New Weapons for the Multimedia Trenches
(Some Sales Tips and a Review of Two Great Laptops)

Any seasoned sales-producer knows that an opportunity to show your work to a client is the first big step on the trail to work. But an appointment with the Administrative Assistant who decides what coffee to buy for the lunchroom is different than an appointment with the V.P. of Sales who decides what company makes the Annual Sales Meeting media. Finding out which appointment your going to is the art of qualifying. In the long run, qualifying can make the difference between success and floating in the water with your belly in the air.

Before I booked the flight, I was going to qualify the client and make sure the time, money and effort were going to be well spent. The first step was made before the call. I researched the client's title (Director of Sales Development) and asked his secretary if he ever engaged companies like mine. The answers being in the affirmative, I qualified further.

"Are you planning an assignment soon?" This establishes timing. Meeting a client six weeks before his anticipated project is a lot better than meeting him six months before. A lot can happen in six months. The client can get fired, the job can go south, the budget can get cut, the company can get bought. Timing.

"I've already started this project, with a company I'm dismissing." he replied, "The assignment is right now."

So much for timing. The blood starts to rush, the game's afoot. The next usual step is to qualify the budget, but his comments about dismissing a fellow producer gave me pause. Dismissal is serious business, involving legal entanglements, exit payments, and sometimes bad blood that can sour the project for whomever tries to rescue it.

"May I ask just what caused the dismissal?" I asked.

"Lots of things." he answered, "But mostly the quality of the video. It was awful."

Video. Hmm. That's often a cause for "C-Disatisfaction." Many clients find it hard to make the expectational transition from the quality of VHS video to the kind of quarter-screen, hesitating video that is produced by most CD-ROM programs operating on less than optimum systems. These facts of multimedia life must be explained to a client up front, but few producers do. They are so hot to sell the deal, they don't want to risk lowering their chances by floating a few caveats at the balloon festival. Woe is he, whose client bails out halfway through, when the quality on the computer screen doesn't match his Trinitron at home!

I made a note to spend a few minutes in our initial meeting building the client's trust of me by defining the limitations of video on computer screens. I also made a mental note to take the new IBM 760CD laptop on the trip. My shoulder started hurting.

The next step in qualifying is to ascertain the size of the job in terms of budget. You don't want to spend a thousand bucks courting a client to win a job worth only a few thousand more. Budget qualifying is a delicate proposition and there's no sure way of coaxing this information to the surface without sounding nosy. But you can and should inquire about the size of the project, especially if the cost of your sales efforts are considerable.

"Can you describe the complexity of the assignment?" I ventured.

"We're talking about making a video and then converting it to an interactive CD-ROM program." Now, does the client have any idea what this kind of work costs? Maybe he's dismissing the current producer because he thought such a project should come in at $20,000. Another qualifying question. What is the experience level of the client?

"Have you commissioned a project like this before?" I asked.

"Yes." He answered, "This is our third CD. Our hundredth or so video."

Good. Now for the blunt question to finish the qualifying process. You never start with this one.

"What's the budget range?"

Without hesitation he responded, "A hundred and ten."

Good. We knew the client was a key decision maker, the time frame was immediate, the task was commensurate with the effort of getting the account, the client was experienced and the budget was adequate. Now I started looking at the flight schedules and my datebook. The assault had begun.

Choosing the Weapons Compliment

A feature film Director of Photography I know once equated making a film to a war. Ladies, pardon me, but I often think along equally macho metaphors when I consider the efforts required to find, meet and win a client. Not a war, exactly, but certainly an assault. But, your enemy is not the potential client, your enemy is all the vagaries of misfortune that can deter from a perfect performance serve to successfully match your skills with the client's needs in a presentation that builds trust and a mutual desire to work together.

In order to execute a perfect assault, you must follow the six "P"s: Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Part of the proper planning for any assault requires the selection of appropriate weapons. The sales-producer's weapons are his multimedia display devices and the show reels of past work. Unless you're going in as a straight video producer, it is no longer sufficient to walk in with just a videotape under your arm.

