Consensus vs. Sage CRM vs. Sofon Proposal Organizer

Within the last 6 months, I've run a personal A/B test on opportunities with and without Consensus videos being sent after every meeting. Those opportunities where I sent Consensus videos after every meeting had a >50% likelihood of closing and/or progressed past the Proposal phase. Those opportunities where I did not send Consensus video, I was left unanswered more often than not

as it is a very flexible software that can be adapted to any business model, other functions human resource management, manufacturing and supply chain planning, all these functions are housed in a highly technological interface. I liked this system because it made automating accounts payable so much easier.the control of the basic accounting of any type of company

In my opinion, the most valuable characteristic of SPO is that by answering simple questions a very complex product can be configured; therefore the scope of delivery is defined very well. In addition, SPO has great flexibility to manage prices and costs. However, SPO is configurator of parts that allows incorporating basic design rules for their selection. SPO is not a optimised for developing complicated engineering design rules.

• The ability to tailor demos and demoboards to show various functionality of the product.
• We appreciate the features Consensus has to customize demos in various forms.
• The customer service and post-sales trainings the Consensus team has held for our company have been extremely beneficial. I personally appreciated learning how demos are better received when they're not 'perfect'

Incentivized

• When in client profile, it is very intuitive, allowing you to easily transcribe notes in the clients profile.
• Sage allows 3rd party plugins, so if you utilize a particular phone services or would like to import something as simple as google drive, its compatible.

Incentivized

• Top Down approach
• Drive sales representatives to their goal
• Clear final calculation

• The front-end UX could be improved to look and feel more like a mature SaaS solution
• There's a limited amount of help resources to assist throughout the video building process
• I'd like to see more integrations with broader SaaS solutions to unlock more use cases (i.e. Engaging in group formats, long-form webinars, etc)

• Reliance on Apache Tomcat causes a lot of headaches. There are common issues trying to start up the server, resulting from Apache Tomcat misconfigurations, or Java. Some forum posts on Sage City address common issues, but digging into server logs seems to be an often occurrence.
• Support is somewhat lacking, less user install base means error messages are sometimes hard to find quick answers for. Most of the knowledge found on the internet is in the Sage City forum.
• Integration with Microsoft 365 causes you to have to turn off some security features. This will result in your 365 tenants running lower security standards than recommended, it may put you at risk for targeted attacks.

Incentivized

• SQL servers may lead to unexpect failures
• Tables created in SPO could have better interface with the user
• Management of user licences could be easier

Consensus has been a valuable and vital sales tool at every stage of our sales cycle. In the very early stages of prospect education, you can send videos to get them familiar and up to speed with our product without a solution consultant's involvement. It is also a very powerful tool at the later stages of the sales cycle, with the ability to tailor demos and intro videos and record exec alignment itro videos, which we have had great success with

Incentivized

There are really no other words to say, it is a very easy to use application that is more straightforward and has provided better results with the bulk of features that appeal to a very broad amount of users. There may be other CRM platforms out there that are more prevalent, but I have found them to be much more clunky and less intuitive than Sage CRM.

Incentivized

Unfortunately I have no possibility to renew or not renew SPO so it is difficult to answer to this question

It only took me a matter of minutes to onboard myself to Consensus and start utilizing it with my clients. The platform is very simple to set up and straight forward to use. Most platforms take time to learn how to use and navigate but Consensus was very easy to pick up and use as a first time user.

Incentivized

Excellent integration with the most important social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) to get leads. The mobile app is quite useful for speeding up the tasks at hand and not relying on the computer or being in the office to get them done.

Incentivized

Sage works very quickly based on the network you are using it on. It is internet based so if your network is slow, it will perform slowly. Reports seem to run reasonably fast, if there is too much information it is trying to populate that could slow it down a little. When Sage CRM is integrated with a Sage ERP product it doesn't tend to slow down either system at all

Support team is really slow and they need to work on this really. Sometimes it takes days to resolve a simple query and there is no way to get it expedited. Rest the product is is amazing but the team should look into the costumer support and get it working

Incentivized

Most training would come after a upgrade. Otherwise we would self teach new employees. Training was with a Sage Software partner SWK technologies.

Incentivized

The implementation and upgrades were rather quick and straight forward. Attempting to link Sage CRM with Sage 100 ERP however was a nightmare and will be avoided by us in the future due to numerous issues.

Incentivized

We did not find a similar solution that could provide the prospect experience Consensus provides. We did not seriously evaluate any other platform like we did with Consensus. Consensus allows your prospects to select their interests and only show them the relevant parts of your product. No other software we evaluated could do it like Consensus

Whilst SAGE CRM was selected around 10 years ago and we became a partner, the main contenders would have been at the time Sales Logix and MS CRM 4.0. However, we had extensive experience of the mid-market CRM's and decided on SAGE CRM since it had a clean, easy to understand interface and importantly offered both workflow automation and Self Service capability, all of which across both the Case and Sales and Marketing functionality was seamless and saved time. As it was pure browser based, access was from anywhere we wanted. In my view, SAGE CRM still stacks up well against all the other mid-market CRM systems and offers good value for money, but more importantly, it is an easy to operate and customisable solution which user like. Again, we can teach administration users very quickly to support and customise themselves since the admin. function are clear as well.

The previous product we used was developed by ourselves so my experience is very limited. I can say that having a software like SPO we can configure the product without any programming experience and this makes things faster and better. Moreover, I can say that MS Office compatibility is a strong point.

• I closed 3 deals last year by prospects using Consensus and finding additional modules they wanted to purchase.
• Consensus speed up the buying process in 6 of my deals last year to close in quarter.
• Consensus saved me time from doing additional live demos.

• It is very affordable in pricing, compared to competitors
• Lead management and convertion into prospects is also a very easy process
• Lead capture from web pages should be available, and better ways to capture leads from tradeshows by uploading directly from scanned business cards

Incentivized

• Reduce quotation time at the proposal office,
• better definition and more organise project scope at project management level
• centralisation of knoweldeg: one problem, one solution