Why Ecologic For Manufacturers & Vendors?
Better, faster sales and longer-term higher-value relationships with your customers
Increase sales, sales velocity, deal-size, cross-selling and up-selling
Manufacturers and vendors rely on outsourcing from Ecologic to grow their sales and expand their customer relationships. By serving as your internal leasing department, our outsourced leasing services enable executives at manufacturers and vendors to seize control of the financing dimension of their sales while offering their customers a wider range of services throughout the lifecycle of their relationship. Under your brand, we offer competitive wholesale (third-party capital), captive (your capital), or hybrid programs that make it easier for your customers to buy your solutions, while locking out the competition.
Here are some of the problems Ecologic solves for its clients today:
- Problem: In today's highly competitive markets, finance and sales executives need their leasing operations to catalyze and expand sales without proportionally adding headcount, infrastructure or other overhead costs. And they have to get to market quickly and can't afford the uptime typically involved in building their own organization. Likewise, finance and sales executives often struggle with the internal question of how to manage leasing operations, especially if they require resources otherwise associated with core finance and sales functions. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Finance and sales executives often don't trust their leasing partner because there is no transparency in the relationship. They are forced to share control of the customer relationship, even though their sales people originate all the leads. They believe they are not getting the best terms and the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process. They believe they are probably leaving money on the table. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Finance and sales executives are worried about losing customers. Traditionally, equipment vendors and manufacturers have sold or licensed products as part of one-time transactions with a warranty or maintenance agreement. After selling the initial services needed to install, integrate or configure the equipment, the vendor or manufacturer is then finished with the sales process. That leaves sales people without a compelling reason to engage with the customer again for months or even years, opening the door for competitors to develop ongoing relationships with their customers and taking over the customers by delivering continuous services. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Many sales and finance executives face the same core sales problem: how to enable their customers to buy over time as a service while still getting the revenue upfront. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: The credit quality of a service provider's customer base can vary widely, from investment-grade to poor. Because your current leasing partner has narrow credit policies, your sales team is forced to turn away deals with customers without investment grade credit or your firm has to take the financing risk. This puts finance and sales executives in a bind. Discover Ecologic's Solution...
- Problem: Finance executives can't track docs, assets, or accounting because they don't have the software they need to controll processes, manage their portfolio, and perform closed-loop, asset-level lease accounting. Discover Ecologic's Software Services...
Incease sales, improve deal quality, control costs, reduce management time: leverage the economies of Ecologic's leasing operations platform
The problem: In today’s highly competitive markets, finance and sales executives need their leasing operations to catalyze and expand sales without proportionally adding headcount, infrastructure or other overhead costs. And they have to get to market quickly and can't afford the uptime typically involved in building their own organization.
Likewise, manufacturers and vendors often struggle with the internal question of how to manage leasing operations, especially if they require resources otherwise associated with core finance and sales functions. But how do you get the leverage you need from your leasing operations while positioning the operations to scale?
The Ecologic solution: Outsource and leverage Ecologic's leasing operations platform and specialized expertise. Ecologic has the expertise, best practices, and technology platform at the appropriate scale to manage this function properly and support all the other organizations in your business. And because leasing operations is our business, we invest approximately 15 - 20% of our revenue per year in training our people and the research and development needed to ensure that leasing can have the strategic impact on your core business.
So while we focus on what we do best - leasing operations - our manufacturer and vendor clients can focus on what they do best: Achieve excellence in their customer sales and relationships (while beating the competition).
Break the grip of monopolistic leasing companies – get the best financing terms through competition
The problem: Finance and sales executives often don't trust their leasing partner because there is no transparency in the relationship. They are forced to share control of the customer relationship, even though their sales people originate all the leads. They believe they are not getting the best terms and the lowest cost of capital in a controlled, competitive financing process. They believe they are leaving money on the table. The executives may be working with one, monopolistic funder. Or a variety of people in their company may have relationships with many different funders in North America (in some cases 30 or more).
The Ecologic solution: Financing transactions should be managed and negotiated by a team of trained financial experts. Ecologic’s leasing professionals have expertise in credit analysis, pricing, structuring, financing, and syndication. They work with our clients to develop the best strategies for their business, and then develop programs and manage the equipment financing processes to meet their needs.
We systematically and routinely compete funders as appropriate for our clients’ business strategies, and manage their performance for the life of the program. Ecologic maintains a centralized database of funders in North America with whom we engage at some level over the course of a year. Whenever possible, we work with the "buy-desk" to avoid the sometimes-costly internal origination fees that banks and leasing companies pay to sales people.
We provide our clients with a transparent, side-by-side ("apples-to-apples") comparative analysis of proposals so they can decide the best path forward. We then facilitate the negotiation, selection, documentation, and on-going performance evaluation of the funder, working closely with our clients so they have the greatest comfort and confidence.
