Sage News and Discussion

Sage Partner Alliance Received this yesterday and wonder if anyone else has as well. it seems that Sage wants to expand the accounting alliances on the backs of the reseller/consultants revenue (8 hours complementary service per referral). I've heard more than once from @JohnHoyt that even being with an accounting firm leads are rare to his group. It makes me wonder why Sage is trotting down this path. Reminds of days ago, when Sage/SOTA would sign up any CPA as long as they were breathing, even if they had no experience in ERP.

This showed up in Sage Sell about a week or two ago. Sage began privately emailing VARS about a week later. The Sage Accountants network is what apparently became Sage Partner Alliance. The old program had the same ""8 hours of volunteer work"" requirement as this one. No change. The problem is that as you and John probably already know - the old SAN seemed to attract a lot of people who were either looking for cheap software or were looking for cheap software. Though on occasion I did find a CPA firm attracted to the program who was looking for cheap software. The free 8 hours under the old program was never much of a hard and fast requirement since you could always claim that the back and forth discussions you have with the myriad of people who call under the program (or more likely who you call) were consuming that free time. In my experience the Sage relationship with CPAS was lost back in the QuickBooks days when Sage unceremoniously dumped most accountants from their reselling program to appease us complaining resellers. I'll be personally surprised if much happens here.

Sage seems to reinvent this program at least every two years. At one point we were part of this alliance and continue to have the same CPA firms as partners (about 8 - 10), although Sage has not contacted us regarding those alliances for years. We are also members of PKF North America, an alliance organization of about 60 CPA and Consulting firms throughout the country. We should be the primary contact with regard to Sage for all of those firms, most of which do not represent any software except QB. I can imagine alliances being formed with many of those firms and other business partners, which does not make sense. Actually we have partners in all of our offices who receive mailings from Sage and resellers on this subject, and they get forwarded to me. CPAs are not going to change as far as actively bringing their clients to us or any other reseller, even when they are in an alliance group. At least 6 months of the year they are too busy to meet, and then they forget about it. Software is no more on their minds than Sec. 179 is on ours. This is just another sign of the dysfunctional BS that Sage thinks up in their useless strategy meetings of people who have no real world knowledge of what is really going on out here. (This is my reaction after sitting next to @PeterWolf for two days at MOTM. Peter, it worked.)