SalesChain has announced the release of version 8.1 of its software, featuring the new forecast 30-60-90 view, activity tab sorting and net-new versus existing activity sorting.

Forecasting

• SalesChain has added a new 30-60-90+ Forecasting Desk to give users another option for viewing their pipelines. This interactive report was inspired by one of SalesChain's archived screens — the "Sales Funnel Report by 30/60/90," and features a slim, expected close date-based breakdown. Notably, the "next step" of each lead is prominently displayed and directly editable with a brand-new pop-up interface for easy sales team communication.

BETA: TCO/MPS Toolset

• The much-anticipated total cost of ownership (TCO) and managed print services (MPS) utility is now in beta. SalesChain is beginning the initial round of testing with a select group of dealers who have been instrumental in guiding its design and development efforts.

Business Intelligence – Charting

• SalesChain has added a new "Tile" construct to display a specific metric such as revenue or GP as a number. This allows for additional level of creative display of information within our custom dashboarding tools.
• It has also created three new dashboard templates for users to have more options when they create custom dashboards in SalesChain's business intelligence platform.

Statement of Work

• SalesChain has created a Statement of Work (SOW) utility to allow dealers to creatively define lists of services offered and to generate marketing-friendly documents for customers. This can be used by sales to create a talk track aimed at cross-selling all of the different services your business might provide.
• SOW options have been added to the Customer Advanced Search utility so sales can easily search customers that do or do not currently have a particular service.
• SOW documents generated will be highlighted and attached to the SOW to easily track SOW history.
• Attachments may also be marked as SOW related and highlighted in the SOW history viewer.

Great America Leasing (GAL) Integration

• SalesChain has upgraded its credit application integration to utilize GAL's latest Restful API system. This will replace its longstanding SOAP-based integration module and opens up the door for more features and future improvements.

Activity Tracking

• SalesChain has added filtering capabilities to view new prospect versus existing customers within the Forecast 30 – 60 – 90 and Forecast by Category Slim.
• It has added colorization to improve the visualization and highlight actions when viewing account activities, scheduled tasks and more, so prioritized actions can "pop."
• It has added the ability to filter activities by type within the account view. Users can now filter activities to show only attachments, documents, notes, emails or tasks in addition to viewing all.

Fixes and Tweaks

• SalesChain has modified the method of securing the tabs on the Order Breakdown by not showing a tab at all if the user does not have access to the underlying component. This means certain users may not only be permissioned away from parts of the OBD, but they will no longer see the areas they do not have access to, avoiding potential confusion and frustration.
• It has removed the old Help library from the Menu/Help section. This feature has been replaced by SalesChain's new self-help library.
• It has fixed an authorization request with the DLL integration that was causing the portfolio request to be locked.
• It has updated its integration to HubSpot to support upgrades to API scopes.

In other news, SalesChain has released a new territory analytics tool to their software platform. This tool will allow dealers to use their software platform to collate, analyze and make decisions based on sales opportunities in different geographic regions.

According to SalesChain CEO Tim Szczygiel, this tool provides a "spot-in-time analysis."  It helps dealers understand the range of their opportunities in a particular region, based on ZIP code, so they can balance their sales reps' customer bases in those areas.

The software syncs sales rep territory information input with national census data. This gives users density data, such as total number of businesses in a ZIP code or a region, along with how many accounts are currently in that region along with the number of leases, and the revenue being generated there. This balancing tool has the capacity to run scenarios with the data to help managers make informed decisions.