Sage Blog

Tonight we’re handing over our call centre to Sports Relief to raise money to help change lives. People from across Sage have given up their Friday evening to staff the phones. So, if you call to make a donation tonight and there is a friendly Geordie voice on the end of the phone, chances are it is one of our people.

Good luck to everyone raising money, and don’t forget that you can make a donation online all year round.

If you came to see us at Sage World last year then you’ll probably remember the excellent marketing speaker Geoff Ramm. Well, Geoff is celebrating his 10th year in business by putting on The Great Event for North East businesses and entrepreneurs.

Speakers at The Great Event include an award winning international marketing speaker, a Times number one best-selling author, a Secret Millionaire, the former Managing Director or Porsche and BMW and a speaker described by Nelson Mandela as a ‘A National Treasure’. And it’s all in aid of a North East children’s charity.

The ‘Now That’s What I Call A Great Event’ will take place in Geoff’s hometown of South Shields, at the Customs House theatre on Monday 2^nd April, 6.00pm – 10.00pm and tickets are available from (0191) 4541234 or via the Website.

And if you haven’t seen Geoff before, here is a tester of his unique style of observational marketing.

As the product manager for Sage Online, I’m responsible for developing new and existing services, like our online accounts service, Sage One, ensuring that they meet the demands of the market and answer customer needs.

Customer insight

One of the most important aspects of this role is actually taking the time to gain valuable customer insight. Without this, we may end up with a great accounting service that helps you stay legislative but how do we know that it’s usable?

Talk to your target market

Customer insight can be gained in many ways. Secondary information can be gathered by monitoring relevant discussion forums, gathering findings from surveys etc. but the most valuable insights come from speaking to your target market in person. This can be done by attending events, through phone calls or email, but taking the time to visit people in their own working environment will give you a wealth of understanding you can’t get from sitting behind your desk.

Insight can form the basis of anything; from functional requirements, design concepts to how a service is delivered. The real benefit to a Product Manager, like me, comes when working with Research and Development. The development team will feel more confident knowing that every concept of your product or service has been validated by customers.

It’s my job to be the voice of the customer during development, but having customers talking directly with the development team should also not be underestimated as this ensures nothing is lost in translation and gives the development teams a greater understanding of the customer pain point.

Test, test, test

The involvement of your customer doesn’t end once development begins. It’s important to continually test at every stage of development to ensure that you’re staying on track and delivering what your customers want. Never forget that the success of a product or service is dependent on meeting your customers’ expectations!

Phil Thornton, Sage One Team

In late 2011 the Marussia F1 team challenged us to get them up and running on Sage ERP X3 before the start of the 2012 F1 season and that’s what we did.

Welcome to our launch event live twitter stream. You can follow all the action throughout the season by following @sageF1fan

Today’s guest blog comes from Alex Kinsey, Director of copywriting consultancy Eric and Frank

Does the way you talk to your public sound right?

When you’re starting up and running your own business, you want to make sure the world knows what you do and why you’re so good at doing it.

Your fantastic new website looks shiny and suitably impressive, but do the words on it sell your services as well as it could? Does the prospective letter you send out to hundreds of potential new clients do the same? Are your Facebook updates and tweets reflective of the personality of your business or brand? In short, does the way you talk to your public sound right?

Writing your own copy

Working with design agencies across the country, one of the most commonly heard complaints we hear about customers is that while they’re happy to let designers make their site look good, clients often insist on writing the copy themselves – with varying degrees of success. But as the designers say, what’s the point of having a good looking website if the words on it are rambling, ineffective and likely to turn off your reader?

You might know everything there is to know about the industry you work in and the services you provide, but do you know the best way to express that in a way that works for you by getting the client to pick up the phone and call you?

Sometimes it’s hard to relinquish control over something you feel so passionate about – and after all, it’s just words, you speak and write them every day. But more often than not, your detailed understanding of your industry or services can be too much for a customer – they simply don’t need it and it could turn them off. The wording becomes too detailed, the processes overly-explained or the key messages – your top selling points – submerged in paragraph after paragraph of waffle.

Revisit, review

As web users in this digital age, we want to find answers and resolutions to our problems as quickly as possible. We spend less and less time skim-reading pages on websites, getting the key information and then quickly moving on to our next task.

