Independent Dealer Approach with Custom Bundled Solutions
LDI Connect has built its reputation as an independent dealer focused on delivering the right technology and services for each customer’s needs, regardless of manufacturer. By taking this manufacturer-agnostic approach, LDI can bundle products from a wide range of providers with custom-configured service and pricing options, ensuring clients get tailored solutions without bias. For over 15 years, SalesChain has supported this mission by streamlining pricing, proposals, and workflows, helping the team eliminate manual tasks and deliver polished, accurate quotes quickly.
In this Case Study, we talk with Evan Hantman of LDI Connect about how SalesChain has become essential to their sales process. Evan explains how his team uses SalesChain to maintain a detailed product catalog, build bundled proposals on the go, integrate with eAutomate for seamless order management, and unify workflows across departments for a smoother, more efficient experience. You can watch this case study in video form, or read the transcription we’ve provided below.
You can learn more about LDI Connect on their website: https://myldi.com/
Where is LDI Connect excelling today?
We’ve always done very well in terms of bringing an independent and vendor-agnostic approach to solutions we provide to our customers. What I mean by that is we’re not beholden to any vendor or any particular solution when it comes to our customer’s needs. We have the ability as an independent provider to bring those solutions tailored to their needs and pull from our wide array of partners in developing those solutions.
So I think where we do really well is using our expertise and our specialists in different areas that have been with us, and been in the industry for so long, to create highly customized and tailored solutions that really meet and exceed our customer’s needs.
What role does SalesChain play in LDI’s day-to-day operations?
SalesChain has really provided us with a vehicle over the years for allowing us to bring in all of our different solutions and products that fit those solutions into a singular platform that’s allowed us to price, propose, and turn around these solutions quickly to our customers. When we do these deep dives into their needs and pull from that product catalog to present them with the proposal that is accurate, on point, concise, and explains what that solution is that we provide to them.
How does SalesChain’s “Catalogs Made Easy” service benefit your team?
The SalesChain catalog is very easy to use and it allows us to create bundles that we pull from on a regular basis. It allows the people that are doing our pricing and our configuring to see the different solutions in a way that they can put together a viable product quickly on the go, whether they’re on a computer, looking at an iPad or a tablet, or otherwise.
It gives them the flexibility of being wherever they are and using whatever vehicle they’re using at the time, whether that be a tablet, a computer, or otherwise. I think any proposal and pricing configuration tool is only as good as what you put into it.
So having the SalesChain team at our disposal and really maintaining that product catalog and keeping it up to date for us has been a home run and is something that we rely on on an everyday basis in doing our pricing and proposals and things of that nature. So that’s been a home run.
But also it’s been immensely more productive for the people in the grind on a daily basis doing that pricing versus what we had before when it was a completely manual process and just so time-consuming and tedious. So it’s really been something I can’t speak highly enough of, and it’s been a tremendous asset to our process on a daily basis for the many years we’ve been using it.
What would you tell dealers who price and configure deals manually?
I would be hard-pressed to believe that there are fellow dealers actually still doing this manually. But for any dealer doing this manual, I would say, what are you waiting for? It’s a no-brainer. It’s easy to set up. It’s not like there’s a big process involved to make it work for you.
The ROI is there tenfold. SalesChain has always been on the forefront of the industry and how things evolve within the industry. Honestly, it has been a vehicle for us to lean on in understanding how other dealers are doing things, how we could do things, and really giving us some guidance, as recently as this morning, in fact, on how they can help us to accomplish certain goals.
How does SalesChain connect your team and unify your process?
We follow our entire process from post-pricing and proposing a deal to getting paperwork signed through e-sign to submitting that paper digitally through SalesChain workflow, to tracking the order process and the delivery process from team to team, from department to department. Throughout the process, it has been a huge value add and has really broken down many data silos and also different kinds of silos within our process throughout the years.
The more we’ve gotten acclimated and adjusted our processes to run through SalesChain’s workflow, the better off we’ve been and the more unified we’ve become as a company when tracking these processes. It’s been great from that standpoint. More recently than when we started using the workflows- this was probably about 2 or 3 years ago now- we started pushing our orders into eAutomate from SalesChain, which has been a huge time saver but also allowed us to better manage the flow of the orders. When you have orders flowing through two different systems at once, it can be a challenge to track the status of those orders in those two completely independent systems.
But this has allowed us to manage one single order workflow where we’re pricing it out in SalesChain, we’re pushing them to eAutomate, we order the products there, but then we’re able to have visibility from both perspectives as to where we’re at in the order process.
Why has LDI Connect been with SalesChain for so Long?
I’ve been with SalesChain, and we’ve been with SalesChain, for so long because it’s the best solution in the industry. It’s the best out there for us. SalesChain has been a great partner. Honestly, I am always on top of what’s available to us, what tools are available in the industry.
I can’t say enough great things about just how on top of the needs of the industry SalesChain has been throughout the last 15 years that we’ve been a customer, and how their tools have evolved to meet the needs of us and the rest of the community at the same time.
My general advice would be, keep an open mind. Don’t be too dependent or partial to your current systems and workflow. There are many opportunities to improve out there, be it in existing systems, new systems, or some combination of both. I think communicating with your vendors and understanding what possibilities are out there, what situations they’ve seen that can help guide you, is always a prudent course of action to take. And something that can really help immensely.
