The ERP Lifestyle Consultant

It’s the second day of  Sage MAS90 consultants trying to log into what’s known as the Sage Software Online site.

As of this morning (7/2/10) the Sage  knowledgebase used to research technical support issues is down again – either in whole or in part.

This is the latest knowledgebase site outage in what has become  frequent enough that that our consulting group  routinely downloads and saves major program patches to a fantastically helpful service called Sugarsync (referral link) which allows us to then access the files over the web or from our mobile devices.

We need these patches to ensure that we can deliver an Exceptional Customer Experience to our customers.

For most of yesterday 7/1/2010 the portion of Sage’s support site used by the MAS 90 and MAS 200 consultants who log in over the web to research problem reports and provide support to mutual customers and deliver on Sage’s stated goal of an Exceptional Customer Experience was down.

Other portions of the site for downloading patches and fixes have sporadically been up and down. It looks as if Sage is working to create better redundancy in their servers and apparently as the saying goes – things have to get worse before they get better.

This morning I spotted a posting on the free online classified advertisement site Craigslist for MAS90 MAS200 EXPERTS!!!

You can click the image on the left and read the whole advertisement. The bigger question for most consultants is whether these types of free advertising sites work to attract prospects?

Yes! This advertising works. It will attract responses. You may even be busier than you ever imagined – so long as you don’t mind working for three kinds of people (and they all share a common distaste for paying for consulting fees).

Here are the three primary types of prospect you’ll be sure to attract with a free advertisement that primarily offers low cost services.

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Sage North America’s Insights 2010 conference was held last week in Denver Colorado.

While the total numbers of conference goers was never officially disclosed (at least not to me) – it appears there were in the neighborhood of 1,000 Sage partners who attended based on interviews given by Sage leading up to the conference.

Conferences can be great big distracting events. It’s nearly impossible to notice all the news that is released during the event.

Some of the news is released quietly and unless you’re paying close attention – and follow up with questions it can be easy to miss. I think there were at least ten important announcements that went relatively unnoticed at this years’ Insights 2010.

Here are the 10 announcement that I caught which I’m not sure if everyone noticed.

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During May 17 – 20, 2010 we’ll be attending the annual Sage Insight reseller conference. This year it’s being held in Denver Colorado.

One of my pet peeves about conferences is that they’re so damn big that you can quickly lose people in the crowd. My favorite activity is to find friends and compare notes about sessions that we’ve attended and about ideas for the coming year.

None of this collaboration works well if you can’t find the people you want to compare notes with. Even entering the keynote sessions I’ve found it difficult to locate people in the sea of faces (over 2,000 people are expected at Insights).

This year I’ve started a test group to collaborate in real time using Google Wave to collaborate on Sage Insights sessions. So far we have 60 87 people who’ve joined our Insights Google Group.

Using Google Wave, anyone who is a member of the group can join, read, create and edit the notes that others take during the sessions. Have a question for another participant? Google Wave is a great place to ask other participants. Have an observation or question during the keynote? You’ll be able to share that with the group as everyone jointly creates notes and shares their thoughts on Wave.

This is strictly an unofficial group – Sage is not sponsoring it or endorsing it – though we invite them to steal the idea and improve upon it for next year’s conference.

You can take a quick peek at the main Insights 2010 Wave or join in the fun using these instructions to join the Sage Insights 2010 Google Wave. Or if you prefer you can follow the Twitter feeds (over 120 users) who will be at Insights and Twittering about the happenings by viewing our Sage Insights 2010 Twitter Feed Group.

In case you’ve missed it Google recently updated their search layout.

Instead of always returning standard search results as indexed within Google – the search giant now displays a total of 9 additional places that a searcher (aka prospective client) can find your company.

Nine!

Just when you thought that SEO was a snap and all you had to do was throw a few hundred keywords up on your firm’s home page – the game is suddenly changed.

Actually the game has been changing for years. Blogs have emerged as relevant research tools. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have enabled our customers to reach out to their friends for recommendations as opposed to relying upon raw searches through Google or other easily gamed Internet search engines.

Is there a way for you to keep up with all these changes? I think so – and it’s been right in front of your nose all along.

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Sage UK just reported H1 2010 earnings for the period ended March 2010.

There seems to be some improvement overall, and earnings exceeded analyst expectations, but the company fell short of predicting a return to revenue growth in North America (which now is second to Mainland Europe as Sage’s top revenue provider).

North America appeared to suffered as the region with what appeared to be the only decline in subscription revenue (see the full Sage slide deck below for details).

Maintenance is the ever important recurring revenue item that customers pay for ongoing support, new releases and upgrades of their existing software.

In a perfect world maintenance would continue to grow (Sage North America reported an addition of 17,000 support contracts) as new subscribers are added and continue to renew their contracts.

Here’s what Sage reported for subscription growth (see chart below for details):

North America: – 2%
UK: +5%
Mainland Europe:  +2%
Rest of World: +13%

I’ve long said that maintenance (subscription) renewals and growth are what I gauge to be the key indicators of customer happiness. Within the past year Sage North America has modified subscription margins for many of their business partners (raising sales performance requirements as well as outright margin change).  It’s tough to say what the results would have been without those modifications.

Full earnings slide deck after the jump

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The Sage BM Blog has launched with a roll of 16 bloggers each contributing one or more articles a month on their favorite aspect of BM.

It’s a pretty fair bet that the topics will stay close to ERP and consulting services – especially centered around the mid-marketing software packages offered by Sage.

The site just went live today and promises to bring a non-stop stream of interesting business topics.

Sage Business Management Blog

I’ve just finished up my first post for a software publisher’s soon to be unveiled blog.

My topic?

10 Things You Need To Consider When Choosing An ERP Solution.

Yeah – boredom city.

Which is why I’m predicting that as quickly as I’ve joined the Social Media Tribe  - no kidding – that’s what they’re calling their guest bloggers –  I’ll be one of the first not invited back.

It’s not that I don’t know how to blog (I spent two years learning over at Geardiary as their Sr Editor) – rather I’m not a big fan of rigid corporate blogging where every topic is generic and meant to inspire some ultimate purchase or admiration for the company’s products.

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Fixed fee consulting is the hottest new trend in the ERP world.

You’ll see it used with new deals – and you can see it in the post-sale consulting world where upgrade, projects and other services are increasingly offered for one fixed price.

Consulting based upon a pre-set (fixed) fee has advantages for both the customer and the consultant. The biggest customer advantage is the lack of any surprise costs and the removal of any motivation for the consultant to drag out an engagement for the purpose of billing hourly.

For the consulting firm there’s an opportunity to make more money – but to do so you must enter the fixed fee world with a plan.

After having worked for a while on several fixed fee engagements with my clients – here are what I found to be the top 10 secrets of making money on a fixed fee ERP project. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning I was reading a post by Seth Fineberg on WebCPA. He apparently picked up on the press release issued by Accession Technology promising that they will be offering a 0% financing option and free consultation services to all companies interested in upgrading or converting to Sage Software’s MAS 90 and MAS 200 4.4, the latest version of MAS 90 and MAS 200.

This post from WebCPA elicited some excellent discussion on the Sage LinkedIN group about reducing software implementation and support Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

The only problem is that a lower service fee (or discounted software) – isn’t the same thing as a lower TCO (total cost of ownership). Not by a long shot. Read the rest of this entry »