Today's clients are interactive savvy, they are connected to the Net and often have hefty multimedia hardware sitting on their desktops. Consider the expanded role you can assume by expanding your media offerings. I no longer present myself as a "video vendor," but as a specialist in "electronic media." You can, too, as soon as you recognize that our business is quickly expanding in many ways and that to present yourself in all media you will require new tools, new weapons!

Here are a few you may wish to consider while I let you peer over my shoulder as I court a new client. A real case history, by the way.

Moving from qualifying to assault planning, I asked the client what sort of playback equipment he had at his facility. His response drew me back.

"I don't have much in the way of computers. Why don't you bring a laptop and play your CD samples off that?"

This response gave me pause. Traditionally, in video sales, if a client didn't have a VCR in house, that was a sure negative qualifier. Even the lowliest of bona fide clients has a VCR by now and if you get a client who doesn't, be assured, trouble, this way comes. But in multimedia and website design, the game is slightly different. The equipment is changing daily and curiously, a lot of clients are jumping in by virtue of the lemming reflex and it is common to find them inadequately tooled. Naturally, the clients lack of weaponry made it all the more essential for me to have and select the best I could find.

The Ingram of Media Firepower

As mentioned above, I was already planning to bring the IBM 760CD laptop. Since the quality of the video was key factor for the client, I wanted to show the ultimate in multimedia video power and this new release from Big Blue has video that wollops the viewer's visual cortex like a .45 slug between the eyes.

If laptops were guns, the 760ED would be akin to a silenced Ingram submachine gun on full auto! About equal in weight to the Ingram, the 760, at 7.5 pounds isn't for wimps. My chiropractor gives them away like dentists used to dispense lollipops (Just joking, the 760 costs $6,999, a pricey lollipop, indeed.!).

This matte black media muncher debuts with an impressive array of inclusives; a 12.1" SVGA screen, 1.2 GB hard drive, a 4X CD-ROM that swaps for a floppy drive, a 28.8 onboard modem, 16 bit stereo Soundblaster audio, 16 megs of RAM, a 133 Pentium CPU and, best of all, an MPEG1/MPEG2 video card with 2 MB, 64 bit RAM! I chucked to myself thinking how the client was going to react, looking at D1 quality, full screen, hardware accelerated video on a laptop. My palms were itchy with anticipation.

Let me tell you more about this computer. Right out of the box, you can put your Betacam's video and stereo audio right into the side. It comes with a rudimentary nonlinear editing program from XX, called, XX, which alas, had no documentation and even less in intuitive layout, but with little trouble I found I could acquire footage directly to the hard drive within a half hour of the Fedex delivery. Hoo ha! My show reels were loaded and ready to play.

I don't, as yet, have the capability of converting my video to MPEG2, but the IBM 760ED comes with a scary CD-ROM that has some clips from "True Lies" that demonstrate true cinema quality. The scary part comes from the interactive screens that offer 760 purchasers the services of IBM's in house production team! Get this, any potential client who buys this baby is going to get his first multimedia pitch from Big Blue. I saw that bit of cut-in marketing and thought, "Now it's time for me to call my clients and offer to build them mainframe computers." Isn't if funny how everybody, from IBM to ATT, to GTE to Prudential wants to get in on our act? I never thought it was that lucrative a profession. Hey guys, stick with what you know best, let me design the programs, okay?

And design the best laptop, they did. The 760 sports a PCI bus capable of transfer rates up to 132MB/sec. The PC CardBus supports all 32 bit applications and cards as well as older 16-bit hardware. The 64 bit graphics engine allows for very high levels of video performance, making the 760 an ideal development bed for programmers who want to take their work on the road. This makes it a good candidate for uploading a real nonlinear editing software, like Adobe Premier 4.2. We did and it worked beautifully. Let me tell you how you can use this baby.

Take your dailies and load them to the 1.2 GB drive in the lowest resolution you can stand. Now leave the office and go to the mountains. Put your feet in the creek and light up the screen. Start editing. Work fast. You're battery will only last 2.8 hours, but what are you? A workaholic? Okay. Run a wire to your car's cigarette lighter and work all night for all I care and I hope your car won't start and you call a tow truck and he charges you an arm and a leg because you forgot your tripple-A card. Two plus hours is long enough to soak your feet, f'Pete's sake.

