Chris Smith is a Senior Sales Consultant for Sage Software at Concentrix. If you're looking to buy Sage software, or have ever considered doing so, here's Chris's view from the other side of the process.....
You may or may not be aware that September 30th is Sage’s fiscal year end. If you sold Sage software for a living, you definitely would be more than aware as Sage are very good at passing the importance of the date to them onto their partner channel and subsequently to any end user customers or prospects.
I’ve personally been selling Sage’s mid market products (line 100, MMS and now Sage 200) for around 6 years and each year September has been a frenzy of activity. Typically the fun starts around July as we enter Sage’s Quarter 4). Those pipeline update calls start to get a bit more regular and your account manager starts to offer help on deals without you asking for it.
By the time we get to August, any deal that’s not going to close in September may as well be lost in Sage’s eyes and the partner channel are concluding all demo’s with a strap line around Sage year end and the great deals that are to be had. This immediately puts the customer is discount mode but does, in fairness, add some urgency to the discussions.
Once we are into September itself, it all royally kicks off. Pipeline updates are daily and sometime twice daily as the month closes, educated buyers are hitting google to play partners off against each other and deals that were previously 20% discounted become 30%, 40% and maybe more on the bigger bids. The pressure builds and builds right up to 17.00 on 30th September. Then it stops.
If you take the metaphor of the January sales, it’s the 1st February, the Sales signs are in a big pile in the corner, there’s a few bits of tat left on a rail at the back of the shop but basically we’re dealing with new season full price stock. In short all deals are off.
This of course is nonsense. For the right project with the right customer, Concentrix can do a deal as easily in October as we can in September (I did one this week!). We can still discuss deals with Sage, we can still look at our own bottom line and we can agree sensible, mutually beneficial payment plans. We can put timeframes on it if you want, but there should be no point if the software’s a good fit.
So if you are interested in Sage 200 or are growing out of Sage Line 50, contact Concentrix now and rest assured you don’t have to wait 11 months for a deal!
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