Up to 80% of purchasing decisions are made as anonymous website visitors. Visitors are filling out less web forms and enabling more privacy protections in the browser.

So, what secrets are your competitors implementing to convert their anonymous web traffic to leads?

"The secret to converting more anonymous web site visitors is providing online product configurators."

A product configurator gives web site visitors the ability to visualize and personalize your products or services, getting them one step closer to imagining themselves as buyers.

The automobile industry was one of the first adopters of configurators, providing rich online user experiences to customize car colors, interiors, wheels, and packages. Customers can truly visualize what they were going to buy… all online without going to a showroom.

In a post-COVID era of remote work and shopping, the ability to interact with a product prior to purchase is what separates progressive organizations from their competitors.

​​When the term “CPQ” (Configure-Price-Quote) first emerged, the idea of customer self-service product configuration was a core part of the CPQ vision. The measurement of success for any CPQ implementation is the ability to move beyond data grids, page layouts, and spreadsheets; and provide an interface that is as close as possible to experiencing the actual product or service.

This ensures customers receive exactly what they expected, reduces quoting errors, and reduces the time from lead to opportunity close.

From a CRM perspective, anonymous web site visitors appear as Leads in Salesforce once minimum interaction criteria are met. Fingerprinting details, like IP address, browser agent, and a cookie-based session are recorded on the Lead.

Slack messages can help celebrate minor wins that notify internal teams when web visitors interact with a configurator. From a resource planning and forecasting perspective, it can be useful to view the "shopping carts" of what anonymous visitors are configuring.

Every Salesforce Consultant, Systems Integrator, and Administrator is familiar with the GenWatt product. GenWatt is an example product pre-installed in every demo version of Salesforce CRM.

This live site demonstrates both 2D and 3D GenWatt product configurators using iDialogue.

As visitors interact with the 3D configurator; leads, quotes, and opportunities are updated in Salesforce in real-time (contact me for a demo. You're guaranteed to love this!)

Configurators are not exclusively for product manufacturers.

SaaS, software, subscription, and usage-based tech companies effectively deploy online calculators to help customers explore "What If?" scenarios. Like "what if I upgrade from the 1GB of free storage plan to 50GB?"

Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing calculator is a great example of using transparent pricing and a range of products to help prospective customers understand the potential costs at various scales. https://calculator.aws/

Implementing a product configurator brings a whole new set of metrics to the lead generation process.

In addition to traditional website visitors, product configurators introduce:

• ​Configurator Interactions
  
• Avg Time in Configurator
  
• Configurator unique sessions per visitor
  
• Configurator conversions
  
• Time to Conversion

Lead Scoring
Once converted, configurator interactions can be integrated with demand generation solutions like Demandbase to provide advanced lead scoring signals.

Web development tools have come a long ways since the early days of building websites.

Using tools like iDialogue "Experience Builder", product configurator development is conducted side-by-side with CRM products, pricebooks, and Leads so that everything is integrated from the beginning.

The waterfall of implementing a successful product configurator project is well known, and can be reliably estimated and implemented within a reasonable time frame.

Configuration API and Project Implementation framework:
https://docs.i-dialogue.com/#/configurators/overview

SDK and source code for the GenWatt demo:
https://github.com/pacificapps/configurator-sdk

I'd love to learn more about your business and discuss how a product configurator can have an impact on your Marketing and Sales processes.

Contact me anytime at mike@getpacificapps.com to discuss.

Core to every digital CX (Customer Experience) is the concept of "Dynamic Personalization".
Every web page, email, text message is personalized to the customer.

"Bottom Up" a CX transaction is personalized through a series of layers:

CRM Data
A CRM Identity; such as Lead, Contact, or User; and a CRM Object; such as Campaign, Opportunity, Quote, or Contract, are the basis for personalization.

Content Templates
Templated content contains merge tags to be replaced by CRM data. iDialogue uses a handlebar format across all types of content, such as {{FirsName}}, {{Quote.TotalAmount}}, etc. Templates may merge single values or collections of table rows. Both text and images may be defined in templates.

Merge Engine
CRM data is merged with content templates based on the delivery medium.
By decoupling the data and templates, any delivery format may be supported. Common formats include HTML, PDF, Word DOCX, and plain text. Transformations may happen in real-time or batch.

Delivery
The merged content may be personalized in real-time based on a web browser request. Or the content may be delivered as email with attachments.

CX Clients
Often times the content must be delivered in a format that is responsive to the needs of the requesting client. The client is most often a browser on a desktop computer or smartphone. But may also be kiosks and other digital experience mediums.

I've long been a fan of Jakob Nielsen's research on usability. I think the Internet, and customer experiences in general, could be improved by implementing many of his principles.

Given iDialogue "virtual rooms" make great use of PDF documents, I found Jakob's recent article headline to be provocative.

PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later (link).

But like most provocative headlines, this particular article buries the lede and actually does offer some very useful advice in its conclusion, which is to "Use HTML Gateway Pages Instead of PDFs".

"Pew Research brilliantly uses HTML gateway pages to summarize the findings in its reports while still allowing users the option to download the complete report PDF."

We use this in practice when implementing CRM-driven dialogues.

