Sage 100

Five things I caught during the Sage All Hands Call 6/14 - Sage only sells Sage CRM alongside our products - not direct any longer (Mike Ritchie) - Sage Bots is off the roadmap (RIP Pegg) - ""We dusted off the code to Sage Budget & Planning"" - think twice before wading into this swamp - RIP Invoice Payment & Presentment? It has been a while since this has been shown/discussed or is it shipping and buried somewhere in the code? (I suspect APS is eating Paya's lunch with their free (shipping) click2pay) - The Sage 100 roadmap is (primarily for marketing) rather stagnant

- MRP is listed as improvements - not as going to framework. I can't think this a huge issue except for the three customers who actually use the product .. however this will hold any customer with MRP from Premium migration unless the improvements are to ditch MRP and sell the customer a third party ""cloud connection

- I asked Sage where the NPS scores were since that portion of the presentation seemed like it was set to review them (instead they reviewed a bunch of demographics). Their response was largely a tap dance around the question, said they were only reviewing the sales and marketing survey. I'll leave it to you to decide whether NPS scores would have been shown if they were positive. It's been some while since I recall NPS being revealed by Sage.

- Mike Ritchie seems to have an impossible job. From memory - he is now tasked with making sure the global product ambitions carry through to the local products (I'm paraphrasing from memory here). To me it sounds like another layer that Sage doesn't need (shouldn't a product manager be going this?). Perhaps he is on tryout for Matt Muldoon's position (if it hasn't already been filled).

- Bring this out to a customer paying $20k/year and let me know what their reaction is.

- Sage sales org chart for the month of July 2018

Well. That has changed just since the Sage Sessions in Atlanta LAST WEEK. And MRP is a little more popular than 3, which ticks me off that it was uncoupled from Work Order.

And don't forget the lead off by Scott Ehmen - ""Sage does not have a Master VAR Program."" Really???

Why is Master VAR such a bad word? If they don't like Master VAR just use something like Partner Advocate... Problem solved.

Sage has had a Master VAR program since the day they took all maintenance $$ away from the bottom tier, Sage 100 will never be a cloud product, and 2 + 2 will always equal 4. I think Sage has been recruiting from the Flat Earth Society...

When you say Sage no longer sells Sage CRM direct - did you mean standalone? I ask because I have recently been told that Sage is selling Sage CRM direct and they want to do more of it. Maybe I heard wrong or the person I was speaking to wasn't up on the latest?

I'm pretty sure Mike Ritchie said direct - the recording is up in MySageSell. I don't think the phrasing was on any of the slides.

Regarding CRM. I asked a question in chat about it, and they wanted me to email Ritchie. The core of my question was: ""I have been struck in the past year by the way mobile and ecomm are converging to remove the need for traditional crm in many businesses. The way 100 is integrating with O365 means that we'll no longer need CRM to do collections work. ... makes it really hard to see why most 100 customers should bother with Sage CRM. ... ""I really haven't heard anything substantial about CRM-100 integration use cases in a couple years. While some Sage 100 customers have the sort of business operations that need CRM, many just don't. And frankly, at this late date those who need CRM already have a solution, for better or worse. ""So, except for maintaining current 100-CRM customers I don't really see a crying need to promote it. ""How am I wrong?"" ======= Ritchie's reply: ""Hey Jerry. I talked with the CRM team and they said you should feel free to reach out to them to discuss CRM-related questions and issues. The contact there now is David Beard, and I've cc'd him on the email."" ------- NOTE that he is not referring me to anybody in N America about Sage 100-CRM business case for Sage 100 customers who don't already use some crm system. Sage's Office 365 initiative brings it awfully close to Dynamics CRM .... Wayne pointed this out recently.

From my perspective, I'm still seeing a lot of activity with Sage 100 partners contacting me to help with Sage CRM questions (and possibly implementations) for their Sage 100 customers. So it's still viable, alive, and kicking. I think overall that the need for smaller businesses (<5 potential CRM users) to purchase and use a CRM has always been suspect as the cost in time and money to implement CRM doesn't have a quick (if any) pay back. The juice isn't worth the squeeze - usually. There are exceptions so I happily field these calls to help them find an appropriate path. For companies with 5+ potential CRM users, there can be tremendous value in CRM depending on the organization and the type of sales (dollar amounts, sale length, transactional volume, new vs current account sales, etc.) they pursue. It's worth a talk with them at least. In regards to Sage CRM and specifically Sage CRM in North America, it is my understanding the new team in charge of sales intends to begin pushing the integrated Sage CRM message again to partners and customers. They are working closely with Dublin and David Beard. I believe this push is already starting. It's possible Mike Ritchie is unaware of this push or he was aware and has been told to coordinate everything through David Beard to ensure everyone is hearing the same message? I would guess it's the latter but with Sage ... who knows??? :)

Thanks Peter. That makes more sense. I was purposely playing Devils Advocate, and I was stunned that Ritchie didn't have any reasonable answer --- like yours!

The question remains: was his answer actually reasonable or was it ill-informed? LOL

sort a scary either way ...

I just had a company with 25 seats on Sage CRM for 3 years turn in their notice to downgrade and are switching to Salesforce - tired of the clunky integration and for some reason their outlook plugins work this week and quit next week for various users. so they have decided to see if SalesForce works better - they were also wanting google analytics integration also.

@JohnnyPabian we too had a client make that switch after a couple of years with Sage CRM. They used a product from Commercient to integrate to Sage 100 and are quite happy with the results.

And the next player in the CRM market - Google https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crm-for-gmail/hpfmedbkgaakgagknibnonpkimkibkla

This is definitely the wrong post for this but Alan and Johnny's comments make me want to respond a bit. There is no doubt that Sage CRM and the Sage CRM integration with Sage 100 is not perfect. In my experience, the typical Sage 100 customer will find Sage CRM to be a great fit. (Key word = ""typical"") In the end, it depends on what they are looking for and making sure expectations are set appropriately. As an example, look at marketing capabilities. Salesforce and Microsoft CRM have rich, deep marketing functionality built-in and countless third-party and integration options. Sage CRM is not as strong here. And yet ... our average Sage 100 prospect that comes to us rarely has a dedicated marketing person or, if they do, their needs are pretty darn basic. So, what leg up do the competition offer? I don't really think it's any different from any product ... none of them are perfect (including Sage 100 :)) but it depends on the needs and budget.

Peter, thanks for your frank assessment. Such a unique forum we have at 90Minds!