Friday August 7, 2015
So today I was thinking about one of my “better” windshield moments. In the spring of 2013, I spent three weeks traveling across the country with the Omega Tour. The Omega tour was a true windshield moment that I had in the fall of 2012. I was considering an email forwarded to me from a customer expressing his dissatisfaction with the Sage Summit that he had just attended, and he suggested that Sage should create a Sage Pro ERP user group. I had also just learned that Sage was planning to retire Sage Pro ERP in the spring of 2014.
So the result was that I thought that if we organized resellers across the county with the help of Sage to help end users move to a new platform it would be to everyone’s benefit. We could do a roadshow, taking the message directly to the users.
We spend six months having weekly meetings every Friday afternoon organizing the event. At least a dozen competitors getting together with their primary vendor working to deliver a common message. Dealing with competitors and the publisher’s politics often took a drink before the call, but it all worked out.
The result was a successful series of events where we were able to help a number of customers and resellers plan for the transition. All born from my windshield drive one morning in the fall of 2012.
The effort is still paying results. Yesterday I had an initial office meeting with a new prospect. His current software solution has been discontinued, and even though he has paid for support faithfully for the past 12 years, the publisher is not giving him a discount or incentive to move to the current platform. Because of their policy, he has made a decision to discontinue the relationship with the publisher. Once you lose someone’s trust, it’s hard to get it back.
Sage Software can be daunting to work with as a reseller, but as Winston Churchill said “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms”. The company offered conversion utilities, financial discounts, and was willing to send a representative across the county to explain their plan directly to end users.
Today’s Musical Interlude:
