90 Minds Community

Brian Kelly at ASI has encouraged me to make more posts about wins and losses with Sage CRM. So, I'll start with a deal Brian brought me into.

Backstory: Prospect repairs glass on the vehicles that repair North America's Railroads. Pretty niche. The prospect was graduating from QuickBooks and needed something more all encompassing to take the business to the next level. The solution needed to track the equipment, service records against equipment, and allow field service reps to update jobs and add line items to quotes that feeds Sage 100 (using the GUMU™) from a client specific iPhone App. COMPANY A knew the CRM and field service module needed to be unique to their needs. This was primarily a CRM deal since CRM needed to be modified so heavily to accommodate COMPANY A.

Solution: I put together a mock-up that I kept reviewing with COMPANY A over the course of several meetings (3 over 3-weeks). It was exactly what they wanted and because the owner committed the time to meet with me those 3 times, she was very involved in the process. Ultimately the solution required a budget on the CRM side of approximately 40k (including all support for 1-year). ASI handled the 100 side.

Outcome: We lost this 100/CRM deal to SAP Business One. And the reason given was that year 1 implementation fees for SAPB1 were significantly cheaper. Huh? My first thought was…I haven't competed against SAPB1 since early 2000 (in my Sage 300 days). I wasn't even aware it was still a thing. Do any of you ever come across them in competition?

Comments: Sometimes Sage CRM deals are straight forward, but (for MCM) about 1 in 4 requires custom screens. While this prospect had challenges, I'm used to it. I'm surprised, but…since we only win 1/5 of these deals so, not that surprised. I feel it was close.

 

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Dan Cousins 416.233.9049
My CRM Manager
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I have always been impressed with what Sage CRM could do.  Sometimes it takes a few too many screens or is not as intuitive as we would like, but the potential is huge and the single publisher (sage) is attractive to many customers.

When competing with SAP Business One, you should be aware that they have been investing heavily over the past year and especially in their web client.   The browser client is now relatively fully functional for most sales and service functions which are native to the product.  There is no integration or GUMU when the system uses the same data file structure for all functions.  The solution is also very easily tailored for custom fields and tables and there is a customization enhancement tool which makes scripting like creating macros in Excel.

Where a seperate CRM database will win is when the prospect does a lot of prospecting.  Since Business One uses one table for vendors customers and leads, companies with large prospect pools do not want to pollute their Business Partner Master File table with suspects who will most likely never convert.  To address this SAP and several business partners have built out of the box integrations with MailChimp (primarily).  This is where the single publisher angle can bear fruit.

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Gary Feldman
Cloud Evangelist
I-Business Network, LLC
Marietta GA
http://www.summithosting.com
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Dan, this was a great case study. They are always useful to us, even when the sale goes to the competition.  

Gary's insights about SAP Business One are really useful too. Thanks. The point about separate CRM db and prospecting is one I don't see made much; not having a way to cleanly split prospects from customers really drags down an active sales organization. Even cleanly separating leads from prospects is a PITA, because you quickly end up with 3/4 of the entries as old news.

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Jerry Norman
At-Large BOD Member, 90 Minds
Smartbridge Partners
512.419.1444 x112
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-28-2022 09:32
From: Gary Feldman
Subject: Sage CRM / Sales Example from Recent Prospect with Complex Needs (complex for me)

I have always been impressed with what Sage CRM could do.  Sometimes it takes a few too many screens or is not as intuitive as we would like, but the potential is huge and the single publisher (sage) is attractive to many customers.

When competing with SAP Business One, you should be aware that they have been investing heavily over the past year and especially in their web client.   The browser client is now relatively fully functional for most sales and service functions which are native to the product.  There is no integration or GUMU when the system uses the same data file structure for all functions.  The solution is also very easily tailored for custom fields and tables and there is a customization enhancement tool which makes scripting like creating macros in Excel.

Where a seperate CRM database will win is when the prospect does a lot of prospecting.  Since Business One uses one table for vendors customers and leads, companies with large prospect pools do not want to pollute their Business Partner Master File table with suspects who will most likely never convert.  To address this SAP and several business partners have built out of the box integrations with MailChimp (primarily).  This is where the single publisher angle can bear fruit.

