The true cost of ownership (TCO) webinar is coming on 7th June. A chance for you to understand how to ensure you're martech is carrying its full cost and not hiding expenses beneath the hood. So keeping in the car theme, here's a little anecdote that might bring some things home.
I have a friend who is obsessed with cars. Big, fast, supercars. You know the ones, where their average MPH starts at above the legal speed limit, you have to take up two spaces in a car park for fear of people opening their doors on your precious beast and don't even try to attempt to get in it if you have anything close to a bad back.
Anyway, after a couple of years of saving what seemed like enough money to potentially look for a new car, my friend got the blinkers on. Whilst casually looking at adverts for the car in favour at that moment, they found themselves reaching out to the salesman just to have a chat about what the car payments could look like. The salesman, happy to be of service, went into all kinds of contortionist salesman moves to bring the costs down "only for such a special customer" and "did his very best offer" which he "could only do if there was an immediate commitment" and my friend was over the moon to realise that they could (with some serious stretch) just about afford to have this dream car on their driveway. But here comes the kicker.
They hadn't considered the TCO. They may have flirted with the idea that there were more fuel costs and potentially a rise in insurance but until you sit down and make sure you are transparent with all the cost's you're not really seeing full TCO and you're hiding costs in other pots. Your budget (the amount they could afford a month) has to contain all the costs for the lifetime of the ownership. So, in this example, we're talking about the price of the car, road tax, vehicle insurance, services, MOT's, tyre changes or any other unavoidable maintenance and even some contingency for unexpected maintenance. And let's not forget fuel for this car, that will be significantly more than the previous vehicle used but you need to know your average annual milage to apply the math.
You can see by now where I am going with this. This example is just the same and TCO on a piece of martech and so many businesses fail to understand the total cost of ownership when gathering requirements for a new tool. Often, the cheapest looking tool turns out to cost a lot more than you think when you consider things like, hiring or training specialist users, the ongoing upskilling of those resources, the licenses for all users and potential growth, consultants for implementation, optimisation or integration and maybe even the cost of decommissioning other tools.
Join us on 7th June at 12pm to find out how you can avoid these pitfalls and ensure your martech selections contain full TCO and what best practice looks like.
And just so you know, my friend hasn't bought the car yet. They're now considering the TCO and its impacts on the rest of their budget!