It’s hard to run a business at the best of times let alone an Audio Visual business –  last month was quite a busy month. This was made busier as I had my annual week off (which was needed to recharge my batteries) but my great team did a good job looking after my clients and projects.

We are a small Brisbane company and one of our philosophies is that if you’re selling it you need to know how it works. We attend all the training sessions that our suppliers run locally, but more often than not there is no training on some products and the only way you can find out about it is when you sell it. So this month we had an install of 4 monitors for a training centre, we used Samsung monitors with Magic Info Digital Signage running on Samsung embedded PC’s. One of our tech’s spent a couple of days going through the program before going on site, there were a few setup issues to go through with the embedded PC’s but once that was  set up all went well – eventually. The program itself  is very easy to use our client was creating content in no time and getting great feedback from his management.

So what am I getting at, well it is always hard to keep up with new systems so you tend to sell what you know which may not always be of benefit to the end user. It would be fine if the A/V business had a lot of money to spend on demo units etc. but unfortunately we do not. The suppliers don’t often have models you can test out and in most cases they do not run training sessions, this was the case with the Samsung Magic Info system. Yes we can download the software and practise using it but it is not till you get to use it with the actual PC and monitor that you come up against these problems.  In a perfect A/V world when these new products are released they could at least send out some sort of training video to help initially. Our tech found some web forums with people having the same issues in other countries so you wonder whether the manufacturers actually monitor these sites – sadly probably not…. But in saying all that, since we have been through the initial hassles and know the “tricks” with this system we will now be more then eager to sell this product maybe even more than the other digital signage products we provide.

As a business that advocates selling good quality products it is hard to decide on which products you will go with as there are so many that are similar. You need to consider the support the  supplier / distributor gives you right down to the Rep keeping you up to date with the latest products & prices (all it requires is a regular email guys – a blog topic for another day – Rep’s). To the technical backup either onsite or via email – even down to what demo videos they can supply so that it can help you to sell their product to the client.

At the beginning I said that it was hard running a business let alone an A/V business who is trying to survive in a competitive environment – I wonder how other companies cope with the new products – we do more than just sell boxes and that I think is sometimes what the supplier forgets??