General Consultant Discussion

Changing Partner of Record We recently had two experiences with partner/reseller of record changes. In once case a customer of ours was recently forced to change reseller of record in order to get products and services from a master developer who is also a VAR. In another case we were asked to become partner of record. After a week of the poll I will share more about why I am asking the question and what our policies are. @Businessofconsulting

Gary, we will not provide support for someone we are not the ROR. We will call the existing partner if we know and have a relationship with the partner. If they don't know who their partner is, we recommend that they contact their existing partner. If they don't know, we will give them numbers at Sage to call and ask. I would love to know which master developer is requiring an ROR change of record. They only one I have heard of before is a product exclusively for the gasoline retail market.

DM2?

I think you need another option Gary that really is ""Depends on ____"". When I first started in this business, I thought I should always call the ROR out of courtesy. But, as I have been through this process a few times, I realized that it doesn't really matter. As a policy, we do not seek out MAS 90 (Sage 100 ERP) customers to actively poach from other resellers. If a MAS 90 user calls us directly and it leads to an ROR change, so be it. Customer that change RORs do so for various reasons, and I will never fault another reseller for becoming the ROR for one my customers that I lost, for whatever reason. If the customer was seeking out another reseller, they were leaving me anyway. If the reseller is out poaching, shame on him/her.

As a testimony to DM2's success with Sage, DM2 has consistently ranked as one of Sage's top ten resellers and has earned Sage's prestigious President's Circle award every year since the award's inception in 1999."" - From their website.

@RobertWood, yes DM2. In their defense, they do not sell through re-sellers and are very up front about that. They will provide referral fees however. Based upon a conversation I had with someone from DM2 several years ago, they focus exclusively on a very narrow vertical market. All they work with are gasoline distributors and retailers. They feel that their industry expertise provides them a strength and they are not prepared to invest in educating and supporting other re-sellers to come up-to-speed on the industry. Whether I like it or not, I understand their position, respect their direct honesty, and work around it.

We have three customers using DM2 products where we are the ROR. It was at the customer's insistence.

I had one customer in the past that used DM2. That narrow vertical market knowledge stops there, because they have very little expertise with standard Sage 100 accounting functions, which is why we were involved. My opinion is that master developers where their product is the primary focus should stick to that and let the rest of us help the customers with what we know.

Ditto @Robert with one customer. @Gary, are you referring to DM2 or another reseller/master developer?

I find quite a few end users ""prefer not to say"" during the initial phase of discussion. I have also been burned multiple times when I have called a partner and they immediately fly into panic mode and call their customers. in return I get a call from the user asking why I told their partner, etc. So aside from VARS I know - I typically don't call. I would very rarely call the VAR before I got a feel for what the issue was with the end user. In some cases these end users don't/won't want to disclose their partner until they are well along discussing issues. That being said - if 25 end users contact me in a month, probably 22 of them will never respond once they learn there will be some type of fee involved. The vast majority of the type of web user that I see are off-plan, off-VAR and not looking to reinstate either.

I am not referring to DM2 Gary Feldman President I-Business Network,LLC www.I-BN.com<http://www.I-BN.com>

If known, I would always call the existing partner first. 1) It's a courtesy I'd want to receive if the situation was reversed, 2) there may be a reason a customer is calling and it's not because of the existing partner's work or responsiveness. I may be saving myself from getting into a relationship with a bad client.

In some cases I'll call the other partner. Like @BrianKelly, I used to do it a lot, but had little positive effect, and mostly negative. Our sales process is such that, if they are looking for cheap with us, they won't pull the trigger, because most work is prepaid, and we require an annual agreement. That last part generally makes ROR requirement moot, too. That said, we do spend some effort understanding what the prospect wants to do that has them so upset with their current partner. We strongly encourage them to work it out if at all possible;' I think I remember one case where it was.

we typically call the existing partner and just about always require the customer to change before we do consulting work. Custom programming/master developer work would be different, we would discuss with the current partner. So I wasn't sure how to answer but selected the second, ""Will call depending...

just adding on to Wayne's thoughts, we would explain to the customer that the Sage partner community is pretty tight and that is why we will call the existing ROR - so we get permission from the customer first before we call the partner. If they don't want you to call or communicate with the existing partner, that's typically a red flag. Normally they are fine with it, and haven't spoken with the current partner in years.

Yes, in setting up the poll, it is impossible to put all the permutations. I am still holding my comments for 4 more days.

We won't do any consulting work if we're not ROR, but lately we've been doing initiation and visioning projects (billable) before changing the ROR. It helps us weed out tire kickers. We generally connect with the current partner, depending ...

I do want to give a shout out to both Net@work and SWK who in the past has predatory problems but both have reached out to us with more recent situations.

