"Best" investment: a million to recruit 100
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 8/1/2004 6:00:00 AM
Best Software is investing $1 million to subsidize its value-added reseller (VAR) community in recruiting, testing, training, generating leads for, and then benchmarking a total of 100 new salespeople by the end of September. The plan calls for grants of $10,000 to participating VARs, as well as ancillary services.
"In a strong economy, we need more feet," explained Best Software's Taylor Macdonald, executive VP, channel and sales operations, in announcing the program to an estimated 3,000 VARs at a Best Software conference held in June in Orlando.
Most of the company's 13,600 resellers have less than one designated salesperson, explains CEO Ron Verni, and Best needs to get more bang for the 15 percent to 30 percent of sales it spends on marketing & sales support.
Says Jack Power, director of the manufacturing and distribution practice at BHE Consulting, a Best Software VAR in Weymouth, Mass., "We'll definitely take a look at the training program." BHE, formed six years ago by three former Ross Systems executives, sells quality control modules for Best's MAS 500 software aimed at discrete manufacturers.
Best also announced its first vertical suite for manufacturing—the largest portion of its user base across the board, adds Jim Foster, executive VP for midmarket business. The suite will have modules for CRM, HR, manufacturing, and other applications that can be augmented by third-party developers or VARs for specialty applications.
The new sales investment was characterized as a recommitment to VARs that might fear Microsoft Business Solutions as a threat to Best's midmarket business segment with Project Green—code name for the eventual integration of four Microsoft business applications (Great Plains, Navision, Axapta, and Solomon ERP) onto a single code base.
Best Software is telling VARs that by the time Microsoft gets around to making introductions, projected by Best to be between 2007 to 2010, Best will have solidified its small business market share and end users won't want to switch both software and hardware to adopt Microsoft.
With multifaceted solutions built around accounting software, Best is part of U.K.-based Sage Group, which had revenues of $899 million in FY 2003. Best added more than 500,000 users in the last year—the majority through its March 2004 acquisition of ACCPAC from Computer Associates.
