Sage News and Discussion

If you have 49 Sage customers or less, you should read this: Starting tomorrow, Sage representatives are calling into your customers to build a relationship. Specifically, they have been trained to call and ask what the customers' goals are for the upcoming year and what their top challenges are. They are going to do this to identify opportunities to sell more Sage products to help the customers reach those goals. It hasn't been clearly defined yet but I have been told that ""if Sage makes the sale, it's only fair that they get compensated for the sale."" Meaning: the intention is that they will keep any software commission and, in cases of more sophisticated products such as HR and CRM, they will bring in other partners as they see fit to implement the software. @Businessofconsulting

Where to start....First, where did you hear this? Second, 49??

49 or less ... Anyone that has 49 or less Sage customers is welcome to give me a call and we can get out in front of this regarding Sage CRM (and retain the margin).

@ThereseLogeais - It's been coming now for a long time and I have been dropping warnings. Two Fridays ago, Joe Langner laid it out in his all hands call. (They said they would record it but I never saw the followup link.) I've heard it directly from two individuals on the actual outbound call team.

@JimWoodhead - How do I post this to business of consulting group as well??? I tried using @Businessofconsulting but it didn't seem to do anything.

Also - please note: the commission retention isn't confirmed yet. My guess is that it's happening. They've been talking about it for over a year now. If anyone hasn't done so yet, I would scan my clients and see if any of them could use SPS. It's a very simple sale and you can make a nice recurring revenue %. That will be the first and easiest sale that they make.

Interesting. So they think that there is gold in them thar hills of small users? I've brought CRM up to everyone on of my clients who would benefit and only ONE has picked up on it mainly because he was already using MSFT's CRM package. Not a nibble from any others. Same with FAS. Nearly all of my clients let their CPA's handle the asset depreciation. I'm sure there are plenty of hidden gems out there, but they are going to spend a lot of time looking. And what say so does the client have if they decide to go the CRM route? Don't they get to pick who installs and configures? It has been said many times, Sage is no longer a publisher, but now a seller. Not their core strength. BTW, what is Sage core strength these days? FUCUS!

@JeffSchwenk - 1. It might be worth it to go through and see if anyone wants SPS if you haven't already. 2. Did you see the presentation a few Friday's back? They laid out their plan - including their product scoring that supposedly indicates which customers would be good fits for which products. We'll see.

Unfortunately, I missed it. Though I was mentioned in the SC posts. Guess I'll watch it when they post the link. I am pretty much SPS saturated, but will review who is/isn't participating....

I re-checked my emails and confirmed - no links. Maybe someone else has one?

Thanks for the heads-up Peter.

Sage doesn't seem to understand how much time it takes to contact clients about additional functions when we are doing consulting. All small resellers can reasonably do is hope they have trained the clients to contact them, if they have a need. We are not in this category (<=49), but the task of contacting clients for us is even more daunting. For the most part, I think we can depend on the loyalty of our clients. I think it would be more productive to assist these resellers rather than work behind their backs undermining them. Sage had already started this process including contacting our clients who are StarShip clients. I complained and they stopped.

From my memory of prior similar projects by Sage - they kick off a lot of ""oh I talked to Jimmy Joe and he WANTS CRM"" -- then you call and Jimmy Joe doesn't realize that yes they get one free CRM license but it's going to cost to purchase more and it's going to cost to implement and train.... then Jimmy Joe wants a free demo which you need to coordinate with Sage and then you get to the money issue again along with the missing needs that the demo kicked out. Multiply this by 10-12 Jimmy Joes. That's my memory of the last two or three similar pushes. My impression - possibly wrong - is that these are about shaking the trees to harvest low hanging fruit - no matter how complex the plan of attack seems on paper.

I think it would be more productive to assist these resellers rather than work behind their backs undermining them."" I am in total agreement with you on this John. Most of the time once Sage contacts clients I get a call and they want to know if I can call so and so back at Sage to find out what they want. Or the time when a client got so aggravated that they told Sage that if they called them again they would switch to another vendor because they were tired of being harrassed by Sage.

