Sage 100

I hope that my experience here is a one-off. Late last week one of our JobOps customers called me asking why this Scanco company was calling her wanting a meeting; she was happy just dealing with us. I learned that Ross Allen had called her and essentially strong-armed her into scheduling a 30-minute webex meeting the following week. She had no idea why he wanted it. Smartbridge received NO heads up about this contact. So I contacted Ross. They are calling customers to introduce themselves. He claims he didn't know this was our customer. I told him the customer had NO interest in this waste of their time. I tried to understand what they were trying to accomplish. I got essentially sales gibberish from him. He couldn't tell me what was changing in support policies as far as customers. He claimed that the database from MN was not good as far as customer assignments to partners (could have fooled me - the customers appearing on the portal were completely accurate!). Ross had a perfect opportunity to sell me on the idea of calling our customers; I couldn't get a straight answer from him as to why it would be in the customer's interest to spend the time. Did anybody know that Scanco is contacting customers directly without advising partners? Does anybody know how their support policies are changing? What they want to talk to successful customers about? Whether they will be holding a webinar for partners to describe their policies and strategy as to how they will make the most from the JobOps acquisition? Disturbing to me on several levels.

Disturbing indeed. This would not be the first time Ross has overstepped. I am not exactly sure what his official job is, because I don't deal with him.

@JerryNorman Is the customer current on maintenance? When they are not, they are always fair game for Sage, so perhaps Ross thinks so, too. I also can imagine there has been segmentation between the Solution Providers, Resellers and Consultants. I doubt anyone would be calling the customers of Solution Providers. Finally, you are DSD, so there may not be any direct association with you. It was probably just Ross getting a list and a bright idea that was not such a good idea after all.

His title is Current Customer Specialist

The customer is on maintenance. Yes, I am part of the DSD network, but all that means is that he should have coordinated with DSD - which he admitted did not happen. Yes, he is Current Customer Sales. If his approach to my customer was typical, I can't imagine he's very effective. No intro email inviting the meeting. Cold call only. If my customer hadn't been annoyed by the intrusion, I never would have known about the effort. So I suspect that plenty of others have been called already, without partners catching on.

The Sage Community needs to understand that JobOps customers are very different. They call us about everything, and we are in frequent contact with them due to the complexity of the software and their operations. They don't want to talk with anyone else.

Let me get this straight. Scanco, an Affiliate of 90 Minds, and a Master Developer claims that the list of reseller alignments is not accurate and that justifies them cold-calling our customers' directly? That stinks, shame on Scanco. The list of authorized resellers/consultants is probably quite clean since you can't get support or sell JobOps without authorization. I read today that Don Martin left Website Pipeline to become Director of Channel Management at Scanco. Perhaps this should be his first order of business, taking care **not** to tick off the channel.

Moira, like I said - Ross was full of $h!t, and made no sense.

This should be considered a rogue Current Customer Specialist and nothing more. I am sure management at Scanco does not condone it. This type of thing happens all the time at Sage, but never gets fixed, because by the time it gets to management - they're gone.

@JoeBisaha Joe, will Scanco be offering a Webinar to the Re-sellers of JobOps to discuss with us the plans, policies and strategies?

http://mailchi.mp/scanco.com/scanco-announces-don-martin-as-the-new-director-of-channel-development

I feel bad for WSP but congrats to Scanco!!

All- thank you for the feedback as that is always important to us here at Scanco. We will be scheduling a JobOps webinar shortly for all of the certified partners to talk about the road forward under Scanco. Scanco is a solution provider and has been a leader in the Sage market since the early 90's. We continue to evolve our technology and products over time and that is impossible to do without talking to our customer and partner base. In all of our acquisitions we reach out to both the partner channel and end user base and conduct diligence on our newly acquired products and services. This is an absolute necessity as it provides us with the knowledge on things like product roadmaps and services that need improved. The end user base for JobOps has feedback on products, services, ideas, and issues that are imperative to the success of both JobOps and Scanco as we move forward post acquisition. This will make all of our products and services better which should be all of our goal in any partnership we share. Scanco as an entity has grown substantially throughout the last couple of years and we attribute that to our customers and partners feedback. We will always continue to work with you all as we move forward and I speak for everyone here at Scanco on how excited we are to drive Sage Manufacturing/JobOps well into the future with each and every one of you. We have had an overwhelmingly amount of positive feedback from the Sage partner community on our acquisition and the negative is just as important for us to hear. I would encourage each of you if there is an issue to reach out to myself or any of our staff. In our opinion- the more we engage our customers- the more we learn, and can apply across our product lines to continue to drive industry leading software solutions. I am available to address any concerns you may have moving forward, so please do not hesitate to reach out to me at any point.

**....We will be scheduling a JobOps webinar shortly for all of the certified partners to talk about the road forward ......** How about a webinar for 90Minds members??????

I actually was to have a call with Moira last week for 90Minds. But I had to postpone. I am open next week for a call with her or with a group. I am open to anything just let me know.

@MoiraGoggin: What can we schedule?

Thanks @JerryNorman I'll work with Joe to get it arranged.