Challenges Finding a Winning Total Cost of Ownership Solution

Charlie is an account manager for a Managed Print Service (MPS) company in the Pacific Northwest and she is having a rough year. 2020 was supposed to be record shattering. It’s been more of a roller coaster than she could have ever imagined. She is facing new and increasing pressure to deliver value, and save money for both existing and new customers. Adding to this challenge, many businesses are operating with remote employees now, resulting in an alarming drop of consumables. So how can Charlie effectively show her customers how to save money and optimize their print fleet, while also winning new deals and growing MPS for her company that so desperately needs new sales? An accurate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) engine could give Charlie the edge she needs to keep current accounts satisfied, and win new deals.

Unfortunately for Charlie, she doesn't really have access to a great TCO tool. That's not to say she hasn't tried them before--she totally has. The same common problems have gotten in the way of a TCO tool being an effective compliment to her deliverables. Cost, accuracy, and presentation have always been a challenge for her in some capacity. If any of these three factors are lacking, it often requires more manual effort and data massaging than the TCO engine is saving her. Let's take a closer look at each factor, and what the possible impacts could be.

Among the TCO tools Charlie has tried, cost has been a common challenge. Many offerings charge per seat/license, making the software expensive. When COVID-19 shut the country down, she decided she would never purchase a TCO license again. It was such a waste to pay for the license but having no active deals she could pursue.

She went ahead and started using a TCO tool that was free, but pretty much abandoned it immediately. It was painfully slow to do analysis for an entire fleet, and the click pricing wasn’t even close upon closer examination and a few quick Google searches. Apparently with TCO engines, sometimes you get what you pay for.

This leads into one of her primary challenges of the past in trying to find a good TCO engine-accuracy. Many of the TCO tools she reviewed made it difficult, and even impossible at times, to understand how each component comprises the total click cost. It’s always easy at-a-glance to show costs, but Charlie knows some customers are going to review her presentation with a skeptical eye, and she wants to operate with integrity as much as she can.

This leads to one of Charlie’s most difficult challenges-the presentation. Many TCO engines she has audited come with a myriad of outputs. Along with the outputs, came infinite configurations, complications, and really useless data. Charlie will often have 3 or 4 simple metrics for her pre sales deals. Considerations like device reduction, fleet age, and whether a device is under management are her primary focus for most customers. She doesn’t need ALL of the data, she just needs the data that paints the picture of savings, efficiency, and reliability for her customers. That’s what wins deals.

Fortunately for Charlie, 2020 is looking a lot better now that she is giving the Cartos Suite TCO a try. With Cartos TCO, she can price a 50-device deal in a couple of minutes, instead of a couple of hours by hand. If she doesn’t do any analysis for a month or two, it’s no problem. Cartos will charge her by usage, so the cost of the tool is completely correlated to the amount of opportunity she is chasing. The accounting department loves this!

The best part about the Cartos TCO is that she can actually see down to the device-level click costs for every device. If the client really wants to go deeper into the direct and indirect costs, Charlie can be confident during presentations and reviews the data will validate her findings.

She also loves the TCO reporting. She gets all of the charts/graphs she needs for the “Wow!” factor, without hours of manual adjustments to her Excel tables she used to spend hours on. With Cartos in her portfolio, she has the confidence to win any deal, and really show how she can deliver value and live up to her brand promise.

To see how Cartos TCO can help you win more deals, Check out our Cartos Suite of MPS tools.