Sage North America is looking to enhance its channel partner program by adding a product and company scoring initiative as well as a dedicated market development fund to help fuel partner marketing initiatives.

Joe Langner

The company claims the goal of the latest additions is to offer partners the right tools to compete and grow their customer relationships.

Launching on April 1, 2013, the new Sage Market Development Fund Program will be available to channel partners to help them drive new business and support cross-sell efforts. Firms will work with a Sage Revenue Growth Manager to help them build and execute campaigns co-financed by Sage. The new MDF program will essentially replace the current Sage Partner Advantage Co-op Program, which will be retired on April 30, 2013.

In addition, a new Sage Product and Company Scoring Initiative is designed to predict which customers will have the highest potential to purchase other Sage offerings, showing the probability of a particular customer needing particular products. By aggregating attributes (such as industry, number of users, and complexity of their business) into a single company score, Sage has inputted the data into a vehicle that shares this information with Sage business partners.

“Success in sales is about focus and doing the basics brilliantly, so our goal is to help in any way we can and leverage the data and resources we have to work with our partners,” said Sage’s executive vice president of midmarket solutions Joe Langner. “The scoring information is really about having enough customers to where you’d see the value, which tends to be firms with more diverse customer bases. On the Fund Program side, we have a Growth Manager assigned to all partners, the funds are not unlimited but it’s there for partners who make the most compelling argument for investment.”

In addition, Sage looks to continue its Sage Customer Symposium Series, which kicked off back in December in Houston. These meeting of partners and customers will be held across the country throughout the year and are designed to help Sage customers learn about important product news, the Sage technology roadmap, and relevant industry trends,such as how the cloud and mobility will impact their businesses. Sage customers also have the opportunity to interact with their peers and speak directly with Sage executives and product insiders.

Sage’s outgoing vice president of channel sales Tom Miller, who had a strong role in the latest channel program enhancements, claimed they were the “most significant improvements” to the program to date.

“For our Sage-focused partners I think the scoring mechanism and what it represents is really exciting, I don’t see anyone else in our industry doing this,” said Miller. “If you think of changes that have already occurred and what we’ve done to help our partners embrace them more widely, the advent of the marketing funds is really about that. Also, the excitement last year [at Summit] around the product roadmap, particularly around mobility and connected services, is becoming a reality and I’m glad to have been a part of it.”