Sage's channel program an evolving work in progress
At its annual Insights conference held in Denver last month, business management software vendor, Sage, announced new partner workshops and resources, as well as enhancements to its existing channel initiatives to help make partners more profitable.
This year's Insights conference marked the last partner-specific event to be hosted by Sage, because starting next year, the vendor will put on a combined partner and customer conference event, known as Sage Summit.
Tom Miller, vice-president of channel management for Sage North America, has been the company's channel chief for just over a year now. Prior to Sage, Miller worked at Microsoft for eight years. Reflecting back over year one, Miller said he's "pleased" with the progress the company's made with its channel thus far.
"I'm pleased with the progress we've made but I think we still have a lot of work to do." Miller said. "We need to make sure we have the right sets of programs for our partners and help them find new customers and opportunities. We also have to get communications out to our partners and provide training so we're all partner-ready. I'm confident that we can get there, but it's an evolving work in progress."
Among some of the new partner offerings are four workshops around sales, consulting, customer experience and business strategy.
Miller said when he joined Sage last summer and had a look at the existing programs, one of the improvements he wanted to make was increasing the number of partners participating in them.
"We found that some of these programs were too expensive from a time and out-of-pocket standpoint," Miller explained. "Partners also wanted a more condensed version that was offered closer to home."
To give partners more of what they wanted, Miller said Sage introduced its sales, consulting and customer experience workshops. The sales workshop is a free, one-day intensive selling workshop to help partners improve on their sales performance. The consulting workshop, which is also free, is designed to help partners further develop their business and consulting skills. And lastly, the customer experience workshop is a free two session workshop that coaches partners on customer experience and also on developing specific skills in order to better serve their end-user customers.
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