How Nina Smith sold Sage Software’s employees and customers on its corporate rebranding effort

If you are a user of Sage Software as many of our readers are you may enjoy this article about Nina Smith, President of Sage Software's US Business Management Division, published by Smart Business.

"In the six years that Nina L. Smith has been at Sage Software, she’s been running full speed. In that time, she has seen the software company take on more than 20 acquisitions to grow."

Total Upgrade by Mike Cottrill

management division, watched as those acquisitions helped build the company from $100 million in revenue to $1.01 billion in 2007. But with that growth came problems.

The acquisitions had not been fully digested. Too many employees had been part of other companies and didn’t have a full understanding of what Sage was about or what its capabilities were. They couldn’t sell additional Sage products or services because they didn’t have the knowledge required to do so.

Many of the company’s customers were in a similar situation. The growth had come so fast that they didn’t have a full understanding of everything Sage could do for them. Customers of the acquired companies might be used to getting one particular product or service from what was now part of Sage, but for the acquisitions to fully pay off, Smith needed to sell multiple products to each customer.

If that didn’t happen, Sage would never get a full return on the money it invested in the acquisitions.Smith and the leadership team realized the solution was to focus communications on the employees and the customers. If the employees got the message, they could then help sell customers on Sage’s expanded capabilities.

So Smith rolled out a vision to get Sage attention as the leader in the marketplace — internally and externally. Step one was getting employees to buy in to build energy and spread the word. Step two was pushing that to existing customers.

“My vision is to become the recognized leader of business management solutions in North America,” Smith says.

Since Sage, an arm of The Sage Group plc, was already at or near the top of the market for most of its products, Smith said the goal was to roll out a vision that her 2,000 employees and the company’s more than 2 million customers could understand. To do that, she wanted to go out and touch those people with the mission, get them on board and then follow up with them. More