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Gary Feldman
Cloud Evangelist
I-Business Network, LLC
Marietta GA
http://www.summithosting.com
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@Jerry Norman the seperation of entities from the ERP BP Master is typically for unqualified suspects.  Most of the MailChimp integrations will add the prospect to the SAP BD as a lead once qualified through activity in Mailchimp and before any quoting is done.  Once in the system as a lead, you can use the Sales Opportunity mod​ule to track all sales activity.   

The other reason for segregation from SAP of suspects is that the Marketing module will use the user's e-mail who triggers a mailing as the sender.  If you do bulk marketing this can quickly get your domain blacklisted and other issues.  Even bulk e-mail programs tend to provide governors to reduce this risk.

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Gary Feldman
Cloud Evangelist
Summit Hosting
http://www.summithosting.com
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-28-2022 13:07
From: Jerry Norman
Subject: Sage CRM / Sales Example from Recent Prospect with Complex Needs (complex for me)

Dan, this was a great case study. They are always useful to us, even when the sale goes to the competition.

Gary's insights about SAP Business One are really useful too. Thanks. The point about separate CRM db and prospecting is one I don't see made much; not having a way to cleanly split prospects from customers really drags down an active sales organization. Even cleanly separating leads from prospects is a PITA, because you quickly end up with 3/4 of the entries as old news.

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Jerry Norman
At-Large BOD Member, 90 Minds
Smartbridge Partners
512.419.1444 x112
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-28-2022 09:32
From: Gary Feldman
Subject: Sage CRM / Sales Example from Recent Prospect with Complex Needs (complex for me)

I have always been impressed with what Sage CRM could do.  Sometimes it takes a few too many screens or is not as intuitive as we would like, but the potential is huge and the single publisher (sage) is attractive to many customers.

When competing with SAP Business One, you should be aware that they have been investing heavily over the past year and especially in their web client.   The browser client is now relatively fully functional for most sales and service functions which are native to the product.  There is no integration or GUMU when the system uses the same data file structure for all functions.  The solution is also very easily tailored for custom fields and tables and there is a customization enhancement tool which makes scripting like creating macros in Excel.

Where a seperate CRM database will win is when the prospect does a lot of prospecting.  Since Business One uses one table for vendors customers and leads, companies with large prospect pools do not want to pollute their Business Partner Master File table with suspects who will most likely never convert.  To address this SAP and several business partners have built out of the box integrations with MailChimp (primarily).  This is where the single publisher angle can bear fruit.

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Gary Feldman
Cloud Evangelist
I-Business Network, LLC
Marietta GA
http://www.summithosting.com

Dan, 
Thank you for sharing this. Very interesting scenario and based on your write up, this would have been an ideal opportunity for TimeLinx PSM + SageCRM. TimeLinx is built in the file structure of Sage CRM so no need for a user to open another application or understand how to navigate a separate tool, TimeLinx tracks equipment as well as service records against equipment ( and much more) , it schedules and dispatches field techs and alerts them of their assigned work using our SmartMobile application. The SmartMobile application allows field service reps to accept work, update jobs and add time, expense and additional line items to quotes that ultimately feed in to Sage 100 ( we have our own integration to Sage 100 called TAP- TimeLinx Accounting Platform and therefore no need to purchase another 3rd party application like GUMU) Our mobile application is device and platform agnostic so it works with tablets, laptops, iPhone and Android. Lastly, TimeLinx PSM is user defined so during the set up, we allow access to the various tools/ modules based on user type. In other words, field technician will only see limited information and data pertinent to them and their assigned jobs vs. a member of finance that would want to see complete project accounting, real time report and overall profitability of every job etc.  The scenario is very typical of the majority of our clients and we would be happy to show it to you should a future Sage 100 / Sage CRM opportunity bubble up where field services is a key requirement. Again, thanks for sharing this story with the group. Very helpful.
Kind regards, 

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Jeffrey Gregorec
Executive Vice President & General Manager
TimeLinx Software
Phoenix, AZ. 85050
Mobile +602.526.2080
jeffg@timelinxsoftware.com
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