Let's use a typical Salesforce use case. When sending a PDF quote generated from a Salesforce Opportunity, the essential piece of information is the "Total Amount". In the iDialogue Room Builder, the value of the record's Total Amount can be merged into the HTML of the default landing page, with a link to an itemized PDF (see screenshots below).

Invoices are another classic example of providing the customer with a high level summary of the invoice and an option to download a detailed PDF for their records, if necessary.

Online customer interactions can be described as "Events". Orchestrating a series of events is a "Flow".

One example of an event-driven orchestration:

• Send quote
• Receive alert when quote is viewed
• Auto-send reminder if quote is not signed in 3 days
• On eSign event, update the Opportunity Stage to "Closed-Won"
• Notify Account Manager of executed agreement
• Send customer an onboarding and welcome email

iDialogue raises dozens of platform events and provides out-of-the-box actions integrated with Salesforce Flow Builder to automate any end-to-end process that interacts with customers.

Studies have shown that 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual. When embedding images into quotes and proposals, customers process the images 60,000 times faster than text (source study).

Combining the power of personalized text with an image of a service or product will instantly increase conversions by 15%... and in some cases even double the conversion rate!

Learn more about configuring image templates using Microsoft Word and the iDialogue CRM connector for Salesforce.

Conversely, portal interactions are customer-initiated. Portal access requires a username / password, along with the prerequisite onboarding and identity verification.

Examples of using rooms

• Invitation to review quotes / proposals / contracts
• Online product configurators
• Upload documents
• Collect eSignatures
• Collect payment methods
• Collect web form input data (billing name / address)
• Send receipts or acknowledgements

Examples of using portals

• Providing access to licenses and entitlements
• Submit support cases
• Download product specifications and user guides
• Search documentation and knowledge bases
• Return merchandise authorization (RMA)
• Discussion forums and groups

iDIalogue is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) for hosting personalized "rooms" integrated with leading CRM systems.
Try a 30-demo and get hands on with the "Room Builder" in iDialogue Studio.

Collecting information from a Lead or Contact during the sales cycle is a balancing act. You need to collect “just enough” information to initiate a dialogue, but not inundate the prospect with too many requests for details like billing and shipping address until they are ready to purchase.

iDialogue room builder now supports a form builder for collecting essential information at any step in the quoting, sales, or contracting process.

• Add “SField” plugins to any room page layout.
• Delegate data entry to the customer. Saves Sales Reps time.
• Fewer back and forth emails to collect last mile details.
• Mobile friendly interface gives customers the convenience to submit orders from anywhere.
• Form submissions trigger regenerations of documents automatically.
• Improves data quality of closed-won opportunities.

Pricing a Subscription-as-a-Service (SaaS) product can be a challenge. Most companies start with a simple user-based license model, paid monthly or annually. Billing then is simply a function based on the number of licenses in the subscription.

But for companies like Addigy, who monitor Apple devices, the billing requirements are more specific to how the service is used.

SaaS companies who have invested in Salesforce as their CRM platform are actually within reach of implementing a usage-based-billing (UBB) solution on Salesforce fairly quickly. The billing account, order, and product information are readily available.

By implementing iDialogue SaaS Quote-to-Cash, Addigy was able to pull in near real-time usage data into their Salesforce Accounts. Standard formula fields are constantly calculating and forecasting future billings based on up-to-date usage data. Time-series usage data is available directly on Salesforce Account records.

The result is more visibility into future billings and elating customers with a flexible business model that allows for variable usage and billing.

This tutorial demonstrates how to generate documents using Salesforce Flow. Checkout our Flow Actions under the "Document" and "Room" categories once iDialogue is installed.

I'm excited to announce our partnership with AviateNow, a Salesforce ISV partner, to deliver a SaaS solution to the Aviation industry. Full press release here.

By embedding iDialogue's document generation API into their managed package, AviateNow was able to rapidly extend their Aviation FBO app with comprehensive quoting capabilities.

“As the Aviation industry re-emerges from the 2020 lockdown, apps like AviateNow will help Fixed-Base Operators (FBOs) deliver an end-to-end digital user experience that will revitalize and optimize the aviation industry. Integrating iDialogue’s API into AviateNow gives Aviation Ops Managers the power and flexibility to generate documents for any stage of their process; including quotes, flight plans, agreements, contracts, invoices, and maintenance schedules,” said Michael Leach, CEO of Pacific Apps. Inc.

iDialogue’s no-code document automation solution allowed AviateNow to substantially shorten product development lifecycle by delivering CPQ functionality to its customers in record time while achieving notable savings compared to other platforms. Adding the iDialogue lightning component to AviationNow’s Reservation page layout provides one-click access to generating pixel perfect PDF quotes that can be delivered using personalized portals with an all-in-one experience of quote delivery, eSignature, Chat Room and ePayment functionality.

"AviateNow is very excited to bundle iDialogue into our product offerings for the aviation industry. iDialogue greatly enhances our product offerings and is a clear winner in the Salesforce ecosystem. iDialogue's flexible architecture seamlessly integrates with AviateNow’s product offerings. We are thrilled about our partnership with Pacific Apps, Inc. and the product features that we can offer by combining the power of both platforms!" says Charles Wagner, Founder of AviateNow, Inc.

Pacific Apps and AviateNow will continue to collaborate on the development of the best-of-breed solution for the Aviation industry by offering additional workflow automation and document templates to streamline processes and increase operational efficiencies.