Protect your customer relationships and strengthen your business by moving from one- time sales to life-cycle solutions
The problem: Traditionally, equipment vendors and manufacturers have sold or licensed products as part of one-time transactions with a warranty or maintenance agreement. After selling the initial services needed to install, integrate or configure the equipment, the vendor or manufacturer is then finished with the sales process. That leaves salespeople without a compelling reason to engage with the customer again for months or even years, opening the door for competitors to develop ongoing relationships with their customers and taking over the customers by delivering continuous services.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic’s outsourced solutions are helping manufacturers and vendors join the growing trend toward transforming their operations from a single-transaction model to a solutions-based model that creates ongoing, longer-term customer relationships.
This shift comes as customers see the advantages of an integrated solution, in which customers pay for equipment, services, and financing from one total solution provider: your company.
With Ecologic, manufacturers and vendors can gain...
- A higher net present value per deal
- Longer-term relationships with customers involving more frequent contact (and opportunities to sell) because of monthly billings and more regular service calls
- An opportunity to leverage built-in equipment refresh programs that lock out competitors while maintaining long-term customer relationships.
At the same time, Ecologic’s solution allows manufacturers and vendors to take responsibility for the management of the assets, the quality of the components, and the delivery and management of the overall solution. This allows for more and better customer service opportunities, and higher-value customer relationships.
Say "Yes" to your customers: Sell your product as a service and your customers will buy more
The problem: Many vendors face this same core sales problem: how to enable their customers to buy over time as a service while still recognizing the revenue upfront.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic resolves the complexity of multi-contract, multiparty lease financing with our innovative Services Agreement Financing (SAF) Program, allowing your customers to use your products as a service, which they pay for over time.
Instead of an upfront payment, your customers can pay one monthly fee to your firm that bundles together the cost of all products, services, and financing into a single, straightforward services agreement. You still can get the recognizable revenue and your customer gets to align their expenses with their use.
Through our SAF Program, we can finance the capital costs (equipment + soft costs such as installation) from within a services agreement. In most cases, we can structure the transaction off balance sheet for your firm, which will greatly simplify the buying and selling process while reducing the technical complexity for buyers. Now, your customers can simply enjoy the benefits of the products you delivered to them as part of your services offering, rather than having to research the technical details or gain purchase approval for costly equipment.
Ecologic’s SAF program helps manufacturers and vendors convert customers from old legacy technologies while catalyzing sales by simplifying the buying and selling process.
Get the Most from your Pipeline (ROI) - Regardless of Credit Quality, Geography, Ticket-Size, or Asset Type
The problem: The credit quality of a service provider's customer base can vary widely, from investment-grade to poor. Because your current leasing partner has narrow credit policies, limitations in geographic coverage, ticket sizes, or asset types, your sales team is forced to turn away deals with customers without investment grade credit or your firm has to take the financing risk. This puts finance and sales executives in a bind.
The Ecologic solution: Ecologic’s financing programs exploits our broad funder network to ensure that your customers get the financing they need (assuming they are financeable), and the sale goes through – regardless of a customer’s credit quality, geography, ticket-size, or asset type.
You won’t get this commitment from a leasing company. But because we work with many funders around the world, we apply the power of competition to reduce the cost of capital and to maximize the number of deals in your pipeline that get funded and closed.
Ecologic's Software Services: LeaseAccelerator™ and PortfolioManager™
Ecologic’s LeaseAccelerator and PortfolioManager software services give our clients the centralized solutions they need to automate and manage their financing and leasing processes for greater visibility, consistency and control.
LeaseAccelerator is an automated service that supports the end-to-end process of lease establishment and asset tracking by facilitating transactions and document flow among the multiple parties.
The system’s workflow, document management and transaction processing capabilities accelerate funder review and acceptance. And it automatically links together documents in the supply chain, making them accessible by schedule or asset.
Ecologic and our clients use LeaseAccelerator to create, send, and track acquisition requests, purchase orders, asset assignment and notification documents, certificates of acceptance, and lease schedules.
PortfolioManager is an asset-based lease accounting and portfolio management system. It provides an automated service for tracking and managing leases, assets, and risk, complete with robust, Web-based reporting capabilities.
Ecologic uses PortfolioManager to perform asset-level accounting, including sales and property tax calculations. Ecologic also uses PortfolioManager to perform billing and collecting services, enabling our clients to attract low-cost funders who need servicing in order to invest in transactions.
To protect up-time and access to our software services, Ecologic uses geographically distributed hosting facilities with redundant back-up and fail-over capabilities. We also provide security at the data, application, system, and network levels.
