Sage News and Discussion

Sage Sales Involvement: As a result of the restructuring and sales meeting recently, my Sage sales contact and the supporting cast have really cranked it up with regard to current customer involvement. I am getting a minimum of one e-mail a day about clients interested in new modules (Sage obviously called them), clients calling Sage (maybe) inquiring about various functions, and support calls that are related to new sales. Fortunately, my RAM/RSM and I have an agreement that he will send all of these to me for follow up, but I can see the potential where Sage will just deal with these directly and we are out of the loop. So it has started, and we need to be much more proactive with our current customers, or we'll start losing out. You also may have a RAM/RSM who is much more mercenary than mine and won't communicate with you.

A sales lead a day? That's great @JohnHoyt! Is the RAM/RSM making the calls to your clients? I'd be interested in knowing if that was the case. I've had reports from clients that unsolictied sales calls from Sage usually have been made by tele-marketing types that can't answer any questions and at times are ""not very nice"", per a client. Also how do you approach your RAM/RSM to convenice them to include you in the loop on these leads?

I'm sure the leads are based on calls from Sage, not the other way around. And to a certain extent we could say I'm getting a lead a day, but in many cases these are clients we talk to all the time and there is a definite strategy in place that is being disrupted and requires my time to explain. I'm not convinced Sage is helping in many cases. I must have threatened someone at Sage at one time, so there are probably notes that say ""don't mess with John Hoyt."" Or maybe it's just mind games and they're going to do what they want anyway.

Yes they are calling our customers but not always, in my case asking the right questions. One customer using Sage 100 has 3 other sister companies in various states using other systems - 400 user total. Corporate (French) wants to get corporate and all subsidiaries under the same system. Sage jumped all over this. After days of emails and maybe even phone calls they finally found out that Corporate already had purchased SAP for financials and was just looking for Manufacturing to interface with SAP. If they had called me and dicussed this ""opportunity"" I could have told them the situation and saved them hours of false excitement. Sage's closing email to the customer, ""OK, we do not have any stand alone solutions. Sorry.

I dread these types of Sage ""sales calls"" aka cold calls. They're almost always in areas that we know about, the salesperson leaves out key details (like price) and we are left feeling obligated to spend a few hours cleaning up. And just wait - if they start making calls to migrate your best Sage customers to ERP X3 your opinion will probably change -- just like many VARS had to react back in the days when Sage (unsuccessfully) tried to do migrations for MAS200 > MAS500 customers (and by unsuccessful I mean for the customer because most who 'bit' are now stuck on abandonware).

Abandonware"" - nice term @WayneSchulz !

ditto-our guy seems to want to jump in and just close them. JOY