Deciding whether to offer workplace hardware as a service

The question

A technology company had always sold its workplace equipment outright, and wanted to know whether businesses would take it as a service instead.

If they would, it needed to know which businesses to approach, what would persuade them and what to charge. An honest answer had to allow for the possibility that the market did not want it.

Our approach

We took the service concepts to the people who would buy them: IT and office managers at companies small and large.

Each concept was shown unbranded and unpriced, so people judged the idea itself. We measured which value-adds would make the service worth switching for, and adjusted stated purchase intent down to a conservative estimate before any market was sized.

A trade-off pricing survey then tested package and price options. Each person chose repeatedly between options, so revenue could be modeled at every price point in the tested range. Both the sizing and the revenue figures are estimates under the conditions tested, built for planning.

What the team came away with

Division leadership had a conservative sizing of the market for each concept, and a pricing model showing how revenue would change across the tested price range.

We brought the work together in a proposed design for the service, ready for leadership to decide whether to build it and how to shape it.