Why I'm Stopping My EmployeeCentral Newsletter

My name is Brandon Toombs, and I am an independent HR consultant. I have been working in HR technology for over 20 years. For the last 5, I’ve focused on SuccessFactors’ core HR product, Employee Central (“EC”). I write a free newsletter for EC customers and consultants that covers the latest EC developments. After 2.5 years and 90 editions, today’s edition will be my last.  I’ll explain why in a minute, but first some background.

I started my newsletter, Employee Central Intelligence, to keep EC customers up to date. There are sections with commentary, EC blogs, and support notes from SuccessFactors. Despite the dry subject matter and suspect writing on my part, Employee Central Intelligence has grown to a subscriber base of 850.  While the newsletter has certainly included criticism of EC, I think any objective person who reads my newsletter consistently realizes that I have a very favorable impression of EC.  

Last week someone in my network reached out to me to let me know that a salesperson for a competing HR solution had forwarded an excerpt of my newsletter to a prospective customer in an attempt to discourage them from selecting SuccessFactors. The excerpt from my newsletter showed that there were --gasp-- open support issues with the product.  (I would show the slide here, but the slide had “[SOLUTION COMPANY NAME] Confidential” on it.  Guess my newsletter has become the confidential property of that competing organization.)

I’ve decided to name the salesperson here: Jerome Sullivan. My rationale is that if he can use my newsletter, with my name on it, to make a bad-faith argument to an audience for which the newsletter was never intended, I should be able to make public my objections.  At least I’m making my statements in a way that he can feel free to respond as opposed to his use of my newsletter in the shadows. I’m sure many of you will see nothing wrong with what he did.  If so, by making this public I’m letting you know so that you can congratulate him on his efforts. 

This brings me back to my newsletter--I have made the decision to discontinue publishing.  One of the key drivers for the newsletter was filling a need that I had: a compilation of EC support notes.  I figured that if I was doing this research anyway, others could benefit from it.  I never anticipated that someone would use this compilation of notes against SuccessFactors:  

• The reality is that roughly half of SuccessFactors’ support notes aren’t problems at all, but are actually helpful “how-to’s” for very specific issues. 
• And as for the other half of support notes that are actual issues with the product, so what? ALL solutions have flaws, and I’m grateful that SuccessFactors is forthcoming with theirs. As any customer or consultant will tell you, it’s just as important for the solution provider to tell you what their solution cannot do as what it can do. It's time for all solutions to provide more candor and not suppress criticism. From my perspective, SAP/SuccessFactors has always been great about this. Can all other providers say the same?

Lastly, I’d like to apologize to SuccessFactors.  I’m a working EC consultant, not a sales guy, so I guess it was just naivete on my part to not consider that my newsletter for EC customers would be used as an argument against companies becoming EC customers. Kind of depressing to spend hundreds of hours working on this newsletter--free of charge I might add--just to find out the Jerome’s of the world are using it using to make quota.