The point I'm trying to make is, you now have laptop nonlinear editing! In fact, you now have laptop 3-D animation and Photoshop and soon, even After Effects. Paradise. For two plus hours. Be happy.

Of course, anyone spending nearly seven grand for a laptop wants to know how the street model can get desktopped. IBM has thought out it's docking routine better than a teamster on steroids.
A wide array of options allow the 760 user to go from a simple port replicator to the new SelectaDock series of base stations. The SelectaDocks adds PCI, ISA and PC CardBus slots that allow the user to expand the functionality of the system.

For instance, the SelectaDoc II, with SCSI II, a full sized PCI slot and connectivity to a series of 9 GB Seagate or Micropolis hard drives will boost the laptop's office architecture to the point where a Targa 2000 or DPS Perception card can be added for true D1 quality nonlinear editing output. Come back from the streamside, slide the computer into the dock and take control of full resolution files on the hard drives. This is how we imagined editing would be like in the future. It's here.

In addition to designing their computers with investment protection built in, IBM offers a comprehensive tech support program. One option allows you plug your computer into the phone while an off-site technician debugs your problem remotely. I found that I needed to test IBM's capabilities in this regard, which led me to discover the only design flaw in the whole works.

For some reason, none of my demonstration CDs would play back video on the 760ED. The programs worked fine, but the video remained black and none of the Quicktime "VCR" controls appeared. Weird. The programs were operating as if they sensed the computer was unequipped with video. I reloaded the Quicktime for Windows program and still no response. I called tech support and, no wait, the guy answered on the first ring!

After recovering from my infarct, I explained my problem and immediately the tech offered to send me a new hard drive by overnight courier. Great, but what was wrong with the hard drive?

"The computer doesn't support Quicktime. If you load it, it corrupts the hard drive."

Now you tell me!? I was baffled. I would think at least, at least, IBM would have thought to put a big dayglow orange card with a warning in the box. A lot of CDs, are created by Apple MAC users who, taking compassionate pity on those of us who prefer PCs, convert their Quicktime files to Windows format. Did IBM forget them when it designed the 760? Looks like it.

Now my shoulder started hurting more, because it had just learned that yet another computer would be going with me on the plane, my trusty Canon 360CD, which could play Quicktime files. Well, never mind. It's rare that one has a corrupted hard drive to play with overnight and I was going to see just how corrupted the drive was. I loaded all manner of media programs; Macromedia Director, Lightwave 5.0, Digital Fusion (CHECK), 3-D Studio Max, Softimage, Video Action Pro, Premier, Hollywood Effects, Saw Plus and Sound Forge. Everything worked fine (though not all at once, Jack, this is only a 1 Gig drive!). Still, I could not play the Quicktime files, so when the new drive came, I changed it out. This, like all adaptations to the 760, is a simple procedure. Just lift up the keyboard to reveal all of the system components, each of which pop out for easy reconfiguration.

Next, I tested the capability of the 760 to demonstrate my company's website. Like many of you out there, I've expanded my services to include website design. What client demonstration would be complete without showing him the sites? Since the 760 has an onboard high-speed fax modem, I connected it to the phone jack and loaded Netscape Gold.

Here, friends, a word of caution. When you're going to a client website demo, make sure your Internet provider is as up to the task as you are. There are a lot of "providers" out there these days who are working harder for their own survival than for yours. You know some of them, no doubt; companies that spend millions on celebrity radio ads and hundreds on technical support. I don't care who you use, but just before your meeting, jack into them and make sure everything's working fine, because like Little Mikey Corleon said, you don't want to come out of the men's room with your hand empty.

My site (http://www.avekta.com) is housed on a T-1 backbone in Long Island with a completely redundant, T-1 system in San Francisco. The system, operated by ANT, Inc. (http://ant.net), houses one of the busiest sites in the country (like Publishers Clearing House) and I include them, de facto, into every installation I design. In webs, putting all your eggs in one basket is not unwise, but keep a good eye on that basket. With the 760, I can jack in anywhere, even with my cellular, to monitor the efficiency of any of my clients' sites. The density of the servers allow me map my drives with no delay, which is often one of the ways a very savvy client will qualify you on a sales call. Heck, any rube can show off someone else's site on a call. When the client asks you to map the drive, you're server better snap-to, or you're going to be serving Egg McMuffin from your forehead.

