By showing customers that upfront costs matter less than a lifetime of expenses, solution providers can leave low-margin, cost-cutting strategies behind.

Total cost of ownership analyses may not be top of mind for most end users these days. But solution providers that successfully sell TCO benefits can free themselves from the pressure of constantly trying to undercut a competitor's price. The first step in getting clients to see the big price picture is educating them about some basic economic realities.

Start with assessments

One increasingly important TCO consideration is energy consumption, including how much power devices draw when they're at rest and when they're actually printing pages (see related story, "New Strategies for Selling Tech Refresh").

In addition, solution providers can gather sales ammunition by taking the time to perform a thorough print-environment assessment, says Robin Wessel, director of product marketing for Xerox's desktop products. "By assessing the customer's total needs, you can look beyond just the product the customer may be asking for," he says.

"So, if the client says it wants to replace its tabloid copier, you may see four or five printers throughout the office, plus a few fax machines," Wessel explains. "That end user has a variety of options, and it may make more sense from a cost standpoint to install a multifunction product to reduce the total cost of ownership, not just at the individual-device level, but the cost of ownership for the total environment. That process starts by assessing all of the pages [handled] in the customer's environment, not just the pages on the device that the customer is looking to replace."

Some of the biggest TCO savings also come from replacing numerous desktop inkjet printers, notorious for high consumables costs, with fewer and more-efficient workgroup inkjets or lasers. "The company may be running inkjets on 10 different desks because [each inkjet was] acquired below the radar screen," Wessel says.

Minimize color costs

Customers also have cost-savings options after they've made their hardware decisions. Vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Xerox now include access-control technology with their hardware or as supplemental software. With the proper settings, companies can keep expensive color print jobs to a minimum by regulating usage by the time of the day, the day of the week or by individual application.

For example, company settings may ensure that color jobs run only Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. "to make sure people aren't coming in during the evenings to print soccer flyers," says Tom Codd, director of marketing for Hewlett-Packard's Worldwide Print Sales and Services Organization.

Monitoring color usage across your organization adds another layer of controls for restraining TCO. For example, HP's Web Jetadmin lets managers analyze usage at each device to spot abnormal usage patterns. "Customers can say, 'All of a sudden we're seeing these high color volumes happening in the Finance Department; maybe we should go check and see what's going on,'" Codd explains. By spotting such blips, customers can monitor and often rein in unnecessary expenses.