General Consultant Discussion

New Price Increases: I thought for sure my browser was broken or social cast was down when I didn't see a long bunch of comments on the new price increase. Clearly Sage must have really good economists to be able ""to review our entire portfolio on a yearly basis to consider all market conditions, such as: the cost of doing business, major product releases, value that we are delivering to our customers, and competitive factors"" With almost all prices going up 4% it must somehow be correlated with 1. The consumer price index (http://www.bls.gov/cpi/#tables) which was flat or slightly negative in the last year. 2. Competitive price increases (Both Microsoft and SAP were flat last year) 3. Value delivered to customer... 4. Especially when compared to competitive products (like SAP which added enhancement to rule based gl coding, Multi-bin, major manufacturing module improvements, and in-memory computing with 100's of dashboards and widgets). But subscription pricing remains the same. Or, the truth is that we want people to go on subscription so we are screwing the existing customer base and adding another self inflicted wound to our heavily scarred body.

Not sure what you mean by #3. ""Value delivered to customer.."" Sage added ""auto complete"" last year... What an impressive feature! Never mind that it locks up the entire ERP system if there are more then 10,000 records in the table. What do you expect for a measly $15,000 a year in maintenance fees?

@DougHiggs I've been asked to turn off auto complete in half our recent upgrades. Now that's enhancing the customer experience and improving productivity.

LOL... Same here Kathryn... causes more trouble than its worth.

But consider how Sage is supporting the channel - making 4% more on product and maintenance. Oh, yeah, times our margin %. #nevermind

The reality: 1. More customers than ever are sitting tight fearful of upgrading due to perceived glitches 2. Popular features such as Paperless Office are band-aided from one release to another rather than get real technology updates 3. Where'd the money go? In developing these ""hail Mary"" integrations Sage had high hopes would boost revenues 4. Sage CRM integration based on customer feedback = still awful 5. Sage Intelligence. Sage Enterprise Intelligence. Talk about confusing messaging and Sage owns the damn products can't they normalize the pricing and give an ""all in"" price -- single company SI = $x, mutli company = $y. Geesh. Added: 6. Core wholesale distribution features of Sage 100 ERP increasingly have unusual bugs that don't appear solvable by Sage 7. Almost all power users of Sage 100 ERP also have integrations which also increases the finger pointing around support time by a factor of 5x and requires the VAR providing support to first do due diligence to figure out whose problem the bug report is. Too many EVP and VP -- too little common sense.

perceived""???

I agree regarding what is and is not being delivered by Sage, but the reality for us is our current customers are not complaining about these types of features or lack of. The biggest complaint is the high cost of annual maintenance. They don't use the Sage support. The best action Sage could take for our customers would be lowering the annual maintenance to 18% with only one level. Any support would be optional. Of course, that won't happen, because Sage is now hooked on that cash stream.

@JohnHoyt There are some basic features that many of my customers have been requested for several years: Multi-bin and drop ship history visibility come to mind. I am sure there are many others. Several of my clients would love to have a SQL database, but since many of the modules are not compatible with premium, they are stuck. The Sage ""Customer for life"" philosophy is a load of crap.

For 20 years people asked me why MAS has no autocomplete and Quickbooks does. I've always told them because QB is for smaller businesses. Larger companies usually have too many records and every time you go into that field it has to retrieve tons of data over the lan and will be very slow... Guess they thought they knew something I didn't...

It works in ABC... @MarkChinsky - that is what I had been telling people too - now they can see it for themselves.

Now that's funny @PhilMcIntosh!

Doubt this would ever be considered by Sage, since rewarding customer loyalty is a foreign concept to them. Maintenance fees on a sliding scale. In other words if you've been a loyal customer with continuous M&S payments, then you get x% off each year's renewal. Say 2% for years 2-5, 4% years 6-10 and 5% years 10+. It would be novel since I don't think any other ERP software does this and would turn the 'Customer for Life' phrase into something more than 'Customer for a Life of Long Punishment'.

Great idea @MoiraGoggin ...Your reasoning is innovative... like great IT products should be... As you mentioned, Sage probably won't consider it as there would be a short-term slight reduction of M&S revenue... even though implementing such a policy may generate greater long term new product sales and the resultant additional maintenance annuity.

And then we woke up...

If I'm Sage I know damn well that a very high percent of those people aren't going anywhere. To Sage giving discounts is just taking money out of the Sage shareholder pockets.

Sage can invest in the products or in the customers or both. The shareholders are going to lose a lot more than the cost of a discount if Sage doesn't invest wisely.

@WayneSchulz - Sounds like the mission statement of a crack dealer....

If sage was doing what you are suggesting Moira, we wouldn't have had the massive turnout for alternative product sessions at MOTM

Ummmm, Another reason we had massive turnout for the alternative session is that there were general sessions and the only one offered for that slot.... Perhaps a better indicator of the mess Sage has created is the DESIRE of the Accumatica and xTuple to seek us out. THEY wanted to be there......

Took a call last week from client wondering why they should renew maintenance for $5K. Tough one to argue since they are reluctant to move off v4.4...... But in an effort to keep the cash cow bloated, I have asked Deborah Nelson to join me in a conference call next week to hear the client's thoughts about the product allow her a chance to sell her product. I think it is important that the product development team participate in the ""unfriendly"" conversations to hear first hand. Now if the client were only on a later version.........

Did Deborah say yes, she would join the call?? That should be interesting! Let us know the outcome.

That's one reason we love RingCentral (plug, we are a referral partner), you can hit one button before the call begins and record the whole thing easily.

Yes, Deborah accepted my challenge (er, invitation) for next week. I am looking forward to her participation.

@MarkChinsky I wasn't suggesting that Sage was investing in any of those things, its obvious they aren't.

Looking forward to hear how Deborah handles this.