General Consultant Discussion

Soon we will update our 90 Minds Socialcast group structure. Some groups will be merged and we will create some external facing groups for use by all of our members (both vendor and consultant). Here is our proposed group layout. Most of this is pruning out of groups that receive very little traffic. The biggest change is allowing vendor members to join us in external groups open to both consultant and vendor members. CONSULTANT MEMBERS (Restricted - Consultant Members) Business of Consulting (Possibly both consultant and vendor) Sage 100 Routine Sage 100 Urgent Sage 300 Routine Job Ops Admin Sage CRM Sage Scripting EXTERNAL GROUPS (EVERYONE) Third party solutions (Open) Sage and Industry News (Open) As our group grows and we continue to admit vendor members there have been requests to allow vendor members to interact with our consultant members. We plan to create groups for our vendor members to interact with consultant members as shown above. As part of this change vendor members will NOT have access to any of content within prior groups that had been used exclusively by consultant members. Please join us for a brief conference call (this will be an open Q&A without any formal presentation) if you have any questions or would like to make suggestions on how we continue to update our groups for future growth. When: Wed, Nov 19, 2014 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST Topic: Socialcast changes to groups https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3873732659089333505

<bump> I'm bumping this to make sure people see it. I think it will be a great change and help streamline the socialcast structure to everyone's benefit.

Ideally I would like to see us have just one set of groups for everyone. I know we can't do this with some of the groups where there may have been discussions about vendors that should remain private. Long term I think it's in our best interest to continue migrating this information and combining our groups of consultant members and vendor members. We can either sit back and watch Sage tour the country along with vendors and reach our customers directly -- or we can be proactive about becoming active participants. The old rules of ""always go through a partner and never direct to the customer"" are fading - and fast. Our customers are using the web to get informed and reaching out on their own to providers. The only way to have a fighting chance to combat this is to become more informed on the types of offerings and make sure that your customers are hearing about them from YOU. I think a closer interaction with vendor members will help this greatly. For now we're not proposing to open up all groups. Instead we'll create a subset of external groups where we can all interact. Vendor members added to the external group won't have access to other general groups. Remember that for a few years 90 Minds was paralyzed with fear (myself included) over what would happen if we stopped offering geographical exclusivity to consultant members and allowed other consultants from the same state/geography to join. We wrestled with this for a good amount of time. Our first step was to create a category called OASIS and onboard new members into that category to share tech info to an external group. Then a funny thing happened. All of our fears about competitiveness between members were unfounded. We went from about 60 (give or take) up to the 170 (give or take) members that we have today. All without any conflict or ""stealing"" of customers. Of course some of the reason that adding new members in the same geography was relatively painless was that at the same time Sage was undergoing reorg after reorg and clearly on a collision course with our services. So the view of competition began to shift and it was less of ""that competitor around the corner"" or ""the big VAR who is going to steal my customers"" and more of a collaborative effort to survive when Sage had suddenly offered every single Sage 100 customer 5 support cases a year. I think that's what is going to happen with vendor member interaction as well. For the initial time we'll move slowly. Then as we see that it is in fact helpful to have a Scanco or Website pipeline interacting with the group then I think we'll become more comfortable. There's undoubtedly concern about Socialcast becoming ""one big commercial"". Please remember that in addition to Socialcast that several of us are active on a daily basis moderating several Sage LinkedIn Groups - some with upwards of 8,600 members. None of those groups are over-run with spam/commercials or sales pitches. Nothing precludes us from continuing to offer a consultant only private area as well as vendor only private area. However overall I believe we should begin this process of expanding our groups and allowing vendor members to interact with us. Sign up for the webinar to share your thoughts. This will NOT be a presentation - it's going to be a conference call for Q&A. https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3873732659089333505

I'm in 100% agreement with Wayne. I heard a great saying recently that really stuck with me: Speed is the new currency of the customer. The pace that the world moves at requires more openness and transparency - the good, the bad, and even the ugly. My view is that we are all in this together and open channels will result in greater velocity of communication and ultimately better services for the customers.

Well said Wayne. At the second MOTM I suggested that 90 Minds become more of a go-to-market organization and I see the changes coming now as forced by Sage on our community. Then last year we had vendor sessions designed to be non-commercial and the group wants to know more about product and price. I firmly believe that you can go to market without being blatant in your face sales and I believe that many of our vendor partners understand that. Many of our members have expressed the desire for our vendor members to be providers of quality products and services that we would be proud to represent and not just organizations willing to write a check. This is why I full support keeping the vendors segregated from some aspects of the community. Basically so we can talk honestly about them just as we do with Sage. If we really want to be more about sales, perhaps we need a group dedicated for pre-sales activity. This could be in business of consulting, or a separate group. It could be open to vendors, but then opinions could not be expressed as freely. Alternatively, vendors may have products that the community does not know about that can solve problems of our customers and prospects and their input could be very helpful. This again goes back to only having vendors of high quality products. I look forward to hearing the opinions of others.

Gary, I appreciate your comment. But this topic begs the question - Should your company be considered a vendor member or just a regular member?

A fair question. Here is another. Should DSD be a regular member or a vendor member? I believe DSD, I-BN and Azamba contribute to the discussion without blatantly selling their products.

I couldn't agree more! In my many years of participating in this group, I have never felt that you were in it for the sale. Never once!!!! But times change, the group changes - where do you draw the line now? I honestly don't have the answer.

If we're partnering (and we are), couldn't we all be under consideration as vendor members? @WayneSchulz has sent customers to our classroom and we've done a Fixed Assets upgrade project for @BethBowers . We've gone to @PeterWolf for CRM work and @JohnHoyt for JobOps. @GaryFeldman isn't any more a vendor than the rest of us are. He doesn't behave like a vendor (inside of 90 Minds) and neither do the rest of us.

Thanks Brian! I think we are all in agreement on that.

Just a reminder that this discussion is happening today - Wednesday 11/19/14 at 2pm ET - expect 3 to 5 minute overview of the changes we expect to make and then an opportunity for discussion.