General Consultant Discussion

One of our members raised what I think is a very good question about the reasoning behind our admission of vendor members to 90 Minds in light of yesterday's Summit webinar. Because I'm sure that others have the same question - I've received permission to re-post the question and my reply so that everyone can benefit. Question re: Vendor Members and Yesterday's Webinar: Wayne, I have enjoyed being a member of 90 Minds for the last year and a half. I have gained a lot of knowledge and many online friends and colleagues. With all the benefit received as a member of this organization, it is difficult for me to criticize. I have a lot of respect for you, Peter, Alnoor, Robert, Jim, Jeff, Therese, and everyone that manages the programs. I was a taken off guard by the 15 minutes of advertising to begin the webinar yesterday. What is the reasoning for allowing vendors into the group? Is it entirely a financial decision? Is the mission of the group being compromised as decisions are guided by the almighty dollar? Although I only represent Sage 100 products, I always act in my client's best interest when recommending add-on solutions. I am interested in attending all of the trade show booths.. I always do so at my convenience. I am also interested in attending the 90 Minds social event. I am not particularly thrilled at having to visit all of 90 Minds vendors and listen to their sales pitch as a prerequisite to attending the social event. but I will. Again, Wayne, this group has been nothing but a positive experience for me, and I have enjoyed communicating with all of the really talented people who participate.

And below is my reply which is a little lengthy but I wanted to be sure to answer as many questions as possible. I definitely agree with your views and let me explain a little bit about the decision process behind vendor members. I am not asking for you to agree with it. One thing I've learned from a group of this size - not everyone is going to agree. First, you should in no way feel compelled to visit vendor member booths, patronize or recommend them in any way whatsoever. As a group 90 Minds does not endorse them any more than 90 Minds endorses me or you. Having vendor members is in no way meant to imply that you must attend a single webinar . I'll work harder to make that clear in the future. 90 Minds is presently at 160 members (90 different firms). Hosting events like MOTM is a huge (huge) time suck. Planning parties in Vegas and other activities is an enormous time commitment. Even managing the additions and subtractions of our members to Socialcast (our bread and butter activity) is an enormous sometimes daily task. All of the people doing this work also have day jobs. I personally went to the administrative team and told them they were nuts to be working like this for free. What essentially was happening was they were offering dues to members at an unrealistic below market rate for the value provided and that events were being subsidized by admin team free labor (I think we charged $500 for MOTM 2014 and I see the SLA is charging $750 for what does not appear to offer anywhere near the entertainment and educational activities -- also the ITA Alliance is pretty close in activity level to us and I believe they're over $1,000). Again - not asking you to agree. Only to understand where my recommendation came from. And this was largely me urging the admin team to be realistic in how the group developed. Essentially I told admin 90 Minds can either stay the same and just operate a Socialcast with no promotion to add members but I strongly believed we'd see membership just sort of wither away as people retired, went out of business or took jobs with clients. So ultimately my recommendation -- again if there's any beef with this you can hang me as I was responsible for the proposal/idea: 1. The admin team needs to be compensated for the time that goes into managing the group 2. As an alternative we could hire from the outside and have a person or persons manage the group 3. If we hire from the outside - I am not managing that person for free - so the question is -- who manages the newly hired person ? 4. If we hire from the outside we're going to compensate at a higher level and probably be less happy then if we reimbursed existing admin for their time spent Ultimately my proposal was: a. Charge vendor members b. Use some portion of that money to compensate admin staff for work they do for the group On an ongoing basis we have lots of behind the scenes work that occurs: 1. Accounting (invoices, pay bills) 2. Webinars (setup, promote, monitor) 3. Members (setup in Socialcast, add/delete as people move or leave firms) 4. Events (hotels, menu, coordination) 5. Vendor member management (recruit members, deal with myriad of questions) 6. Overall group management (web site, social media, future web projects) Ultimately we have a diverse group. We have members that are heads down and want to do the work and ask tech questions. We have more sales oriented members who want not only technical but also sales info. Then we have members who are very business oriented and want collaboration on topics such as fixed pricing, support plans, etc. There's just no one size fits all and as such we recognize that some members are going to scratch their heads about why the group has moved in one direction of another. I'm not trying to justify or convince you either way - only to provide a somewhat wordy explanation of all that has gone on behind the scenes in the past year to get where we are today.

Wayne, Do you think that the free exchange of ideas and more importantly experience (with products from all vendors) might be inhibited for regular members because vendor members have access to Socialcast?

Vendor members do not have access to Socialcast. We are not anticipating adding them. If in the future we were to have an area for them it would be in a place where they could NOT read prior messages. Vendor members have a defined set of benefits depending upon their membership level. Here is a guide we provided to them to explain benefits, etc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jW4XJTr7QZ-T5dC-uz4WZXBE8NPUEww1DKYC8xzjltI/edit?usp=sharing

@WayneSchulz I fully support the direction taken with regard to the vendors and compensating the admin group for all their hard work. This is the only way in my opinion that the group can be maintained, grow and stay relevant. I know it was not the original intention, but 90 Minds has become a powerful force in the Sage community, and I know Sage recognizes this. It is still primarily focused on technical support and the exchange of answers revolving around this, but the power and influence is there if we choose to use it.

