Right Around the Corner: 7th Stage from Grand Rapids, MI!

I had a great visit with the team at Sales Pad on the west side of “The Mitten” in Grand Rapids, Michigan (Beer City, as they have a niche of microbreweries). Ben Lilly, Matthew Gritters and myself, brainstormed on the new product, 7th Stage, created some marketing strategies for working with QuickBooks Pro Advisors and discussed how to align their product with the Firm of the Future Movement. (Read More). I am so excited for the team over at Sales Pad as they are receiving some major kudos from some of the bigger Intuit people (David Leary, Kaydee Peterson and Stacy Kildal) for providing functionality on a range of features that are outside of the scope of QuickBooks Online. More importantly, it provides a tool to customize workflows that can be for any niche industry, and that is a BIG part of being a Firm of the Future. By becoming a specialist in a niche, you can develop a workflow, you can put it in the cloud (with 7th Stage and QuickBooks Online) and you can become a Trusted Advisor. This is what the QuickBooks Pro Advisors are looking for!

I met Ben Lilly from the Sales Pad team on a plane to San Antonio in 2014. We were both going to the Woodard Event’s Scaling New Heights conference and were using the conference app to see if anyone else on the plane was also going. Crazy luck, I was right behind him. We kept in touch, but it was just recently that I became more involved with their message and their products. Sales Pad had been in business for roughly 8 years in the Microsoft GP market and had a huge scope of MS Partners who specialized in their product. Ben Lilly was going to the conference to reveal Sales Pad’s new functionality to integrate with QuickBooks Desktop. Right about then, Intuit was moving the heavens and earth to get QuickBooks Online “right with the world”. As we all have learned, when Intuit starts moving toward a new and better vision, we listen and we respond. Soon after, Sales Pad was starting to develop it’s own unique product that would interface exclusively with QuickBooks Online. Their team of developers have been working furiously to bring 7th Stage to 7th heaven status. At their conference in September (they throw a mean conference), I started seeing glimpses of their product. Some of the rockstar features not found on this planet are:

• Inventory Costing using Average Cost, Fifo or Lifo
• Ability to develop and manage department workflow
• Price Levels per item, by a percentage and date range/discount logic
• Sales documents with Sales Orders
• Actionable information for Users, Managers and Owners
• An incredible dashboard for opening any one of your company’s data files
• Grid view that is searchable and customizable
• Note Cards for Customers, Vendors

Plus, teams and departments, sales reps and other users can be working specifically in their customized space and stay out of the accounting file. 7th stage booth will be on the “Main Street” of booths at the upcoming QB Connect conference. They are on a path to achieve their ultimate vision, but in my book, it’s an amazing start to an amazing product.  I’m sure there is more to come, but after visiting their office and seeing a massive team humming at their desks (with signs over their heads of MARKETING, PRODUCT DEV, CUSTOMER SERVICE and the like), I’m confident that they have the manpower to do this right. I’m also confident that I will move future clients in my niche market to 7th Stage.

It pays to follow the trends of Intuit, but more importantly, it pays to follow the trends in the world.