Sage CRM

Another CRM story from the vault. This one will be a real tear jerker for any of you who are capitalists.

Ouch............. Amazing how people find this much money to waste!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In all fairness, they were a $20MM business - $275K was a drop in the bucket for them for a project that was supposed to help them grow revenue 15% and cut costs 10%.

Well last I checked, none of us are PURPOSELY being charity organizations so I guess that makes us all capitalists :)

I just have never had a pleasant experience working through one of those ""we've been hired to do a search"" type consultants. I'll bet you that the consultant set himself up as a Salesforce VAR and took a cut of the action when it looked like SF was the winner.

I guess my story wasn't clear - I absolutely believe that's what he did. He had told me early on that he was just wrapping up a job where he did something similar (not with Salesforce though). He contracted people to do the development at $30 per hour and charged the client $100 to do a $400K implementation. Not bad - a 70% markup for 10 months of work = $280K in his pocket while he was selling other jobs.

And... he made sure SF was the winner by telling us to not present a hosted solution. My initial suggestion was to go to a hosted solution based on their requirements. He told us that wasn't the right path since the Accpac was on premise and that was the way they would want CRM. The worst part of the story is that the partner told me ""wow - I really learned my lesson. We need to schedule time to review my clients and discuss active marketing."" He blew off two advances by me for a meeting and I moved on. Still waiting for a call...

The second worst type of marketing call that I've ever been on (and refuse to do anymore) is the ""lets get together and talk about how we could work together"". I went on more of these types of meetings with CPA firms that I care to remember. Never closed a bit of business with any of them. I secretly suspect most of the meetings are either impulsive or so they can put some activity on a marketing calendar they hand in monthly.