I agree with John and the idea of compensation and monetizing value provided by 90 Minds. I would just caution that vendor sponsors should meet some sort of qualification criteria. When Sage selected inferior products as endorsed it diminished the perception of Sage to the channel.

When 90 Minds begin as a group the admission criteria was highly selective. We allowed existing members to veto potential new members. While in some cases that worked pretty well more often what happened is that it made it impossible to add anybody due to minor regional squabbles. The group had a year or two where we did not add many members at all. I realize you can make an argument about why do we need x vs y numbers. If we have an active Socialcast where people are answering questions why keep adding people? My overall response has been that we see members become very active and less active all the time and for us not to be actively recruiting new members means that we likely would see existing membership wither at some point. We also had more than a few cases where the existing member doing the vetoing wasn't especially active in the group so their veto of a potential new member was more of a drag on the expansion of the group. We got rid of that rule and I think it has been a very positive thing. Admittedly the environment of consulting has changed so that there's not as much VAR to VAR competition as there was in the past. I guess my concern about vendor members is how do we screen them ? Given the maturity of the Sage 100 marketplace those vendors still in the marketplace are doing something right for at least some segment of the market. One thing that we have held off on is admitting competitors to Sage - ie Netsuite, Accumatica, etc -- or Sage themselves. I'm not saying we'll never do it or that it would or won't be a good idea. Rather for new we think we have enough on our plate just dealing with the Sage related vendors.

@WayneSchulz ""Vendor members do not have access to Socialcast."" To clarify.....Does this statement mean no employees of a vendor company have access to Socialcast? One of the great benefits of this group is the ability to ask members for advice and recommendations of third party solutions. The free exchange of experience with products and objective advice is essential.

@DougHiggs we have member who are both VARS and also may be considered ""vendors"". Some of them are members of both sections (Socialcast and Vendor Members) and therefore are in Socialcast. I believe all of them have been here since before we began accepting vendor members. As examples DSD Business systems has a myriad of members (including me) who might (should?) be considered a vendor (though they are not a vendor member), SWK is a vendor member and has people as Socialcast members. Blytheco might be considered a vendor (though they are not a vendor member), i-Business Network (though they are not vendor members), Clients First (though they are not vendor members), Joe Bisaha of JDB Solution is both a member and vendor member. I'm sure I've unintentionally left several off the list. We want to have a place where people are not afraid to ask for and give their candid opinions about any products and services that they've used. It's something we (admin) talk about very regularly (about once a week) and so far we haven't found a solution that seems ideal. We could open another group that's private but realistically we've gotten stuck on the DSD issue - who participates in that group as moderators if Jim w, Robert, Me are DSD affiliated - then we shouldn't be in there. Now throw in the other VARS who might subcontract occasionally for vendor members. Suddenly we've created another project (vetting who can and cannot access the ""pure VAR "" proposed area -- that's questionable if it solves any issues. The definition of who is a ""pure"" VAR is also changing quite a bit. With the wide acceptance of subcontracting we have many pure VARS who may also be working as subcontractors (whether one-off or regularly) for what we consider to be vendor members. It's tough to create a place where a large group is going to have candid disusssions. As of now I've been asking for email replies when I sense people may be reluctant to openly comment about any topic. I also use Google Hangouts in small groups of trusted VARS where I can ask questions or just discuss off-topic things during the day or night. To me this is the best way to have candid conversations because I know exactly who I'm directing my questions to. In the future I've thought that we could do more surveys which ask people for opinions and feedback on various hot topics. Do you have any suggestions?

Also to be clear we are going to have both vendors and members in our group Google Hangouts as well as Google+ chat during Sage Summit. I will make it abundantly clear as well as the location of the un-join button in Google+ for anyone who prefers not to communicate that way after they've joined. (Note: G+ is fully opt-in - people will have to join on their own by clicking the link below). Here's the Google+ group for anyone who has not joined. We'll use this to broadcast activities and keep in touch during Summit. We are using this only during Summit instead of Socialcast so as not to clog Socialcast with lots of non-technical updates which might increase the rate at which messages scroll and make it difficult for people who are trying to get answers to technical questions. There are both members and vendor members in G+ and Hangouts. https://plus.google.com/communities/107517138465908981244

This is a difficult issue. There is a need to compensate the admin staff which I fully support. To afford a compensation plan, new sources of revenue are necessary. I don't have any suggestions at this time. As you mention Wayne, it may be that in the future we need to use Google Hangouts (I don't have any experience with this) or other communication method to discuss sensitive issues. Once the group accepts money from a vendor that has employees as regular members, other members may be reluctant to give negative feedback about the vendors products or services.... can't offend the people paying the bills.

Not having most vendors included in Socialcast encourages more candid comments regarding their products and support. Unlike some other groups, however, we all act professional for the most part, and most vendors want to hear that feedback, so they can fix and improve their products. As long as we can control those that have vendettas against certain products and vendors, this would all be positive. I would support either option. I do believe, though, we should not include Sage in Socialcast. They get the criticisms in the Sage LinkedIn group, and that is sufficient.