Alinean

TCO Calculator

Turbo-Charge Demand Generation using online TCO Comparison Tools

• How can frugal buyers be compelled to select a solution best at savings money and delivering value versus the competition?
• How can sales and marketing teams effectively differentiate products from the competition?
• What can be used best to educate prospects on unique quantifiable cost advantages of specific solutions in order to un-stick deals and shorten the sales cycle? 

Alinean's TCO Calculator can be customized for your solutions, services and product offerings, providing a quick online way to interactively engage customers and prospects in discovering the cost advantages your solution has over named competitors or competitive technology sets.

Run as a self-assessment or assisted by inside sales or channel partners, the Alinean TCO Calculator is a perfect tool to attract qualified prospects, and deliver a credible assessment of total cost of ownership and business value advantages of proposed solution.

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The Alinean's TCO Calculator first provides an easy to use questionnaire, collecting size, opportunity and solution specific information from prospects (which solutions and options they want to consider from your solution set, and which they want to consider from the competition). From this information, the tool quickly quantifies the cost savings and business benefits from the comparative solutions, clearly highlighting TCO savings, service level and agility advantages. The analysis results are clearly illustrated in easy to understand online tables, charts and graphs, which communicate the TCO savings and business advantages of your solution over the competitive offerings.. Users can obtain a more detailed e-mail report, or Word / PPT reports directly from the tool (configurable).

Unlike most in-house developed TCO tools, the Alinean TCO Calculator is pre-loaded with industry, size and location specific research and metrics to ease data collection, and guide the sales person and prospect.  These initial defaults can be fine tuned and completely customized with the prospect's personalized information and "what-if" analysis. The compelling analysis reports can be printed, and the analysis saved for later recall or available for online sharing with associates (collaboration). The results are editable, credible, accurate and approved by Alinean as a third-party leader in IT investment valuation.

To provide additional third party research and validation, Alinean partnered with WiPro PSA to provide customized TCO studies and case studies / validation to accompany any program as an option. Wipro PSA researches existing installations, competitive installations, and even does lab testing to validate and substantiate claims with solid fact based analysis and documentation. Alinean is the ONLY tool provider who has been endorsed by a major professional services research organization such as WiPro PSA.

Using Alinean's TCO Calculator, a personalized overview and unique TCO analysis can be generated in five minutes or less either directly by the prospect, or in assisted mode with sales professionals. This interactive approach attracts prospects, keeps them proactively engaged in determining your solution's economic and business benefits, and generates proven conversion results.

Used early in the sales cycle, the prospect can obtain quantified TCO advantage assessments versus typical feature / function price messaging, helping to engage economic buyers earlier, and un-stick deals mired in product selection or architecture battles.

For direct customer access campaigns, the TCO Calculator has proven invaluable to leading IT vendors such as Microsoft, Dell, and HP, serving as the perfect call-to-action for competitive TCO/value-based advertising and direct mailing campaigns. Alinean's TCO Calculators have been featured in multi-million dollar worldwide advertising campaigns in over a dozen major print and online. Print advertising, banner ads and direct mail campaigns can all point to a customized self assessment designed Alinean TCO Calculators as the call-to-action - to generate more leads and provide value-added personalized content for the prospect.

Beyond self-assessments by customers, the TCO Calculator can be used early in the sales cycle by direct sales teams to better gauge prospect value opportunities, and provide value added ROI reports to help move the deals through the sales cycle more quickly / unstuck languishing deal flow.

The Alinean TCO Calculator is designed to seamlessly link from your corporate web site, or be made available for private sales person / channel partner use via secure login site. Features include TCO analysis, service level and business agility advantage comparison, solution selection and investment analysis, report printing /export, online results collaboration and save, as well as demand generation capture and integration to existing systems (such as Eloqua).

If you already have a TCO comparison spreadsheet, Alinean can improve and validate the content, and port it into a compelling online application in two to three weeks. If an existing spreadsheet model has not been developed, or needs updating, Alinean analysts work directly with product marketing, sales consultant and sales staff to analyze the solution and quantify TCO advantages. TCO Calculator sales tools are typically designed and delivered in 6 weeks or less, are built from the award-winning EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform so that content and results are compatible with other Alinean business value sales tools, and are designed to be hosted by Alinean as a complete Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.

Features:

• Easy to use, yet powerful and credible third-party validated modeling and metrics base

• Collects contact and project/opportunity information from prospects

• Quantifies potential benefits in compelling and attractive tables, charts and graphs

• Provides powerful"what-if" capabilities

• Calculates key financial metrics for TCO comparison including customized chart of accounts, as well as service level and business agility impacts

• Includes hard and soft costs in the TCO comparison

• Enables reports to be printed and exported to Word and PPT (PDF optional)

• Enables report content to be saved for later recall and review by client, and saved in a database for later analysis by the marketing / sales team

• Enables reports to be shared with associates (collaboration option)

• Integrates data with demand generation tracking systems such as Eloqua, or proprietary tracking solutions and systems

• Completely customized storyboard, model, metrics and value proposition  to effectively communicate the quantified benefits for your products and solutions

• Multi-currency and local metrics for worldwide selling opportunities

• Several language options and translation programs available

• Uses the EnterpriseROI™ sales tool platform to deliver an enterprise-ready sales tool and suite

Benefits

• Qualifies and educates prospects on the TCO competitive advantages for the solutions

• Reduces the duration of the sales cycle  by engaging economic buyers and confirming TCO advantage messaging and quantification early

• Drives competitive advantage by engaging clients on unique TCO advantages versus feature / function and price

• Improves advertising and direct mail response rates by 100% or more through value-added content

• Quickly converts suspects to leads and sales

• Helps capture additional opportunity, solution and value information about prospects to help sales close more business