Recently our friends at Microsoft Business Solutions (Great Plains, Navision, Solomon and Axapta) have been attacking Sage and their partners from a truly odd angle. Apparently the folks at MBS think that businesses purchase accounting, inventory, manufacturing, human resources and customer-relationship management software based on whichever software vendor is currently running a sale on their respective products.
For a business, implementing a new software system is just as invasive, complicated and risky as it is for a human to go through triple bypass open heart surgery. In both cases, the patient could very well die! Many businesses have been put out of business by software implementations gone sour.
I posed this question to several of our MAS 90, MAS 200, MAS 500 and Abra customers: If a Microsoft (or any other software) representative called or came by your office today and offered you their software for free, would you be interested? The answers are a unanimous NO. Just like the kids in the Lio cartoon below, they are not interested in open heart surgery for their business even if the doctor gives it away for free.
Would you go to a doctor who discounts or offers a buy one/get one free surgical procedure? I don’t think many of us would be interested. So, why would any business purchase a software implementation based on price? Especially when that software becomes such an integral and vital part of that business that it cannot live for long without the software functioning properly.
I seek out the doctors who have new patient waiting lists of several months. They’re the best ones and they are almost always the most expensive and the most successful. The same goes for technology consultants. Do you really want to work with software from a consultant who isn’t busy and can only compete based on price? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.
And notice how many customers Dr. Lio brought in with his free offer.
