Connecting the Team Across Departments
Metro Sales is one of the largest independently owned Ricoh dealers in the United States, with over 55 years of service in Minnesota and beyond. Known for their commitment to delivering exceptional customer relationships, Metro Sales turned to SalesChain to replace their legacy CRM with a solution that unifies and simplifies operations across departments. With SalesChain, their reps can manage accounts, proposals, lease approvals, and used equipment inventory all in one place.
In this Case Study, we talk with Monte Shives of Metro Sales about how SalesChain has become a critical tool for their large sales organization. Monte shares how the platform supports everything from lease management to e-signature workflows, including the custom integration of their pre-owned equipment program. He also explains how SalesChain and Metro Sales have had a uniquely collaborative approach over the years, leading to mutual growth that is uncommon in most vendor relationships. You can watch this case study in video form or read the transcription we’ve provided below.
You can learn more about Metro Sales on their website: https://www.metrosales.com/
I’m Monte Shives with Metro Sales, a Minnesota-based dealership. We’ve been in business for about 55–56 years. We transitioned from a privately held company in 2019 into an ESOP. I’m the Senior Director of Sales, and I’ve been with the organization for approaching 29 years now.
Where is Metro Sales exceling today?
Metro Sales has always prided itself on being one of the number one Ricoh dealers in the United States. We’re one of the largest, if not the largest, independently owned Ricoh dealers in the United States. We’ve always proudly asserted that as part of our company, and I think we’re one of the top SalesChain users in the industry as well.
Prior to SalesChain, we had an in-house sales CRM, and we were transitioning away from that due to some changes with the ownership groups of that company and the direction our company was going. We reviewed a number of CRMs and chose to go with SalesChain. I think it’s been a successful combination of our large organization and what we bring to the table as far as sales goes and what SalesChain has brought to the table and what they do to support the sales reps. Those two things combined, along with some of our customization, have continued to make SalesChain an important part of the tools that our sales reps use to be successful. Managing their day-to-day account activities, managing customer interactions, utilizing the various information that’s available to our reps, whether it’s the leases and the lease database and upcoming leases and evergreen leases.
Just that whole portfolio of trying to maintain continuity with the reps, their customers, and the information that’s available, making sure they’re staying on track and approaching their customers in a timely and efficient manner.
How has Metro Sales made use of SalesChain’s Leasing Integrations?
As we continue to use SalesChain more, we are integrating more of an automated lease database process within it where we’re able to get lease approvals and lease upgrades and buyouts. We integrate that because we have multiple third-party lease companies that we work with. As we integrate that, it’s going to make our reps more effective and efficient, because right now they’re generally having to go to multiple locations to gather bits and pieces of information.
With SalesChain- we’re hoping to pull that all in so they’ll be able to see the customer they’re working with, grab their lease information if they’re a current customer. If not, they’ll be able to get a lease buyout, upgrade quote, get approval, and build a proposal.
We can do signatures within SalesChain. These things the reps were doing before with their customers- building a proposal in Word or a separate database, emailing it to the customer, using DocuSign to sign documents, and sending it to a sales admin person- they can now do themselves through e-signature in SalesChain.
I think the continuity of having all that information within one type of CRM for the rep, from the beginning of the process, the initial cold call, to building a proposal, building an order, processing the order, getting signatures, and sending it through into our accounting department- that whole process, as we get closer and closer, is going to make the reps much more effective and efficient.
Ultimately, the goal is to make them more effective and efficient so they can spend less time on their paperwork and more time being in front of the customer. That’s what’s important- engaging the customer, building those relationships, and getting sales, not working on lease upgrades, buyouts, approvals, quotes, and building proposals.
That’s not an ineffective use of their time, but it’s not the most effective use that we want for them to be successful.
How does SalesChain facilitate Metro’s Used Equipment inventory?
