- Product cross referencing refers to the process of grading match of items between source and client websites in a B2B market.
- Product Cross Referencing is a vital process in the manufacturing/industrial sector
- In this post, we’ll understand how product cross-referencing can be improved with automation.
What is Product Cross Referencing?
In a manufacturing or industrial business, cross-referencing your products with those of your competitors on factors such as quality, price can help you sharpen your pricing strategy as well as response speed. Competition Cross-referencing is a vital tool for the sales team to respond to RFP/Bids better.
Without cross-referencing, the sales team will not have access to competitor data regarding pricing which can have an adverse impact on the sales strategy.
Bottlenecks in Cross-referencing
- Product cross-referencing is a manual process and can be very exhaustive due to the large data volumes.
- Scaling up of Product cross-referencing process is not feasible.
- Accuracy of data is largely dependent on the expertise of the personnel and hence prone to errors.
- Obsolete product cross-referencing solutions involve multiple stakeholders who work independently.
- A minor disconnect between the individual members can affect the quality of output by a large margin.
Why is Product Cross Referencing Important and how can you improve it?
“According to a Salesforce study, 50% of sales go to the vendor who is the first to reply. Not the cheaper one or the better one”
In the fast-paced world that we live in, the first-mover advantage assumes greater significance. Vendors must outpace their competition in responding to bids to win them. And automating the manual and data-intensive task of cross-referencing is the only way to get ahead of the competition.
Product Cross-referencing is an important function in B2B market and eCommerce. It can save companies time, and money if executed properly or stagnate their growth if ignored; many organizations rely on it to stay ahead of their competition. But dependency on human resources can slow down the process and not provide timely support to the sales team to respond to RFP’s.
With AI-powered tools in the market, organizations need not be limited to the expertise of personnel to execute elaborate tasks like cross-referencing.
Automation of product cross-referencing can help your organization to speed up the process while reducing errors. It also helps to accurately estimate production volumes.
Automated Cross-Referencing Solutions
RAPBot is an intelligent cross-referencing solution to enable Search & Grading match of items between source and client websites. With RAPBot you can eliminate the bottlenecks of the competitor cross-referencing process and grow your profit margins.
Product details like key features, serial numbers, manufacturing details, etc are captured for a comprehensive analysis and reporting. This will enable your sales team to make the right decisions regarding product display, description, pricing, and alternate product suggestions.
The Bot uses multiple parameters for Rule-based grading, Data-based grading, and Quality control. It performs exhaustive data scrapping and search operations for cross-referencing with hardly any omissions.
The resultant data intelligence can be used to make key decisions with respect to pricing and planning manufacturing volumes. This also makes upselling and cross-selling easier.
Benefits
1. Automated Cross-Reference: reduces efforts by 50% by automating data scrapping, QC, and report generation.
2. Reduce Costs by cross-referencing more products in a short span of time and enabling better decision-making.
3. Improved Efficiency: Product comparison and matching are improved with minimum human intervention resulting in superior Quality Control and higher efficiency.