It’s why it’s so important to revisit and review your website and other communications regularly. Does your website work hard enough for you? It is your main platform for prospective clients to find you and find out if you can solve their problem. Can customers get what they need quickly and easily? Do you need to put your words through a Plain English filter – removing jargon or excessive descriptions? Could someone unrelated to the business do a better job at explaining what you do?

Your business messages and how you get them out is the key to making sales and building new opportunities. Make sure you explain what you do, succinctly and without unnecessary jargon.

Alex Kinsey, Eric and Frank

Update March 2012: If you missed David’s presentation Social CRM; what it is and how to implement it at TFM&A 2012 we’ve added it to the end of this blog.

Communicate. Collaborate. Compete.

People think CRM is one thing, but CRM can be many things to many different businesses.

Gartner define CRM as:

“A business strategy whose outcomes optimise profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction… CRM technologies should enable greater customer insight, increased customer access, more effective customer interactions, and integration throughout all customer channels and back-office enterprise functions”.

Simply put, CRM is a business strategy…it’s not technology.

At the basic level it is good contact management, but if you extend the concept of CRM into your business it can be much more than managing who you contact, how you contact and when you contact. It becomes about the way you manage processes, from the way you sell your products or service a customer, to the way your run processes internally.

So we can’t think that utilising CRM in your business is just a case of installing a new piece of kit and watching it magically solve all your business problems. I see a successful deployment of CRM as focusing around three key things.

1) Communicate.

Think ‘more haste, led speed’. Now’s the time to identify and connect with key stakeholders and really think about your business issues – what are you trying to solve?  For example, are you trying to improve efficiency or better understand your customers?

Once you’ve recognised those challenges you can begin to think in terms of measurements and identifying targets. This helps you develop clear strategic objectives and understand where you want to be, essential to proving the return on investment from your CRM.

2) Collaboration.

Interact with other areas of your business; you may discover things you’ve not thought of or get new ideas. Remember good collaboration can move CRM initiatives company-wide.

Enquiring outside of your department can help you recognise where you can link up processes to provide the best value for your customers and share knowledge.

3) Compete.

Of course you must spend time understanding the capabilities of CRM software packages but you must spend more time thinking about your own business. What are your core competencies compared to your competitors? How can your CRM make that competency even better? CRM can, of course improve your marketing function or empower your sales force, but successful CRM could be a whole lot more.

Look long and hard at your products, your staff and particularly your processes. Where can you improve? Where can you add leverage? And can you use them as business drivers to make your CRM support you and go further?

David Beard, Sage CRM Expert

Overtrading occurs when a business takes on more work than it is able to fulfil. The good news is that 82% of Sage customers expect their businesses to remain stable or grow in 2012. However the biggest challenge for 1 in 4 businesses  is collecting payments from their customers on time*. As anyone in business will tell you, this can put a strain on your cash flow which can ultimately lead to insolvency.

The combination of both of these scenarios is the risk of overtrading.

Overtrading may not be a term widely used but it is a common downfall for many businesses. At face value it sounds great; getting more business, winning new contracts or even receiving larger orders. But when you come to fulfil the orders, how are you going to pay for the materials, wages or transport costs to supply the goods or services that you offer?

Having enough money, working capital, to fulfil any orders is a must otherwise you could lose the order/contract or worse; your business could become insolvent trying to fulfil orders you do not have the resources for.

How to avoid overtrading

Here are some handy tips to help avoid you overtrading, keep your business healthy and your cash flowing in the right direction. You might also find our Guide to Cash Flow really handy.

