By MiaCate Kennedy I
While at Sage Summit Atlanta last week, I had the opportunity to interview several of the leadership team at Sage. One was Nancy Harris, Managing Director North America. Nancy has over thirty years in the building of successful software companies.
She was very cordial and incredibly insightful during our interview. When I asked her what inspires her to get up every day and work at Sage, she said it’s about “contemplating how you get the right solutions, native cloud, in the market, and then take your customers on a journey at the pace they want to go.” Sage is on a new journey according to Ms. Harris, of “Transporting a business (2.3+ billion dollar software company) on a journey to build a SaaS business.” Throughout the Sage Summit Atlanta there was a theme of the critical importance and awareness of delivering products that the customers need and want, versus inside development fully navigating the innovation roadmap. Ms. Harris was enthusiastic about the new technology that can help Sage’s customers. She said, “Imagine if you could have a continuous audit potential” where you could have an audit trail that also supplied security and compliance, etc. She wanted to stress that the main takeaways for Sage 100 Cloud and Sage 300 Cloud, “It’s that same tried and true core ERP accounting, financial system… but now what we’ve done is we’ve extended the capabilities by adding these cloud connected services to that core.” By integrating O365 and it’s huge array of applications, Sage’s tried and true, reliable, tested, mature software, is even better and more effective and useful for the customers. Things like AP automation, bank reconciliation in the cloud, and cloud based invoices are just a few of the capabilities. As well, Ms. Harris said that now “you don’t have to be the Accountant, to then see all of that information about the customer in the field.” Sage’s salespeople in the field can see invoices, payments, everything on their accounting system on a mobile device wherever they are.
When I asked her about her thoughts on what has helped her in 30 years of success in Sales, Marketing, and Partner Development, she gave some background on her impressive career and mentioned that a “strategic and thoughtful marketer, revenue performance marketing that makes everybody accountable, and building the right trust, communication, trust listening to partners.
We finished the interview with some industry talk and a bit about me, and a promise to keep in touch. I felt inspired and confident of Sage’s long term commitment to its customers, colleagues, and community, under her leadership and that of her colleagues. Sage’s products are versatile, agile, and future forward as well as affordable for SMBs.