SalesChain has released the latest update to its software, version 9.3, which brings powerful enhancements designed to improve your team's efficiency. From advanced finance company integrations with real-time buyout requests, to new options for tracking sales activity across product types like IT and AV/security, this release is packed with features tailored to meet the evolving needs of office technology dealers.

Finance Company Integrations

GreatAmerica

• We expanded functionality to include application submit and decision notifications.
• We added new functionality to view Invoices.
• We expanded functionality to include buyout/upgrade quotes.

US Bank

• We expanded functionality to include buyout/upgrade quotes.
• We added new functionality to view Invoices.

Finance Company Buyout Integration Requests & Messaging

Leasing is fundamental for the office technology selling process. To further enhance your sales rep and leasing coordination processes, we have added the ability to request and receive buyout/upgrade figures right from within the Customer Profile and Proposal and Order pricing forms.

On the Customer Profile Page, simply click on the "Buyout" button next to the desired lease contract.

This feature will initiate a real time request for buyout/upgrade based on the functionalities and participation of the finance company's API capabilities. Not all finance companies have this feature. US Bank and Great America are the first to automate this feature. Others like Canon Financial Services, DLL and Wells Fargo are in the works. If a finance company does not have a real time API, an email will be submitted to the appropriate party (at FCO or your lease coordinator).

Sales Reps can use the buyout/upgrade numbers within the Proposal and Order pricing tools by simply clicking a button. Simply pick the desired "Buyout or Upgrade Type" to have the appropriate value placed onto your proposal. The value will automatically be placed within the correct area on the Pricing tab.

We have also made enhancements to proactively communicate with the sales reps using the new SalesChain Messaging system to send and log communications to users when results are available. Users will receive an email notification and be able to view results online within the relative Customer or Proposal or Order or Credit Desk view.

Accounts List Advanced Search

We added the Company Type filter to the advanced search utility. This will provide users with the added flexibility to search company records by company type. This feature can be accessed using the filter option Advanced Search > Account Info as seen above

Activity Tracking – Product Specific

As more dealers are selling alternative products like IT products, managed services, A/V and security (to name a few), tracking sales rep activity related to these differing products has come into question. How can managers track activity related to one product over another?

We've enhanced our sales activity tracking to allow you to more specifically define user action types by adding an associated Product Type indicator. This new feature allows managers to filter sales rep activity counts related to a respective product type like IT or A/V/security.

Other Enhancements and Updates

Attaching Documents to an Order

• We added an "Attachment" button to the OBD Documents form to enable users to attach documents directly to the Proposal and/or Order on the documents tab.

Contact Profile

• We added properties to the new Contact Profile form representing OK to Email, OK to Phone, OK to Mail, and OK to Fax. These properties had been part of the older forms and were originally left off the new form.

Credit Application – Note

• To provide additional information, we added a dedicated note field to the credit application submit form.
• This property will be prominently displayed on the credit desk summary and is available as a merge field for document templates and email templates.

Credit Desk – Application and Buyout Request Automation

• SalesChain has created a comprehensive workflow automation platform to manage Buyout and Credit Application and Decision processing. This enhancement allows your leasing department to organize requests, log communication with sales reps and organize transactional data more efficiently.

Customer Profile

We made a number of enhancements to this form to provide more information to users. The changes include:

• e-automate Tax Code – We added the e-automate tax code to the form to provide users with detailed
• Proposal Name – We added the proposal name to the Lead List grid to more clearly track leads for a given account.

Delivery Desk

• The Delivery Desk has been enhanced to provide the option for users to display the Order Date and Status within the grid. The Order Status filter was added to provided additional flexibility for users to display delivery job details for orders within a selected status.

Delivery Job Maintenance

• We added the ability for users to remove the first Delivery Job on an Order. This will allow users to remove improperly configured delivery jobs from an order. Previously, SC did not allow users to remove the first delivery job on an order for purposes of database integrity. As more dealers implement diverse delivery job workflow "Types" it has become necessary to provide this function.

Delivery Job Trainer

• The list of users that will be displayed is a configured User Group that may be defined and configured as part of the SC System Configuration. Simply contact the SalesChain Support desk and they will help you activate this feature.

e-automate

• In a previous upgrade, we added the feature of pulling the customer location relationships into the SC database as part of the lineage process. A few of our clients have since asked that we have the option of turning this feature off. So, we added a "Switch" to deactivate this feature. The feature is on by default and can be deactivated simply by calling the support desk. They will modify the system parameter setting.
• Many of our dealers have a defined warehouse bin for storing startup supplies for new equipment setup. To accommodate this when sales orders are created, we have added a Start Up Supplies ("SUS") bin on the Branch profile. We have also provided the option to use this bin when pushing sales orders to e-automate. This option will appear when an order includes a machine with startup supplies configured.

IT Products & Managed Services Catalog Update Email Request

• Many of the dealers limit the editing of IT and MS catalogs to a small group of users to avoid duplicity and improve quality. We added an email function to the IT Products and Managed Services product lookup forms. It allows users to press a button and have a preformatted email template configured and sent to the designated responsible party, to add products to the respective catalog.