• Regularly produce a cash flow forecast to highlight any risks to your cash flow. You can link your Sage Instant Accounts with Sage Planning for Business to help you forecast.
• Renegotiate your credit terms with suppliers so you can collect payment from your customers before you pay your supplier. If you’ve got Sage Instant Accounts or Sage 50 Accounts you can record different details for each supplier so you can treat them differently.
• Improve your credit control processes; have clear payment terms for customers, issue invoices quickly and have a clear process for chasing overdue payments.
• In both your Sage Instant Accounts and Sage 50 Accounts you can offer your customers a settlement discount if people pay within a specified timescale, so use it to offer discounts for prompt payments.
• Negotiate staged payments or deposits for services/products you offer.
• Sell the right products and services at the right time of the year.
• Improve your stock control: Sage Instant Accounts Plus and Sage 50 Accounts give you visibility of the items you have in stock and what are your best selling items or alternatively what items are not selling. That way you’ll avoid carrying too much stock which can hold up your working capital.
• Hold sales to move unsold stock which reduces your working capital.
• If all else fails, there are options such as invoice discounting which allows you to draw money against your invoices while retaining control of the administration for debt chasing. Alternatively you could use a factoring company so they take responsibility for recovering your customer’s debts.

Following the tips above will help you avoid overtrading and give your business all the ingredients you need to grow your business: Healthy cash flow with happy customers and suppliers.

Gareth Underwood, Sage 50 Accounts team

(*November Omnibus survey – 993 responses)

Here in our online accounting and payroll online development team, we have an excellent group of people who spend their days making sure our Sage One service and updates are of a high enough quality to release to the market.

So, no surprises there really. Every reputable software development company should have a dedicated test team, or teams. It’s what that team does that makes the difference.

In order to produce features ready for use by our customers and to launch them to the live service on a regular basis, we need to have confidence in the quality of the updates. Did you know, we have enhanced the Sage One product with over 30 updates since we launched in January 2011? We have much more in the pipeline and each of these updates needs to be of the same high standard.

That’s where my team comes in. We aren’t just a test team; we are a quality assurance team. You might be thinking what’s the difference? Well there’s a very big difference between testing and quality assurance (QA).

Testing and quality assurance

If we were just testers, we’d just be looking for bugs, mistakes in the work the developers do once they have completed it. We would run through scenarios and try to capture these.

When we perform true quality assurance, we prevent these bugs appearing in the software in the first place.

So, for example, our Product Owner will write a specification document which details a new feature. We in the test team will then review this document, so already our QA process is starting. We review this document for small things like spelling mistakes, as well as compliance with accounting or payroll legislation and the overall end user experience. We think up the edge-case scenarios which may only happen rarely, but which would still be encountered by some of our customers. We then feed back to the Product Owner.

Any updates are made to the document, and this all happens before it has even gone to the development team. If we only tested, we’d take that document, write a test script and run the tests when the feature has been developed. By analysing and performing a static review we highlight issues sooner. That is the point of QA.

We also work very closely with our developers. Yes, testers and developers can get on! We start reviewing their work as soon as they start developing. So by the time it is classed as complete, there are no surprises for us and we can concentrate on testing edge case scenarios.

Quality Assurance starts from the minute a discussion is made about a feature right up to the point when the feature is released to the live service. True Quality Assurance makes a difference, which is why the Sage One community sees smooth, high quality updates going live on a regular basis and will continue to do so!

Claire Adams, The Sage One Team

The one question that every CIO should ask themselves…What are you going to do when (not if) your cloud systems fail?

I’ve deliberately used the word Cloud to grab your attention but the question is equally applicable if you use Cloud systems or in-house systems.

Let me share my belief here, systems availability and security are intrinsically linked, i.e. when you’re appointed as a CIO you’re trusted to deliver competitive advantage for your company through IT. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that if you can’t maintain availability and adequate security of your systems then you’ll only manage to deliver disadvantage, and you probably won’t be around very long.

So, let’s get back to the title of the post… what are you going to do when your systems fail (which is inevitable)?

If you’re running in-house, the apps themselves (if they are decent apps) are least likely to fail, more likely failures are from switches, disks, networks, cables and other parts of infrastructure. You protect yourself against this by designing your datacentre(s) around redundancy with zero single points of failure.

If you’re running cloud services, you pick a reputable supplier who works with a reputable hosting partner right? Well, yes but as we saw with Azure yesterday (and previously with Amazon and Rackspace and most other reputable cloud vendors) the same hardware failure points exist in cloud provider datacentres as they do in your own. If you appreciate and accept this this then you’ll also be mindful that you could be introducing a single point of failure in your enterprise platform and that your service availability is now at the mercy of their service availability.