Metro Sales has always utilized pre- owned equipment. We have an internal program where reps can take equipment out from their current customer database. I don’t want to use the word stockpile, but they can reserve it for their individual sales for a period of time. We have two different kinds of use lists- one that’s available to the entire company and one that’s private to the sales rep for a period of time. We’ll just lump it together as the pre-owned equipment or used equipment. We worked with SalesChain on building and integrating our used equipment into SalesChain so that reps can essentially just go into SalesChain, go to the pre-owned equipment list, and grab one of those devices that’s been pre-built, pre-sold, but is now available to either them as individuals or to the overall sales force. It pulls all the appropriate accessories and the appropriate price, allowing them to build it just like a brand-new piece of equipment, utilizing all the features and functionality of SalesChain- the e-sign documents, building a proposal, all of that.
It’s been very effective. In SalesChain, you can see the used equipment price or the pre-owned equipment price. You can actually see how many people have put this on an order- not necessarily selling it, but proposing it to other customers. You can see how much excitement there is about this product so you can add urgency with your customer, like, hey, there are 3 or 4 people proposing this as well.
Once that equipment’s gone, it’s like a used car- it’s gone. You can always order a new one, but there are benefits to the used equipment. It’s good quality, lower price, sometimes with features they wouldn’t normally buy brand new because they don’t want to pay for those.
Building that used equipment list in SalesChain has been another big aspect that’s made the sales reps more effective.
What has been you experience working with the SalesChain team?
We have a very good relationship with SalesChain. Myself and a couple of other team members work directly with Tim and Jen and others at SalesChain. They’ve been very receptive to the ideas we have. It’s helped Metro Sales be successful by integrating some of the key aspects we do differently as a dealership compared to other dealers.
It’s also helped SalesChain integrate key features and functions that we think are important that other dealers can use. I think it’s going to continue to grow. We’re going to continue to offer good ideas for SalesChain. SalesChain is going to offer good ideas back to us, and we’ll continue to integrate those features and functionality in SalesChain to make our dealership more successful, make our sales reps more successful, and make our accounting people, admin people, delivery people who also use SalesChain more effective and efficient. I see this continuing to scale upward and us integrating more capability into SalesChain and growing. We’re working on a program to build our maintenance agreement program into SalesChain because it’s another software program we have off to the side.
We’re able to pull that information into SalesChain in a manual process right now, but we’re looking to automate it within SalesChain so we can get rid of that software program. It’s another aspect that, when reps are in the pricing page and they’ve built their equipment, they’re able to choose the product and the pricing program that goes along with the service.
We’re continuing to work with SalesChain on a daily, if not, a weekly, basis to continue to scale it to our needs.
What advice do you have for a peer in the industry who is looking for a new software tool?
That’s a great question. When we migrated from our previous CRM to SalesChain, we interviewed a number of companies. They’re large-based CRMs that everyone would be familiar with if I mentioned their names. One was more industry-specific to the copier and IT world.
SalesChain really seemed to align with Metro Sales in a couple of ways. One, like I mentioned, we’re a Minnesota-based company. We’re Minnesota-grown. Even though we see ourselves as a large organization in the copier industry, we’re still a homegrown company with homegrown values.
When we looked at SalesChain- I’ll use Tim specifically- we saw Tim and his leadership as having that same thing. We saw the synergy of Metro Sales, a homegrown organization built from the ground up, and SalesChain and Tim kind of the same thing.
We felt those two coming together would share the same values, challenges, struggles, and goals. That’s the path we went down. That’s why we chose SalesChain. We believed SalesChain would allow us the best opportunity to grow as an organization and also allow us to grow the CRM for our specific needs.
We felt we could work with SalesChain and Tim to grow some of the capabilities we needed that weren’t in SalesChain. We believed we’d be able to customize those. Tim and his team would work with us to do that. I think we’ve done that.
The experience has been positive. We’ve grown together well. It’s been beneficial for us and for SalesChain. I would tell any dealer that I think you’re going to get a bit more of that hometown feel from a company like SalesChain because of how they grew the company and built up their relationships compared to some of the larger platforms.
Sometimes you just become another number, another client. With SalesChain, it seems like we’ve gotten additional attention that we wouldn’t have gotten from much larger organizations. That synergy has been very positive for both of us.
