Upgrading to the electronic signature technology is one way for your business to expedite closing deals. Customers do not have to wait to arrange face-to-face meetings, and documents can be processed electronically much more quickly.

Many of your customers will finance their purchases through leasing companies, and e-signatures are legally accepted by all the major leasing companies.  SalesChain is the only vendor in the business technology field that incorporates secure, approved, e-sign capability right into the software suite.

Our Lease Portfolio Management utility is integrated into the deal pricing module, and we have direct integrations with many major leasing companies, like Great America and DLL.

Optimizing deals can involve time-consuming negotiations between sales representatives, managers, and clients. SalesChain’s Service Pricing Module allows dealers to publish CPC rates and provides sales reps with intelligent and flexible tools for pricing blended service in minutes. They may easily tailor service rates on a deal-to-deal basis. The system configuration parameters allow administrators to lock reps into a series of specified “tiers” of pricing and can even allow reps to “buy down” service rates, donating a portion of their commission to lower the price of the deal in tight pricing situations, such as when they are pricing against a competitor. Integrated bid desk pricing workflows simplify and track secure pricing. Service pricing achievement is clearly measured within the dashboarding tools. This encourages ongoing evaluation of successful pricing strategies by the whole team.

A significant amount of time and energy, for both the sales and back-office teams, is taken up by keeping track of client data.  The SalesChain platform streamlines this portion of company workflow with a bi-directional integration to e-Automate. This ensures consistency through your sales orders with active synchronization between e-Automate orders and SalesChain in real-time. All changes are tracked live to the other system nightly.

Whether your business is in imaging, IT, managed services, or some combination of these offerings, businesses across the channel are facing pressure to increase their profitability. Reducing operational costs is one very effective way of increasing your margin; but how do you do so without negatively impacting your capabilities or productivity?

Automation software works to facilitate an intelligent approach to cost containment and reduction by increasing the productivity of your existing resources. Purpose-built automation software represents the greatest opportunity to increase service to the customer (end-user) while systematically reducing costs.

Since any software is an investment at face value, management often overlooks the potential for savings in time, along with savings related to error reduction. Yet, cost reduction is frequently cited as the number one benefit of adopting a more automated workflow strategy.

If you can automate more processes in multiple departments within your business using one system or software suite, it means you can collect and analyze more data easily. Since SalesChain serves as a repository of information for your forecasting, sales, MIF, lease portfolio, achievement, fulfillment, and order information, we can present data to you in easy-to-understand reports and charts which give you a clear view of your business.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, famously quotes/said? (Is this his direct quote or is he quoting someone else? I had the same question on the BI handout): “You can’t fix what you don’t measure, so you’ve got to measure everything.” SalesChain’s business intelligence utility was built with this principle in mind.

One of the most challenging things to achieve with a dashboarding tool is complete, accurate data, especially if that tool is not integrated directly into the source of the data which it serves to view. SalesChain has a unique advantage when it comes to data accuracy since sales rep activity, leasing activity, service activity, and more are all being logged in our system already. Since we have the data, we can very easily add it directly to your charting tools. This means no cross-pollination or manual entry across disparate systems, eliminating potential points of error.

SalesChain’s Catalogs Made Easy utility includes machine hardware and IT products and services for a comprehensive, organized, and custom catalog of everything your company sells.   Having all this data in one place and accessible with a few clicks saves your sales staff valuable time.  It also makes cross-selling of the IT products and services along with the print deals they are proposing simple, since adding IT services is an integrated part of our order pricing tool. To facilitate this SalesChain has integrations with Ingram Micro and TD Synnex.

Pricing hardware and IT services on a single proposal is an essential component to the fluidity of sales team management.  Individual sales representatives have built-in autonomy when they are on the road to create, price, and document sales proposals quickly and easily. They can create loyal IT customers out of their existing print base with SalesChain’s dedicated IT pricing tool. They can also import and easily manage the product catalog and list of services for easy reference right inside of SalesChain’s order breakdown.

The sales management team can support the sales force with SalesChain’s powerful Scenario Pricing tool.  This allows them to easily address difficult pricing situations by targeting a specific value within the deal pricing calculator.  Management also has access to comprehensive business intelligence and forecasting tools. These provide clear data on how IT products and services sales stack up against MFP and Copier service sales monetarily and can help make the transition into IT and the cross-selling process more efficient.

Your customers value time and will prioritize a system that features ease of use and efficiency.  SalesChain’s is the only vendor in our class to offer secure and unlimited e-Sign document capability that is built right into our product.

Since most customers will finance their deals with leasing companies, electronic signatures are an attractive addition, leading to expedited paperwork processing and fewer human errors between sales representatives and the back office. Obtaining electronic signatures will cut the time it takes to close deals, whether a customer signs on the spot using a tablet or iPad or reviews and signs a locked document package sent via email.  In fact, we were able to help our customers cut their days shipped outstanding (DSO) by 50%.

Workflow notifications triggered by this signature process can be sent to the signer, the sales representative, and any other desired operational staff.

Every deal and every customer is unique.  Having the ability to customize the details of a contract can help to optimize your sales.  The SalesChain platform includes robust pricing tools that give sales representatives the flexibility to quickly generate multiple contract options integrating a variety of service pricing scenarios.

Our tool can calculate the cost of service with intelligent cost per copy (CPC) pricing, either for individual machines or for a hardware bundle. Users can configure different service rates at different pricing tiers and buy down the cost of service to win profitable hardware deals.  Users can easily add zero-cost service items.  Hardware and service costs can be integrated into a single proposal to present to a client, making it easier for them to see their options and less likely that they will refuse a deal because they are reluctant to sort through complicated numbers and choices.

Quality software is well worth the cost when the software solves problems, integrates with other systems, and even predicts the future. Powerful software solutions can convert your company’s workarounds into workflows that may help to save time, money, or both. Reducing human error, increasing efficiency, and consolidating tasks are all benefits of a well-designed software platform.

A system that integrates with your business processes to help you reach your goals and enables you to analyze real-time data can help your business become significantly more profitable.

SalesChain works to maximize our value within the dealer channel as one system, one solution which offers solutions to many of a dealer’s complex problems. Schedule a demo to see how.

This article was written by Matthew Szczygiel