. We’ll also introduce an assessment that will help you better understand which DGS opportunity area can have the biggest impact on your sales organization’s ability to grow.