Sage 100

What are the options for customer training on Sage Inventory Adviser? A customer viewed a Sage video and said it was horrible. The presenter spoke in a heavy accent and was difficult to follow. What are the alternatives?

I had Tom Wilson of Sage do the demo and Q&A Tom.Wilson@sage.com

Thanks Wayne. Tom Wilson did the demo and sold the subscription to this customer also. However, Tom doesn't provide training. Once the sales is made, training is self-service. My customer watched the recommended training videos and is asking for an alternative. They are ready to cancel the subscription if they can't figure out how to effectively use the software.

https://gotranscript.com/??

LOL Phil. Are you suggesting they pay $.72 a minute to translate a heavy British accent to a US accent? I would like to video the look on thier faces when I propose that as a solution. LMAO!!!

Probably the same look you'll get from Russ when you tell him they need to translate all their videos into American English...

I am certain this customer doesn't have an issue with the people that have the heavy accent. They don't believe the SIA setup and features are being effectively communicated. There were three people in the organization that independently watched the videos. They all said the videos were poor. Another customer had a similar experience last year.

Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your initial post.

I thought that SIA charged a fee to get it all installed and would have thought that included a walk through

@WayneSchulz I would like to know if a walk through is included. They purchased SIA a year and a half ago and the employees that were involved in the purchase have recently left the company. SIA was never implemented and the new regime is trying to determine if they should keep it.

That's pretty sad that the initial employees involved have now left. I have a client that implemented it two years ago and loves it.

@CYNTHIAHAY How did the users get trained?

Let me find out and let you know.

My client's implementation team worked closely with a rep (Grant). When the new supply chain manager came on board, he was trained by the implementation team leader. He also said that the training video's were not very good. Sounds like your client needs to get a SIA rep to get the new users trained.

Thank you very much @CYNTHIAHAY !!

Looks like there is some competition to Sage Inventory Advisor. If you don't like dealing with a British/South African accent, these folks are Swedish. https://www.eazystock.com/ Met them at the APS meet and greet at the Chicago Sessions. They are new to the Sage 100 Cloud world but have a lot of experience working with the MSFT ERP offerings. Might be worth a look. Maybe Russ will get the message that folks like responsiveness.

@DougHiggs Keep us posted on what you find as this is likely to come up again with other customers.

In the future you should consider an option where YOU ""enhance"" the vendor training. This would be a combination of coaching, interpretation, and ""counseling"" sessions with the customer's team. then if they don't like the vendor's standard offer ... they have on option in their local expert. Remember that products like SIA also quite effectively incompetent employees, meaning you can easily encounter internal sabotage. Or turnover. Offering a paid, fixed-fee engagement to ""enhance"" their investment will be attractive to many.

I will keep you updated @WayneSchulz . I emailed Tom Wilson of Sage on Friday and he referred me to Grant Emary of Netstock. I hope to communicate with Grant tomorrow or as soon as possible. @JerryNorman I am all for offering this service if I had the talent available to do it. There are many questions that need to be answered first: Do partners have an SIA NFR copy? What are the training options available for partners? Is there SIA certification? How about one or more 90 Minders becoming SIA experts and offering training / implementation / consulting services?

SIA is an example of the direct sales model falling short. The product is demonstrated by Sage and payments are made directly. However, there is little follow up or training available after the sale. Then, the end user turns to us, the business partner for answers.

I call that being the ""upaid complaint department"". I like the idea of getting more involved in helping the customer. However in practice I find with many add-ons the customer doesn't budget for assistance as they were led to believe none is needed. I have seen this with Sage Intelligence, Sage CRM. This is much tougher to sell the customer than you would think. Just remember - once you touch these projects whether paid or unpaid - you own them. Best to get a paid agreement in place **before** you volunteer for unpaid complaint duty..

Wayne -not free. Not hourly. Structured process, defined. 3 options in the proposal, with DIY the bottom. It's not easy to setup, but once you do, it does work. It is in the initial proposal, so it gets budgeted.

@JerryNorman How does the business partner learn SIA? Is Sage tech support available to the business partner? I can't offer a proposal unless I know the product extremely well, and have access to tech support.

SIA has training classes on SageU I've no idea how useful they are. When SIA was first released, there was a 2-day implementation & sales course that you could take with Netstock.

Thanks Moira!