Sage News and Discussion

Merger Update: After being told that mergers could take as much as 30 - 60 days, it has now been over 60 days since the agreements were sent to Sage. Sales reps are useless, since they think it has nothing to do with them. I e-mailed them and said that we now have 6 deals pending with the other partner's client base, so now they're interested in investigating.

Maybe Tom Miller's replacement is looking them over.

@JohnHoyt - Reach out to Kevin Rooker. He will take care of you. He is on vacation this week but will be back next week.

Sales is now motivated, so they are talking to that department. I knew if I mentioned deals pending, they might get motivated - especially since it's quarter end. @PeterWolf Thanks - I'll contact you with my issues, since you know important people's schedules. :-)

And this is the typical response and action plan at Sage: ""If I don't hear back form Sheri by Friday I will send her another email."" Hmmm . . . I thought they are in the same office building in Irvine, but maybe they're not allowed to fraternize between departments. And today is Wednesday. How many of my clients would stay with me if I had that type of response?

Just be glad that you don't have to deal with any department at Sage tasked with changing a license from one company to another due to a merger/acquisition. I think some of the requests have taken months --- to even get an initial reply. Sadly the people in charge of these areas seem to have survived every re-organization at Sage (and that's saying a LOT about their longevity).

Yes, Kevin Rooker (who supposedly is responsible for this function) manages to survive every purge. He's a great guy, but do we really know what he does? As for the others, they are clearly useless and survive because their cost is probably low. Or perhaps these people's purpose is to frustrate the channel to the point where we stop asking Sage to do these things. (""We don't want you to merge. We want you to sell, sell, sell and if you don't, then just leave, so we can sell direct."")

Kevin is one of these rare people who has done significant selling but who (apparently) gets a bigger kick out of tuning up the internal processes to keep sales paperwork from tangling up. I'm pretty sure Sage does what it can to keep him around fro that reason. To do this right you must have a combination of sales management savvy, thinking in terms of systems flow diagrams, enough tech savvy to be able to work with the various tech types that implement the supporting technology and ... an unnatural political acumen and patience. At some point, though, all his experience dealing with this mess will make him too valuable to another company with internal processes completely snarled that Sage won't be able to match the offer.

I think Kevin is one of the good ones. If you get a chance, introduce yourself to him at Summit. He's got a lot of interesting experiences and knows how hard it is to sell and is a friend to partners. That's my 2 cents.

Final update: Apparently on Wednesday night all clients transferred to our account. We have not been notified that the merger has been completed, but really that's 99.5% of what we wanted to accomplish in the first place.