General Consultant Discussion

Who got this from AccountMate today? Message from David Dierke, President and CEO of AccountMate Software SAGE: Your Vendor or Competitor? Does your ERP vendor send letters directly to your clients soliciting upgrades to products you don't sell? Does your vendor contact your clients to sell them maintenance directly? If that's how your ERP vendor is acting, maybe you need a new one before all your clients become their clients. The reports we've read and heard directly from the reseller channel suggest that you don't need more vendors like that. For example, in a recent Bob Scott's Insights column we've read that, ""But it's hard to hear anything good right now from Sage resellers, including long-time loyalists, about what the company is doing. Reports are popping up about Sage undercutting VARs via direct sales and that many channel benefits are gone."" And in another Bob Scott column, ""There is certainly a belief out there that the French management does not understand the American software distribution market and has no interest in listening. There is also a belief that Sage continues to put the emphasis on shareholders dividends, instead of investing in product development."" The management team at AccountMate has been in place over eight years. We're also the owners. We are not beholden to outside shareholder influence. That means our focus is on our resellers, not on unreasonable expectations from people outside the business. We do what we believe is in the best long-term interest of our reseller channel and the company. Nobody can tell us to change the name of our products to conform to some foreign corporate strategy. You can call and speak with the owners/managers. Wow, isn't that a crazy idea? Maybe it's just crazy enough to make you investigate AccountMate as your new ERP vendor. If you need detailed pricing and training information contact Bill Bailey, our Director of Sales, at BillB@accountmate.com or 707-774-7537. For an overview of our products or to request additional information visit us here. As President and CEO I'm happy to speak with you about partnering with AccountMate. You can reach me at 707-774-7555 or email me at DavidD@AccountMate.com. Good selling, David Dierke President and CEO AccountMate Software Corporation www.AccountMate.com

Just showed up in my inbox. Have not looked at it yet.

Something more to learn? Sage is leveraging the learning curve of competing ERP software.

More and more vendors trying to pick at the dying carcass of a once great channel organization.

I wonder if Sage sold the channel list to boost quarterly cash flow results..........

Looking at their product page -- they don't seem like they offer a lot different than Sage. So I guess you go to Accountmate because they're nicer. PS - I don't believe any vendor who claims to offer bigger margins forever. Sorry - it's just not going to happen.

My take wasn't that they were pitching better margins... just a desire to work with a channel.

@JeffSchwenk - I'm not sure Sage sold the list but over the last five months I receive one to two messages daily (on average) that read something similar to: ""Would you like a list of Salesforce (or SAP or Intuit or Microsoft or Sage) customers? Call now!"" Super f*cking annoying as they somehow are not blocked by Google Mail filter and it seems like a new name every few weeks. I'm wondering if it has to do with Sage Summit registration because a lot of them are hitting me up to buy lists explicitly for Sage Summit. Maybe it wasn't Sage ... some enterprising soul could have browsed the exhibitors of Summit on the public site and built the list directly?

I'm getting those too. However they're emailing saying ""We see you're registered as a partner going to Sage Summit"". The thing is the email address they are sending it to isn't registered for Sage Summit. I'm thinking it's an older list.

Was there ever a list of attendees publicly published? If not, Sage has to be selling the names, right?

There was a time where you could buy marketing against the list, but you never actually received it as an exhibitor.

Over the years with all the people coming and going from Sage I'm sure that someone has a list or two that they retained. It could even be something as simple as an email that was sent to a group where the recipients were CC: instead of BCC: Lots of ways this could have been compiled -- including surveys, scraping web sites. Automated systems to scour the web for keywords and scrape email addresses from found web sites are very very inexpensive. I question the effectiveness of much of this. I'm sure people do make sales but would imagine it is much more hit or miss.