Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: At the level you are talking about, the competitor is no longer QuickBooks, it is Intacct and Netsuite.

Joe Langner: When you look purely at the enterprise resource planning (ERP) of Netsuite and Intacct, you can say that there can be friction. We do want to have the best ERP and the best accounting package that people can buy, but we also want to address a lot of the friction that has occurred. We are doing that through leveraging the web.  If we have a CRM or a front-end system and we also have the ERP system, we can address some of those challenges that the others have because we own both the front-end and the back-end, and we have the ability to make the systems work together more seamlessly. If you think about the social media space, you have Facebook, and the Facebook ID is used a lot with other applications.

Therefore, from the consumer point of view, you don’t have to worry about remembering your password at five different mobile applications because you can start using a common passwording approach. The same is true for businesses. You have the password to log on for the CRM, you have the password to communicate with the backup system, and you have those controls in place.  If you have an independent application, it might do a good job. But where there is a lot of friction in our customers’ minds is getting that to be a one end type of a situation.

SM: They are all following that strategy. Other companies believe exactly what you believe: people want integration, they want to work off one database or customer database, and they want to run marketing and customer support off one database. They seem to be building that portfolio. In fact, we just moved our marketing campaign management – email campaign management – to Zoho CRM.  It is actually well integrated. It has automated syncs, for example. I think this is very helpful.

JL: They are helpful. This also falls through your other topic, big data. What you are saying is that larger companies have the ability to say they have a central database, ERP systems, or the concept of collecting and sharing information. In many cases they are extending that to the CRM to enable sales, and they are also extending it to tools like Marketo or Eloqua, which are marketing automation systems.

Larger companies, which have invested in all that IT work, are now seeing the benefits because they can do much more of a database marketing approach, give better service to their important customers, and make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks while moving information from marketing  to sales or back-end solutions.  A smaller company doesn’t necessarily have the ability to invest in custom developments and make things work specifically for business practice. At Sage we are looking to develop that for our customers. The area we are moving in is small business. We are not looking to build these solutions for the mega businesses. We are looking to create solutions for the smaller companies. In doing that, it has to be very easy to use and intuitive. These things have to work together without custom development work. The customer should say, “Yes, this is a big value-add, and I will change this department because letting us all work together is much more important than putting in the extra effort to let everyone work on separate sides.”

SM: What verticals are most of your small business customers?

JL: We sell to every industry there is. We pride ourselves on being diversified as far as the tools we have. We do have some nonprofit verticals or construction verticals.  In construction, it is not so much about the accounting but about the project management. Our Sage 50, Sage 100, or Sage 300 serve all types of industries. From manufacturers, wholesalers, service businesses to retail or hotel chains to the people who build nuclear submarines down to the small retail store, we provide to all.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America
1 2 3 4 5 6