SalesChain Case Study: United Business Systems

United Business Systems is a staple of the Buffalo, NY community. Their sales and support teams have accrued no shortage of accolades as they continue to be the most trusted partner for office technology in Buffalo. With the help of SalesChain, this stellar team has helped bring better office automation and technology to Central and Western New York for over 35 years.

In this Case Study, we talk with John Kerling of United Business Systems, who represents the sales branch of a family business. We focus on the deal pricing, document generation, and commissions components of the SalesChain system and their benefits. You can watch this case study in video form, or read the transcription we’ve provided below.

You can learn more about United Business Systems on their website: https://www.ubswny.com/

Hi, my name is John Kerling. I am the vice president of United Business Systems in Buffalo, New York.  As the vice president of United Business Systems it’s hard to really explain what I may do in a day, but I am doing whatever it takes to keep the customers happy.

I’ve been with UBS 30 years. My father and my uncle and another partner started UBS in 1983. I got involved with the business as my father had brought a new product and wanted me to come aboard to help him sell.

SalesChain is the hub of our sales organization. We’ve been with SalesChain for twelve years now. We use SalesChain to price our deals and put together our proposals. Getting a deal priced quickly and getting a proposal in front of the customer quickly helps us stay on top.

So, before SalesChain, it was mostly Excel spreadsheets and it was very time-consuming to price a deal. Our sales rep would have to pull pricing from a price sheet, put together an Excel spreadsheet with the equipment on there.

Then we would have to massage those numbers to try and make it work.  By using SalesChain, everything’s right there at our fingertips. We have catalogs within SalesChain that help us price deals. Now we can really look at a deal and depending on the size of the deal, it really helps us massage that deal and be able to figure out how to make it work. With SalesChain, I do not have to manipulate spreadsheets or provide pricing to my sales reps. I don’t have to get as involved with deals because my reps have the information they need and they can price deals within the parameters that I provide.

Because everybody is pricing in the same system, we have fewer errors going on and I have the information I need to view reports. It’s not enough just to have an opportunity. You know, the process of pricing a deal is so fast you have to be ready to hand that customer a document right away or else someone is going to come in and show them an alternative. If that happens, you’re going to lose that deal. SalesChain has helped us present and close orders a lot faster. We can have proposals out in five minutes. Because of that, we are able to make more money.

For us, adding the commission piece with SalesChain has been a real game changer for us.  When we price up the deal in SalesChain and we get an order, now when it comes to commission time I can simply click a few buttons and the guys are paid. Before we were doing commissions in SalesChain it was all spreadsheet and spreadsheet-based. It was time-consuming. Accuracy, I don’t feel it was ever there and there were times where I just threw my hands up and said pay them. Having the commissions system in SalesChain has saved me time and it has saved me money.