General Consultant Discussion

What's new for version 2014 any time courses a total of 56 min...

Yea, that's worth 22%

My thoughts exactly!

And 34 of those minutes are for addons...

Empty Upgrades are a fact of life now with Sage 100. And yet, I can't in good conscience encourage a customer to drop it, largely because of the risk of stupid OS-related issues over time. So I'm starting to encourage customers to think about what they can do to get more out of the system, treating the annual tax as a fact of life. Most don't really know how to get good information out of the system, or really improve customer service and acquisition. So, yeah, they cost some extra money, but maybe should embrace more of exploring with customers how expanded SI could help -- ask the CEO and we get different answers! CRM has its problems, but a lot of companies really could more than pay off their investment in it with some effort. Remote sales and service is really attractive to companies -- if it worked right. Maybe an xkZero product instead of Sage's but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be pushing our customers to stretch themselves to get the most out of their investment in the system. I think i've had a Contrarian Virus the past couple days ...

Jerry I find in practice that your view of helping everyone at a company get the most out of the system will only work when there is a strong manager/executive acting as a sponsor/advocate. In practice most companies are siloed and one department does not much care what the other does. Some departments have more ""pull"" and can get these types of things done. Most don't. I've found it fairly rare to walk into a company that has a total big picture view. The only time that tends to happen is around re-org type events -- new owner, big business issue, etc.

Wayne, you're exactly correct. I put this issue in the same business bucket as getting customers on an annual agreement, since a customer not on software maintenance will likely eventually run into something substantial that threatens the entire Sage 100 retention. A surprising number of customers seem to just pay it, treating it like an overpriced cable bill. But for the rest, we really do need to have a decent answer. I think that answer is in the realm I described. This explanation is one he Controller can use to justify the expense, and essentially shifts the blame on ""not getting anything from the subscription"" to the other silos. This is NOT easy. I'm a pretty good salesman, and I struggle at this. But I don't think there is any other approach beyond a shrug and pointing out I disagree with Sage. For those who don't want to be known to the customer as only ""the MAS tech"" something like my approach seems the only one to take. How are others handling the complaints?

Anyone else not able to access the courses with this message? Trying to determine if it's an internal problem.

I had no problems with any of them yesterday. They are now located under completed but I still seem to be able to open them again from there.

@BarbaraGoldstein No but I am getting this error.... they really don't make anything easy.

During the recent economic turmoil I had several struggling customers ask if they could cancel their maintenance. I honestly answered with questions to them. - Are there any new features that you have used in recent upgrades? Or are there any additional features you need or can think of that would help you run your business better? - How many support cases have you used in the past year or two? - When was the last time you upgraded your hardware and when do you think you will need to do so again? If the customer is stable, had relatively recent hardware and was not doing well financially... I told them that they could always wither pay back maintenance when times were better or repurchase or subscribe to the software at a later date. To mix threads, this is why I told my new Sage Care representative that we should be focusing as much as off plan as on plan.

I just had one of those prospects i met with on Thursday. They are on 4.3 and stopped paying maintenance 2 years ago. The dirty little secret to get past the 'but what if Windows 9 or 10 breaks your version) is MAS works perfectly well on a terminal server. In many cases, better than the local desktop.

And of course we are supporting older versions in our data center. However, we may raise prices for maintaining Win 2003 server next year. It will be 11 years old and unsupported...

I bet alot of the clients on win 2003 could move to 2008