Sell Better

Mercato Knowledge Manager is a tool that empowers sales people with rich information to prompt and direct improved selling with a 'live' guided workflow.

The Tool's architecture draws on as much or as little information as demanded from inactive data such as product photographs to highly granular levels of active data such as 'live' price and stock changes.

This flexible and intuitively surfaced tool guides users to manage an accurate sell from a position of knowledge based strength to match customer choices exactly. Sell more, faster.

Proven to shorten and improve sales process by up to 95% with efficient workflow
Delivers clear competitive advantage for greater volume of higher net margin sales
Improves sales accuracy to reduce costly returns or mis-selling
Enables sales process to be devolved down to the less initiated
Improves customer experience and service excellence with deep levels of knowledge offered to exactly match customer requirement-to-solution 'live'
Transformation that is proven to drive annualised growth

This tool can also be deployed for end user buyers to guide themselves through a purchase online.

Squeezing more sales or provision of service from a team whilst driving down overheads are perhaps the holy grail of any enterprise.

Helping sellers make decisions 'on-the-fly' is a complex operation involving analysis of requirements. This can involve consultation, extensive documentation and lengthy meetings to assess and establish requirements – often at great expense.

Web-based product recommendation services have partially addressed this challenge, but traditionally these are not dynamic and have a dependency on technical expertise, restricting enterprise agility.

Allied to these challenges are myriad opportunities for broader transformation, and proven platform-independent technology is helping global business reduce operational costs and grow business, on time and on budget.

Harmonising, consolidating and improving internal & external product information sources to a central data repository and creating better business visibility in the supply chain
Opening collaboration between the many touch points of indirect worldwide supply chains
Leveraging a clear 360 degree insight across a sales community
Optimising a sales team to do a better job faster without costly training
Improving job satisfaction and employee loyalty
Streamlining route-to-market
Reducing transactional costs to help deliver more volume and value
Maximising sales productivity to add value to the bottom line
Unlocking time for sales to spend more time serving customers and prospects

Be more productive, be better informed.

Mercato Knowledge Manager is underpinned by powerful Data Management that brings together and provides granular product or service information. It provides 100% accurate and reliable data driven by a central, unified, context sensitive data repository. This is integrated with a very powerful Decision Engine that links the data to weighted questions and answers.

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The Decision Engine enables simple generation of qualified questions and configuration of appropriately rated responses. Most people engage based on needs and asking questions is about identifying requirements and guiding people through a process to ensure 100% accuracy in meeting their needs.

Question & Rating Engine

Quote Summary

Any Q&A driven process can be fully automated and configured to match any customer's business model, product or service provision needs. This automated methodology drives better business outcomes and can be applied broadly from selling bespoke insurance to high end IT server solutions or advising patients of medical diagnosis 'live'.

With a dynamically rendered and intuitively surfaced user dashboard, Mercato Knowledge Manager delivers a guided experience like no other and helps people make choices quickly. It structures end user behaviour and business workflows to improve productivity and reduce cost. The tool provides high levels of flexibility and extensibility.

Configuration to deliver very powerful business logic, providing pipelines between variables, questions or entire sections of data
View, edit and configure structure, sequence and weighting of questions
Configure and map response types and actions
Quick dashboard configuration to match any step-by-step sales environment
Localisation tool unlocks deployment on a world-wide scale by language, product sets etc
Provision of real-time tailored pricing/specification/service delivery, so business or service can be won or delivered quicker
Interaction with back end systems to automate in-stock and price level updates, guaranteeing accuracy of business offers and releasing time for other tasks
Point-and-click product detail and technical resource online
Indicates 'promo' or incentivised products or services for up/link sell
Complete search functionality, including parametrics on any variable
Can offer direct cross referencing to competitor products for comparative sell
Offers an auditable RFQ for simplified quoting, removing time wastage on requotes and returns
Records all communications to exceed corporate governance requirements, including product references, customer numbers etc in one accessible central repository
Platform independent - web, desktop and mobile platform compatible for all customer consultancy scenarios
Short implementation process and protection of existing ROI in both training and infrastructure
Management functionality unlocks total sales visibility from central control point to track, forecast and audit

Mercato's Data Management engine that underpins the tool can also generate new supply chain data from existing data to offer verified and accessible business intelligence that enhance the Knowledge Manager and the sales process yet further.

Mercato's unremitting focus on data quality, useablity and accessibility is what often makes this tool so strong and powerful. It can be configured to pool intelligence from the Data Management engine to automatically weight further questions based on previous 'touches' and information gathered from an individual. This means a telesales operative or an end user answering questions on a website, can be more accurately guided through the sales process based on their profile.

Equally, the Knowledge Manager can seamlessly and automatically integrate with Mercato's CRM tool to prompt other areas of an organisation to contact a customer/public based on outcomes. For example, the customer is interested in buying a specific server in 6 months time, the solution will automatically prompt an appropriate person in the organisation to call on that timeline empowered with specific intelligence to hand to better drive through that sale.

Amongst others, Mercato's Knowledge Manager is currently being used by 140 worldwide IT distributors and 7,000+ users in a roll-out active in 54 countries.

Mercato uses its proprietary Mercato Application Suite to rapidly deploy its tools via a SaaS model.

The deployment of tools requires no customer application programming, hosting or special skills as Mercato manages implementation, training and maintenance end-to-end.

Experience this guided solution and see it working for IBM