Smart Tech for Small Biz

Dell Financial Services Making Deals

Every big vendor offers financing and leasing of some type. Some use third parties to handle the details while many of the largest create their own financing departments. That makes sense when you understand car companies make more profit from financing a car than from making and selling it. Let's take a minute to see what Dell Financial Services has going on this spring.

Before we start, I'm not advocating you dump your current supplier just because Dell has a deal for you. While the cost of acquisition is important for any technology, the cost of ownership tends to be five or ten times higher than that over the life of your products. Saving $10 at the start may cost you $100 over the life of your product if you buy the wrong things. This is no reflection on Dell, but just so you understand I'm talking about cost of acquisition, and the deals around right now.

Now that we're all antied up in the technology poker game, let me relay some of the news Dell sent me recently. One deal: zero payments for 90 days. That's not as good a deal as some of those obnoxious furniture stores screaming you can buy a roomful of furniture today and start paying for it in six or eight years, but it can help. Every bit of dollar stretching helps today. Well, it always helped, but when you have plenty of dollars most of us forget about stretching the ones we have and reach for new ones. Now we have to do a better job appreciating the ones we have.

European readers might be surprised to learn Dell announced zero-percent financing promotions on servers and laptops through the end of April 2009. US buyers can get a zero percent $1 buy-out lease promotion on certain servers and laptops. In addition, Dell dropped the deal amount from a minimum of $25,000 down to $5,000 and added more models to the promotion.

Yes, the Dell announcement included the mandatory “... do more with less” line we're all sick of seeing. Interestingly, Dell announced most of these details in their Small Business Blog site using the title Finding the Right Financing for Your Business. While I'm all for blogs, I'm betting your Dell sales contact also has the details.

If you use another major vendor rather than Dell, talk to your sales contact. The best way to get value from Dell's announcement is to leverage better lease deals from your other vendors. We hate to see vendors raise prices all together, but we love to see them lower prices all together. Call us hypocrites, with the caveat we're just trying to “do more with less” as the vendors suggest.

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