If your customers have decided it makes more sense to manage their own IT, ask this question: If you used this time to sell or deliver services to your customer how much would you earn? Is it more than you would pay an external vendor to provide that service? If so they’re wasting time and money. Here’s how to help them stop.
Has a customer challenged you to explain why they should use you to support their printing and other IT operations when they can do it themselves? Here’s a comprehensive approach to answering most compellingly:
“Doing it yourself is always less expensive,” is probably one of the most off-base, inaccurate attitudes that is still pervasive in our society. It just isn’t true.
On the simplest level, imagine one of your staff accountants attempting to simply fix a broken computer. Given their lack of experience or training, how long would it take them? They’re certainly competent people, but they have no clue how to begin, much less complete the repair. Even if the fee you pay a repair partner per hour is several times the accountant’s hourly pay, the number of hours required will more than eat up the difference and end up costing you more.
How Much is Your Time Worth?
Beyond the difference in cost between an accountant and a repair professional is the cost of the lost hours of accounting time. In essence this doubles the cost, resulting in paying too much for a repair and paying for accounting work that won’t happen.
Ask how the cost of your time, or your people’s time, compares to the cost of bringing in outside help and customers will consistently see how doing things themselves is never less expensive. There is a decided cost-advantage to bringing in an IT or managed print services expert.
Why Not Hire an Expert?
Perhaps the customer considers hiring someone to do nothing but IT work for them. There are some key questions to ask:
- Do you know how to hire them? How to evaluate who is a good technical resource?
- Will the person you hire have all the knowledge needed to support everything in your IT environment?
- What happens when your IT person is out sick, or away at training?
- Training? How much will training cost?
- How long do you think it will be until your IT person becomes bored of supporting just your environment. Tech experts need stimulation, the stimulation of constantly solving new challenges. That’s the opposite of what you want. You want NO new challenges.
When you engage an external provider, they own responsibility for backfill when people are away from work. Training is their responsibility, not yours. The quality of their hires is also their problem, until it becomes your problem at which point you’ll replace them. And none of their hires needs to be the universal genius. If your environment needs specialized knowledge they have other team members who can step in.
Engaging a services provider shifts all of the burdens off of the customer and into the hands of you, the channel partner, who is far better equipped to handle them.
New is What We Do
One of the biggest mistakes customers make when deploying new platforms or applications is to use their own people to perform the deployment.
What will happen to their teams’ usual day-to-day requirements? Will they backfill with an external provider?
How much will it cost to send their people for the training required? Costs include not only tuition, but also travel, lodging, and the cost of having valuable resources away from their work.
For IT service providers, new is what you do for a living. When we train our people to deploy new platforms and applications we know they will perform that deployment many, many times for different customers, making it worth our while to train them.
Better to leave your people doing what they do and engaging an expert IT service provider to take responsibility for getting your new platforms, applications, and environments up and running successfully.
You Don’t Have Time to Monitor the IT Industry – We Do!
It’s not just a matter of making everything work – the right IT provider should be constantly striving to make everything work better. What are the newest versions of the applications and hardware you use? When does it make sense to upgrade? What new technologies have emerged that would really improve how you leverage information technology?
Customers simply don’t have the time to monitor everything that is constantly happening in the IT industry, but partners do. Our ability to innovate and stay ahead of the curve depends upon us keeping ahead of what’s coming, and keeping customers informed on what’s worth looking at.
Money, Politics, and Partnership
When setting out to determine how best to provide the best services to their organization, there are generally three things customers must consider:
- Money – How much will your company budget for IT support? How will you best use that budget?
- Politics – Everybody has their own preference as to which computer, which tablet, which smartphone, which cloud services they prefer to use. For each choice there is a corresponding cost of preparation to support. Tools, parts, training, and more. How will they decide which manufacturer’s products are supported in their organization and which are not?
- Partnership – As Dr. Ruth Westheimer often said, “At the end of the day, of course you can do it by yourself. But it’s always more satisfying when you do it with a quality partner.
Be your customer’s quality partner and be sure they know exactly why you are worth the partnership. Find out how partners like yourself are moving the sales conversation forward and earning new business with Xerox products and services by joining our private LinkedIn channel partners group.
Learn more about Xerox Partner Print Services
Learn more about adding managed print services to your portfolio and find out about becoming accredited to sell Xerox Partner Print Services on the Xerox Global Partner Portal.
Become a Xerox Channel Partner
Contact your Xerox account manager, or review the Xerox Global Partner Program and apply to become a Xerox channel partner today, to find out how we will help grow your business.
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