General Consultant Discussion

Sage has learned nothing from the Pascal Experience The new ""Get more value for Sage customers with SPS"" e-mail is yet another slap in the face. ""Referral opportunities There's no better time than today to start referring customers to Sage Payment Solutions. As an advocate for small and midsized businesses, Sage delivers a more complete solution for customers to run their business. We make it easy for Sage customers to activate integrated Sage Payments and realize more value from their Sage solutions. By referring existing customers to Sage Payments, you get greater income opportunities and develop more loyal customers. There is no added effort on your end, since we manage the onboarding and merchant support of these customers for you. To earn referral fees for opportunities, simply join the Sage Payments referral program. Through this program, you can potentially earn incremental revenue for each referred merchant. To join or find out more, please contact Director of Business Development Geoff Cox at Geoff.Cox@sage.com."" OK not a bad message. Why is now better than previously??? ""New marketing and sales process To accelerate Sage Payments activations from existing customers, we will start communicating to segments of our mutual customer base on an ongoing basis through multiple touch points and nurturing programs to drive awareness and interest. Starting next month, we will launch integrated marketing campaigns highlighting Sage Payments to Sage 100 ERP, Sage 300 ERP, and Sage Construction and Real Estate solutions customers in the U.S. In advance of any marketing activity, we will send you a preview of all the campaigns before they are deployed to our shared customers."" So we are going to contact the customers because you won't? Perhaps because SPS is not competitive on price? ""Your partnership and collaboration are very important to us. To grow together, we have aligned our resources to support our partners. Each partner will now have a dedicated Sage Payments representative. Please contact Geoff Cox to find out more about this new support feature. "" NOT YOUR BULLSHITING ME. If you really thought we were important, you would have contacted us to work on the sale.

Yeah, I think our next newsletter is going to lead with ""Alternative to Sage for integrated credit card processing

http://community.90minds.com/2015/05/11/sage-100-credit-card-processing-alternative-qa-american-payment-solutions/

Here's the Sage Payments Referral FAQ -- nothing too exciting here except contact numbers at Sage for questions. I'm not sure what is going to change to make SPS more popular. Maybe SPS is going to be run as if they are in a competitive environment instead of a captive Sage audience market.

We're signed on with APS and have no intention of returning to SPS. The chaos of the last 2-3 months at SPS, the lack of any real incentives and the increases in rates for our customers were the leading factors in our decision.

As I look at third party solutions -- payments, reporting -- I think it very wise to choose solutions that offer additional integration options outside the Sage world. SI may be the world's best product but it's a waste of my time (all things being equal) to put in extra effort to learn a product that only integrates with Sage.

How are they going to provide a dedicated Sage Payments representative when they fired all of them in February?

Not an hour after my post received a call from my 'new' SPS representative who is conveniently located in Georgia, a three hour time difference from California. He was nice enough, couldn't spell or pronounce my name, didn't have a clue that I'm already signed up with SPS but was looking forward to working with me. And well, my confidence just soared...for working with APS.

Looks like SPS reps have impossible quotas. I just got an email from Sherry claiming to have just talked. that hasn't happened before: ========= Jerry, Thanks for speaking with me today. I am looking forward to building a lasting Partnership with you. Please feel free to contact me, as your valued SAGE Sales Representative, with all of your questions Sage Payment Solutions. I am here to assist you in any capacity! Please note my contact information below: Thanks again for speaking with me, Best Regard

and another oddity. Sherry apparently is not in LinkedIn! And she's a ""partnership manager, north america"". Sage can sure pick 'em.

We had a full presentation by Patty and Bryce at APS this afternoon for all of our consultants,and it confirmed we have made the right choice to switch to APS. Based on much of what we were told, I feel that Sage has been less than honest about this and has overcharged customers for a long time. We started down the SPS road based on Sage telling us it was the only choice, and we sold it that way. I'm not convinced SPS has much life left.

John, your report does NOT surprise at all. For at least the last 2 years, I've let my Pollyanna side try to negate my growing feeling that Irvine thinks that the channel partners are essentially rubes, and our customers are marks. The events of the past 6 months have removed ANY possibility that my Pollyanna was correct in even the slightest element. So sad for all. It didn't have to be this way.

@JohnHoyt - @MyronStevenson and I also had a presentation with Patty last week. It is an attractive offering, seems to work as seamlessly as SPS integration and it's nice to have a competitive offering that works on more than just Sage - especially as many partners are beginning to diversify away from Sage.

We're using APS internally and have moved some of our customers for SPS to APS. In fact, we were involved in our own implementation and one of our customers that is on our hosted systems. APS has handled most of the legwork on the others.