Sage 100

Roadshow - Has anyone attended one of the recent roadshows? Sage is having one in Dallas next Tuesday and was curious on attendance and feedback at the previous ones?

What's the topic -- I wasn't aware there were any general roadshows -- is this an Ed Kless course?

No Kless - Tom Miller, Erika, Debbie Hill and several others - discuss roadmap for 100, 300, 500, X3. Also presented was Avalara, Altex, KnowledgeSync, EDI, Accellos, Business Intelligence, Sage CRM

I heard that the attendance at one was very light and it seems this was more of a customer show. Very light = a couple people. The new trend seems to be that Sage goes direct with this as well. I remember seeing some notice but it looked as if a third party group of developers were sponsoring. I am still unsure if this is a Sage sponsored show. Low attendance. Not great. From someone in attendance at one.

Definitely a Sage sponsored, customer and prospect oriented show but they are inviting a few partners. They are testing the waters to see if they should have more of these with greater drive to draw more crowds. I was told that the audience numbers were in line with expectations as a trial run.

Well here is my feedback. My understanding from Sage was the Dallas Roadshow was the last of these series until Oct. They also said this was the largest in all the events. I had 25 attendees from Pabian Partners. There were probably 20 more prospects/customers there from other VARs. I was told I had the largest attendance!!! My customers really enjoyed the Sage Intelligence(which made me nervous) but I think once the new version comes out it will be nice. The Don Farber did a fabulous presentation on knowledgesync(FYI 8.1 coming out in a couple of weeks). Erika gave more of a history of PCI and how poor sage had to spend time on being compliant and why they are taking the credit card data out of MAS and storing in the vault. I wonder if the same is happening with MAS500 and Accpac? They did show that Sage Exchange would be able to accept payments for your invoices via cc or ACH and write back to MAS in concept. Also an iphone app able to see customer invoices and take a payment out in the field via cc. Sage CRM presentation was decent - showed alot of functionality that is for Accpac probably out of the box that is not there for MAS without doing a bunch of plugins. But in 12 months the hope is that Sage CRM will have the same type of communication with MAS as accpac.

@JohnnyPabian - how were you notified of this roadshow? I remember seeing something maybe 3-6 months ago which looked like it was from Altec and seemed to be a group of independent VARs. I do not recall reading anything in the Sage news or receiving any direct mailings from Sage. I'm of the impression many others did not receive direct mail either -- or they just ignored -- because there has not been very much talk about this at all. You'd think with the issues that Sage is having making the channel feel wanted/loved that they would have pushed this - but my impression is that they kept this low key although I hear they had a pretty full staff attending some.

This is the roadshow that I'm thinking of -- the lineup seems almost the same as the one you are discussing. I did not attend the one in NY and am not sure what their numbers were like. http://www.erproadshows.com/

@WayneSchulz I got a call from a Sage guy in Atlanta in May saying they were thinking of having a roadshow where they only invite a few partners to attend.

Thanks. I have an email into Sage PR to ask them for details.

We participated in the Atlanta road show. They asked us a month or so ahead if we wanted to do it. They sent out the invites to all customers in this area two weeks before the event.. Then the week before the event they gave us the marketing material to send our own email to all customers and prospects. They really wanted all the partners to use Zift123 (they gave 30 day access to those not using zift already) to send out the email so they could track a prospect back to the reseller and not align them to another reseller (at least that was one of the stories I was told). They really pushed for us to get customers there. They offered 10% discount to any customer or prospect that attended. The turnout was really bad. We had 6+ Sage employees 6+ resellers and only 4 customers. Two of the four customers left after lunch. I think it was a great idea with too short of notice to really get anyone there. It also felt like a sales show in the marketing materials. At least it did to me. I would say there was about 2 hours of good stuff. Sad to say that I was one of the resellers that didn't get any customer or prospect to go. Out of all the ones we emailed and called, only one was really interested but already had plans. I think a week to a week and a half notice was too short for a full day event.

Thanks -- who was the person who asked you to join -- was it Sage or a vendor ?

Sage

Sorry to have so many questions but I'm asking Sage about this and would like to compare what they tell me to your experiences. Thanks.

I spoke to Tom Miller about this last week and he said that it was a limited run to shake out mechanics for the next round. It seems like they improved the message and roll out as they went along. My guess is we will start to see more of these ""mini-Summits"" to drive the connected services and add-on products. Behind the scenes, I'm willing to bet that the third-party vendors are footing the bill for most of the hard costs.

I would like to see the emails that went out for @ToddMartin and the ones that went out for @JohnnyPabian to see if they were the same or if the message changed at all.

In the other post I showed what the emails looked like. I think the main thing that changed was the agenda and how it was laid out. Do not think the content changed much but who knows.

I was initially contacted by Joe Carroll, who said Bill Hammer suggested that we participate. They made it sound like there was going to be just select partners but in the end all the partners that I ever run into around here were in attendance. Actually one was listed but didn't show up.

Well if it is any help - I wrote my own letter and emailed my clients Monday morning - a week before the Tuesday event. I sent to 100 people 38 responded as registered. 27 actually showed. @PeterWolf I saw the Zift email they wanted us to send and I was so turned off by the layout and the marketing of it was too slick and therefore I did not use it. But I am not for turning over the contacts and their email addresses and making it any easier for Sage to market to directly. Now I have 27 that will be on the hook with Sage. I am wondering if Sage is connecting the dots as to what worked and did not work.

27% is pretty good.