When you’re running outside of your own bricks and mortar you also need a high bandwidth and high availability WAN, Firewalls and Proxies, etc that all need to be fault tolerant and designed around redundancy to ensure adequate access and security at all times. Even then you can’t mitigate around someone digging up the cable, which has happened to me twice this year and is more common than you might expect.

Is this a story of cloud bashing?

No, it isn’t. It’s a story of how the CIO needs to take full accountability for managing risk within their platform.

• If you’re running mission critical systems and your business can’t afford any outage then you simply can’t design a single point of failure into your enterprise platform.
• If you’re running non mission critical systems, then you may choose to take a little more risk around availability and accept a single point of failure and manage any disruptions that may arise.

What you deem to be mission critical or not is your own decision and it doesn’t have to be one or the other. For my part I run a hybrid platform where some parts are mission critical and some parts less so and the platform design and location of services (in-house vs. cloud) reflects this.

Of course from a customer perspective people outside of IT expect things to work 100% of the time and if you’re running either of the above, or a combination, then any outage no matter what damages your credibility with users.

So as an effective CIO, you need to design an effective platform around what your business needs, you need to manage the risk, you need to pick the suppliers that you work with, and you need to take full accountability when things go wrong. Yes, you can get livid with your suppliers, but just remember who picked them and who chose to introduce a single point of failure into your platform in the first place.

So, what are you going to do when (not if) your cloud systems fail? Make sure you know the answer today.

Footnote: This post relates to enterprise businesses as opposed to SME businesses. What you do in the SME space can be dramatically different.

Stuart Lynn, IT Director

Follow Stuart on Twitter @_stuartlynn

How are you rewarding your employees?

There’s more to having a happy workforce than a good salary – although that helps!

The way you reward your staff beyond their pay packet has a huge impact on staff morale and company loyalty.  Many employers are asking what are the best rewards for staff? And how can productivity be improved through benefits? Choosing the right employee benefits can really deliver their own advantages for your business, so it’s a good idea to think about what will suit your organisation and your people.

Cash vs non-cash rewards for employees; what really works?

Although your staff might tell you that what they really, really want is a cash bonus or a pay rise, it can often just disappear into the household budget or on loan repayments and may do little to improve the long-term productivity and morale for your member of staff.

So, what are the alternatives to cash rewards?

Get to know your staff, get creative and get thinking of other rewards or incentives that will improve the quality of their life over the long term. This can only help you to improve employee productivity and retention.  Check out a few of our ideas for employee benefits:

• Employee savings: help your employees make their money go further by helping them to save
• Discounted travel: by cutting employees spending on expensive necessities such as travel, you may have a really positive impact on their finances
• Staff development opportunities: this is a great way to boost staff morale and make your people feel valued. Offer staff training and development opportunities for areas that they show a particular interest in. Not only can this benefit you with improved employee retention but your business can take advantage of their newly acquired expertise
• Team building days: taking employees out of their usual environment and getting them to interact in a different setting will create a buzz within your business.  Your staff will feel rewarded and your clients will pick up on all those lovely, positive vibes.

There are many more types of benefits that you can reward staff with, from pension schemes, to flexible working and from childcare vouchers to a drink in the pub. If the rewards are relevant and timely, you can really make an employee feel valued and boost their morale.

At Sage we’ve got a great scheme that gives us a range of benefits, including buying extra holidays to health schemes, but we also have on the spot rewards for a job well done. It’s often these little show of thanks, such as an Amazon voucher or cinema ticket, that can have a real impact on morale.

Remember; communicate the rewards and benefits on offer to employees regularly.

When developing an employee benefits package it’s also important to remember that you will need to communicate the benefits to staff regularly. Frequent communication about what’s on offer will ensure employees are incentivised and have something to look forward too. I particularly enjoyed the occasion that our People Services team reminded us all about our benefits by dropping sweets on our desk with a note about the scheme. It certainly got my attention.

The communication itself can help to boost morale and improve employee productivity and it may also become a discussion point outside of work. Think about all that much welcomed, positive PR it could deliver to amongst a wider audience!

Iain Ramsay, Small Business Team

To find out more about choosing the best employee benefits, download our whitepaper on employee benefits and incentive packages