Greetings!
Our favorite time of year: Selling Season! Are you ready to do battle with the forces of unprofitability, and claim the dollars that are rightfully yours? Read on for tips to keep your grip on your chips, along with a review of possibly the most thoroughly fly gadget ever...
Whatever you're making, selling, or servicing, we wish you success! |
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The top CE companies, from manufacturers to successful CI integrators to the biggest box of all--Best Buy--know the value of keeping their teams trained. They're extremely proactive at developing and conducting internal training.
But who trains the trainers? Sell-Through Solutions, that's who! For example, the CE industry's finest training team at Monster Cable isn't content with being Number One...they want to stay Number One. Monster relies on Sell-Through Solutions for internal training assistance each year.
Among the skill-building programs we offer:
- Advancing PowerPoint from bulleted lists to visual learning
- Adding movies and Flash animation to PowerPoint
- Creating narrated Flash movies from PowerPoint presentations to distribute via Internet or Intranet
- Polishing public speaking skills
- Creating presentations that both modify behavior and SELL.
- Where to find the best technical info: Blu-ray, HDMI, HDTV, Audio, Home Theatre, and more
- Where to get the best images for multimedia presentations
- Image editing in Photoshop
- The importance of follow-up after training
- Best metrics to quantify the results of training, to gauge sell-through increases attributed to training
- Working faster and better with PCs and Macs
Take your training team to the next level:
Call Sell-Through Solutions today!
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In a svelte form factor not much bigger than a playing card, the 2nd-generation iPod Touch gives you: a hyper-sharp 3.5" touchscreen; Apple's iTunes-based music player with CoverFlow search by album cover; Wi-Fi access that allows you to retrieve and send email, browse the Internet, and order new music, movies, and TV shows; up to 32GB of storage for files and images; a lovely image viewer with a slideshow function; a PIM that auto-syncs emails, contacts, and calendar perfectly with Mac OS X, Outlook, webmail, and more; an accelerometer that automatically flips views to portrait or landscape when you rotate the unit...and also makes for realistic game play; an alarm clock and stopwatch; a built-in amplifier and speaker; a viewer for PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint email attachments; a standard mini headphone jack; a mapping application that pinpoints your starting location via Wi-Fi; a widescreen video player; a YouTube viewer; 36 hours of music playback time per charge; and a ton more.
All of this pales in comparison with the iPod Touch's magical interface. With gentle sweeps and swipes of your fingers, buttons wiggle, screens zoom in and whoosh out, pages slide into place with digital precision. It's cool yet classy; the Touch is one of the few computer gadgets actually fun to play with, and enjoying it is endlessly fascinating.
The technology of this thing is so futuristic, it's unfair to compare it with anything else out there. Apple has opened the iPod Touch system to developers (it shares most of its guts with the iPhone; minus the phone and the oppressive, balky AT&T service), so you can personalize yours with hundreds of additional applications and hacks, many of them free. Our own industry wasted no time adapting the silky touchscreen interface to control Home Theatre systems, smart homes, and lighting.
This thing has more horsepower and storage than a top-of-the-line laptop of just a few years ago...for $239. I'm going to show up at CES '09 armed with only the iPod Touch, replacing my customary 25-pound laptop support system with this little 4-ounce wonder. Massively recommended. |
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In an economy under siege,
you do NOT want to turn up your nose at any possible profit. Some CE
specialists believe they're not in competition with big-box retailers such as
Costco and Best Buy, leaving those guys to perform the "little jobs."
With thinking like that,
the Geeks truly will inherit the earth.
Julie Jacobson of CE Pro Magazine reminds us that there aren't really any
"little jobs." She illustrates where Geek Squad charges $800 for an
estimated 7-hour "Premium Home Theatre Setup and Mount." Jacobson
says, "That's $114/hour for a low-level technician. Not bad. Wouldn't you
like to charge that much?"
Many of the big-box packages don't include essential and profitable items such
as speaker installations, difficult mounting locations (above a fireplace,
etc.), cables, mounts--or even hiding the flat panel power cord.
Don't scoff at the simple retrofit audio jobs, either. Powerline multiroom
audio and Sonos, for example, are easy (on both you and the client) ways to get
your foot in the door. And that's the goal: getting inside the home. Once
you're there, use your superior follow-up skills to expand to control,
lighting, video, etc.
Don't pass up a chance for easy money: take all jobs, satisfy all clients. |
 The demo disc in high rotation around our office is Legends of Jazz, with host Ramsey Lewis. A Who's Who of jazz giants performs on this pristine set, with performances taken from the original 1080i masters (the series originally aired on PBS). Artists include Dave Brubeck, Al Jarreau, Chick Corea, George Duke, Robert Cray, Keb' Mo, Clark Terry, Marcus Miller, David Sanborn, and Ramsey Lewis himself, among others.  Legends of Jazz makes for a killer demo. My buddy Ken Manson had it going in the Sonance booth at CEDIA, and the sound was sweet. Joel Silver of the Imaging Science Foundation said in CE Pro that the disc is "beautifully mastered," and what's good enough for Joel Silver is good enough for us. |
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