I'm not sure if this is good news or bad then Wayne and John because, it's my understanding any way, this time around, they aren't passing the leads back to the partner. They are going to sell and close it themselves. In the cases of more advanced sales, they are going to potentially kick it over to the original partner - if they have the certification and desire - but they are going to do their best to sell it before kicking it out to the channel. They are not passing leads around this time. Again - this is my understanding. In some ways, this is good for all of us. More Sage products = more stickiness (in theory). We'll see ...

From what I know they're closing the easy ones themselves.

Peter, my point is that most of my clients will tell Sage that they need to speak with me and that is probably the case for most of the people here. Thankfully we are over the 49 customer level, but next week it may be a 100 customer limit. We have also spoken with most of our customers about SPS and CRM. I believe the better approach for Sage would be to co-host webinars with partners. They would get more attendance and the end-users would be much more likely to listen (because of the reseller involvement). We have done that in the past with Sage.

Excellent suggestion @JohnLeonard - I'm sure Sage would be more than happy to put on a webinar with a partner for that partner's customer base. We've done them in the past as well and you're right, they get more buy in due to the partner's presence/involvement.

@JohnLeonard - I agree that would be ideal. But ... that isn't what they are doing. At least not exclusively. As @ThereseLogeais stated, they probably will still do that alongside you but, in general, Sage has come to the conclusion (I don't agree with this but this is what I hear) that they need to push forward because partners aren't doing a great job. My guess is that they will have some successes and they will also find out how damn hard it is to get a client's attention for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Either way: they are 100% committed to this approach and get the cross-sell attach rates up. That's a big component of revenue growth for 2013. Let's face it ... non-Cloud ERP sales are getting tighter so they need to make up revenue somehow.

I received an email with a link on Nov. 20th. I can't copy the link - it simply opens the presentation - but if you want it, let me know and I'll forward the email to you.

Peter I agree with you and thanks again for the heads up on this. Also speaking of ERP sales anyone having any recent success? We seemed to have an uptick in activity (inquires etc) 2 or 3 months ago, but everything seems to have completely died in this neck of the woods.

@ThereseLogeais - can you copy and past the entire email here (including the link)? I'm not sure if that would work or not ??

@JohnLeonard Everything that I've seen as a new deal inquiry for ERP in the last year has had some type of MFG involvement requirement the companies were either moving from a QB type solution or not ready.

Let's try this: https://sagena.webex.com/cmp0307l/webcomponents/widget/playback.do?siteurl=sagena&recordID=9013652&isnbr=true&ticket=7e968b1d5f085955415c530e444345515b10591339485f46566d0e454008445f455c5c5f40565b525d&serviceRecordID=9013657&nbrhomepageurl=

@JohnLeonard Activity has increased significantly, which I attribute partially to businesses thinking they know how things are going to go down, now that a President has been selected. It doesn't mean they agree with what's happening, just that they are able to plan around it. I am working 6 solid prospects, which have a large probability of closing in December. This would include my first X3 sale, which might get me a lunch at Sage. Sage tried the seminar approach with those Road Shows where they gave us a week notice to invite clients. The one in Irvine had 8 customers, and 4 of those were mine. I made sales to 50% of those, so they work, if Sage would plan them properly.

Congrats on that X3 deal, @JohnHoyt - best of luck in closing that!

That's great news @JohnHoyt!

I'd taken it upon myself with the changes in the sales rep at Sage (beginning of November?) to contact my new one and get on the same page. My rep kindly sent me an email just last week about doing joint calls and we started strategizing together. While I'd prefer to handle calls to my clients myself, if Sage is going to force the issue might as well have them aligned with some of your own ideas. If you've not had a chat with your new rep (or old one) I suggest it, it will work in your favor more than likely.

Here are some screen shots from the call a few weeks ago