Sage News and Discussion

What's the consensus on the Sage Tier changes? What did they make better? Worse? Or was it just not the ""slash and burn"" that you expected?

Being both an HRMS and ERP reseller, this will help us make a higher tier more consistently. Adversely, the tier margins just shrank,,,,, again. Overall, it's not the stick in the eye I had anticipated but it doesn't motivate me either.

The math and sheer number of variables made my brain hurt. I'm sure there's a net benefit to Sage in here and I suspect the benefit is that partners now have to keep up a steady pace on the tier measurement treadmill or they'll be jettisoned off the back. My biggest takeaway is that all partners should be enrolling their customers to a support plan offered by their company. If you are a smaller partner who put all their customers to Sage Gold and sat back and just earned commission on those customers - then suddenly lost tier compensation for maintenance -- congratulations on giving Sage your business for free. However if you require all your customers to be on a support plan with YOU then you've essentially sheltered yourself from most of the tier changes. Going forward having your customers on your own support plan is no longer a nice to have. It's really a must-do.

Sage's focus is definitely all about product revenue. New customer sales first, existing customer sales second, maintaining customers third. They want (and take for granted I suspect) maintenance revenue though they depend upon it heavily. They are looking for 'resellers', not support consultants. If you are going to actively sell their products, then they are going to compensate you. If your focus is primarily on providing professional services your customer base (which is a very viable business model for you but doesn't help Sage meet shareholder expectations) then Sage isn't going to incent you the same as others who are moving product. I don't like a lot of what Sage is doing in their channel and I ABSOLUTELY AGREE with your frustration with the complexity of the new plans. It's an administration nightmare. I'm just glad I don't have to oversee the accounting of this crap at Sage. Did you read the new merger policy? They are now going to track multiple tiers for a company who buys another company for two years. Aren't you glad you don't have to track that tier accounting nightmare? We just merged another practice into CS3 effective April 10th. We are just thrilled with this new policy. Just thrilled.

One of the first goals of the new tier structure they mentioned was to make it SIMPLE. They missed on that one. They also wanted to incent people to align with their strategic initiatives. I do not see where this creates any real incentive for that. So in my book that is strike two.

I thought it was going to be worse than it was. I'm not totally sure how they are really going to track the calculations. We really take a hit on the IB(Installed Base)%. We use to get the same % on NL and IB but now they are different and it is a big difference.