@MichaelNottoli with all due respect - LOL - ""we won't do any consulting work"". I sorta understand what you're saying however (a) that is consulting work (b) it becomes a sales pitch and by the time you reach (c) you have already agreed to ROR at the customer. There is nothing wrong here. I do the exact same thing myself. I just am not shy at telling consultants that I'm not in business to figure out what they are doing which may be repelling users. There are also a lot of red flags with end users who come in the web -- I'll go from riskiest to the best ROR candidates: 1. ""Can you give us a price on this upgrade/module"" -- and present you with a detail punch list 2. ""What is your rate?"" 3. We haven't used a consultant and I don't think we need one 4. We are presently using Z, then before we used Y then initially X 5. We are not on maintenance and my 85 year old bookkeeper who does everything manual is retiring - can you come out and take a look (aka for free and give free advice) 6. We've been using Sage for 15 years - can you come out and take a look? 7. I was researching a problem nobody has been able to fix - and your solution worked - I want to change 8. I've been a reader of your newsletter for years 9 . I'm xxxx and worked with Sage at one of your customers for x years. I'm at a new company and ready to update / they have Sage. I think the better question here is whether you ALWAYS give the other consultant veto rights over whether you get involved with their customer. Calling them and telling them you are going to be the ROR is not really anything significant. I'd say that the majority of partners that I've had interactions with in this area are much more of the ""well I'm going to be filing an ROR just so you know"" and if it's anything more there are usually red flags and they are calling me to see if I can validate that there is a problem.

Also another high risk area is with existing users who are on Sage 100 ERP and want to use it in an industry that Sage 100 is not designed for or which require substantial add-ons from multiple third parties. I don't wade into those waters any longer unless it's on a paid basis.

@WayneSchulz - Reaching out is not necessarily giving the other consultant veto rights. We have definitely had other resellers call us out of courtesy. Here are 2 SAP examples from 3-5 years ago that are relevant. In one circumstance there was significant reasons to keep us involved for transition due to some nifty work we had done and were in the middle of finishing (which was not the reason for the ROR), and the other consultant basically said, we don't want you involved, we would rather charge the customer more to learn what you did than for you to transition to us. The customer was switching because they were local and did not want to pay our mileage anymore... He was just giving me a courtesy call and was getting a C customer who was quickly moving towards D. Another VAR who we work with closely got a similar call from a customer of ours in Colorado. He called and we worked out a deal where he got all the local training and support work while we remained ROR. Later when I got a call from one of his customers, I called him and he said, PLEASE TAKE THEM! Needless to say we offered the same deal to him and the customer went with a different VAR who is also a shyster. No one with ethics wants the F customer.

The better question is ""do you do any due diligence before accepting a customer and if so what is that procedure"" not so much ""do you call another VAR"" because calling a VAR is generally one small step in due diligence. I almost always want to know first and foremost if I have the skills to delight the customer, is the customer using the right solution, do they have a solvable problem and do they qualify for money. Quite honestly I could care less about most other VARS and what he said / she said unless it comes down to one of the due dilligence concerns. From my perspective - people who don't ROR that much (either in or out) have entirely different views than those who do a lot of ROR work (or come into contact with a lot of potential ROR).

@WayneSchulz - nothing but respect. Your words are better, but our gist is the same. We won't provide technical support on their Sage100 system until we've done our diligence. For us that is a paid consulting project called Initiation and Visioning (h/t @JohnShaver ). The goal of that project is to determine what they seek and whether we have the ability to help them get there, both technically and culturally. Somewhere in that process we may touch base with the current ROR - not to give them veto power (unless it's one of our Wisconsin or 90Minds ""friendlies"") but for our own diligence.

I generally ask existing end users who is their current reseller and why they want to change. If it is a reseller that I do business with I always call. That call sometimes results in Partners In Tech taking over the client if the current reseller indicates that they do not have a great relationship with the client. (That can lead to a whole other set of decisions!) It can also lead to the other reseller repairing the relationship. This is a small community and I think it is important to respect boundaries. In the long run it benefits all of us to not fight over clients. If we are all doing a good job our clients will not have a reason to look else where.

Before I take a ROR change, I want to find out if there is a dispute with the previous ROR. If there is a financial issue, I inform the client that I need to have that resolved before working with them. This is both courteous and pragmatic. What they did to another reseller, they will do to you if given the chance.

FYI - In the past few months... One customer contacted us because they were unhappy with their current SAP partner who also hosts at AWS. They were on subscription pricing and were told that they could not do some relatively simple integration without a really expensive services package. They contacted us and we found that the real issue is an SAP licensing issue which is solved through perpetual licenses. They asked to change and we not contact their reseller. When we told them it was our policy to call they said OK. We also contact the publisher. The reseller sounded surprised ant thought the customer was happy (lol). This was especially problematic when we heard from SAP that they had been contacted and there was potential litigation. In another case we were told that the customer was switching resellers because they knew we were not Sage CRM experts and there was a third party product that could only be implemented by the partner who developed it (per the partner). They are a hosted customer and have been extremely happy with our service. The reseller of record change will only be for the implementation of the product and then they plan to ROR back. In this case the partner has really burned bridges for a short term gain (or none at all depending upon the renewal cycle) and to forfeit paying a referral fee to us. About 1 year ago we got a call from a former client who switched companies. He called us to become the ROR because he liked us and the current partner was from out of town. We asked who the current partner was and they were someone we have worked with on occasion. I called the principal of the company and he said, PLEASE TAKE THEM! We offered to provide the local services they needed through the current partner only. We find that as a channel driven company we must always be very up front with our customers and partners. I completely understand partners who do not have products or services that they cross sell may not always contact a ROR, but for us it is not an option.

@GaryFeldman Your Sage CRM example is a ploy used many times in the past. Personally, Sage should deal with this. They won't, of course.