In our outsourcing group, we don’t like to sell laptops & desktops, honestly…
Our Managed IT Services group is 100% focused on delivering a quality service to our clients. Unfortunately selling our clients hardware is a necessary evil. It’s not something we really enjoy doing; it’s more of something we have to do in order to provide the complete package. And for most clients this makes both of our lives easier. However, there are those few clients that this ends up causing more heartache then it’s worth. Let me explain a bit…
The best-case scenario is a client that sees us as a single point of contact for all their IT needs. When they think of IT they think of Compuquip. This client doesn’t buy hardware that often, usually when a new employee starts or when it’s time for a lifecycle upgrade. When they need hardware they send us a request, we turn around a quote, they approve it, and then we deploy it. Pretty seamless…
The worst-case scenario is a client that really doesn’t trust our team for hardware procurement. They are always price checking us and comparing pricing at Dell.com or Best Buy. So they send us a request for a hardware quote, we do the work of putting together a configuration and they end up buying it somewhere. So we provided them with the inside technical support and another provider gets the order.
Most clients fall somewhere in between. Many want to source everything through us because it makes their life easier but they like to keep us honest and spot check us on the pricing. I actually like this because it helps us also make sure our vendors are being honest with us, if we see a huge price difference then we can go back to them.
Then there are those challenging clients, the ones that every time they ask us to order them a laptop we have to go through 4 or 5 versions of the quote. We have to justify why the laptop we recommended is more expensive than what they see at Dell.com or Best Buy. Inevitably the answer usually is “that machine is home edition and won’t work with your network” or “that machine does not meet the minimum specs of your core application” or “that doesn’t include the necessary licenses to keep you in compliance”
In the end we will do whatever it takes to keep our clients happy and that’s why when it comes to ordering hardware we have a dedicated team that helps with the configuration, the ordering, the processing, and the delivery so our services team can do the installation.