The 9mm of Multimedia

Okay, enough about Big Blue's 760, let's get back to reality. Most likely, if you're just getting into multimedia, you'll choose a laptop with a lighter price tag. Here, you want to make a wise selection. I seriously suggest choosing a computer store that has the guts to put its hardware out for hands-on display.

If you live near the Big Apple (I mean the one that isn't going broke.) take a Checker to Madison Avenue and 39th Street to see what RCS has for you; a twenty foot laptop bar! Belly up to this digital watering hole for a no-obligation finger tour of every laptop known to man in the late twentieth century. (They also have desktops out for use, too.) You can jack into the Net, try out software, make sure the screen is big and bright enough, heft the weight, whatever. This is the way to buy a laptop. This is the way I found the Canon 360CD. I walked in to RCS and showed the Manager, Casey, my old Toshiba and said, "No heavier than this, with a CD-ROM, Pentium and 1 Gig." He didn't laugh. He came close.

The Canon 360CD, at about $2,400 street is, clearly, not in the same class as the 760. (Canon's June '96 released 620 CDT is a closer match.) But just as the 760 is like an Ingram submachine gun, the 360 is like a small, well-oiled 9mm Sig Sauer (if you're into this macho guns thing) or put more femininely, it's like a pair of patent leather flats with a black bow as opposed to red 4" heels with gold buckle ankle straps. Get it? Good.

The 360 is also powered by a 586 (AMD brand) 133 MHz CPU (the first laptop under $2,500 with a 133, I think), and comes with a 4X CD-ROM that swaps for a floppy drive. The rest of the features are a little less robust than the 760, but still adequate: A 10.4" dual scan VGA screen, 810 MB hard drive, no onboard modem, 16 bit mono Soundblaster audio, 8 megs of RAM, and a 32 bit VL local bus video card with 1 MB of VRAM.

Instead of the little red J-stick cursor control that sticks out of the 760's keyboard (and, for me, quickly develops carpel tunnel pains), the 360 sports the newer touchpad technology, which allows a direct tap of the finger to initiate a left-mouse click. Nice. One must be careful, however, of allowing the base of the left thumb to caress this pad while quickly typing. It causes the cursor to suddenly reposition itself on the screen, resulting in the typed text to jump to a different location on the screen! This could have been avoided with a slight left-wise adjustment of the keyboard, but I'm being really picky.

For traditional multimedia assignments, the 360 can't be beat. It's nearly as light (6.6 pounds) as the first generation, DOS-only, 64 K-RAM laptops that didn't have hard drives or VGA screens (like the Toshiba T-1000 at 6.3 pounds). Although there is only one speaker, the sound somehow feels stereo. Quicktime for Windows and Video for Windows media files play faultlessly. In about ten minutes, I configured the machine to play all my sample CD-ROM programs and was ready for the road.

For higher quality video or for Internet presentations, the 360 will require connection to outboard devices like a video acquisition/playback card and a fast modem. Since I was planning on carrying both the 360 and the 760 into my meeting, I had all the cross merchandise firepower I needed. Only as an afterthought, did I pack my videocassette reels in case the client wanted to see how I handled linear presentations.

It turned out I never needed the videos. A first.

As the client thumbed through my brochure, I searched out a wall plug and booted both machines on AC power. Sure, it's more impressive to run off the batteries, but I like to save the batteries for really critical performances, like when I meet a prospect on the plane flying home!

As I expected, his first question related to the quality of the video I could produce. I flipped open the IBM 760 and kicked off the MPEG2 demo. His jaw dropped and stayed dropped. He called in associates and asked for a replay.

"What's this laptop cost?" He asked, "Can each of our salesmen afford one?"

This was my segue to the lower cost machine and the commensurate drop in video quality. He could decide for himself which of his salesmen deserved the 760, I had all the bases covered.

Knowing When to Shut Up

One of the most difficult parts of selling anything is knowing when to shut up and close the deal. If you figure that a minority of presentations leads to a bid and even fewer lead to a sale, it can become pretty exciting when you see a prospect's eyes light up and enthusiasm bubbling.

At such times, inexperienced producers (and more than a few seasoned ones) will get enthusiastic too, creating a sort of verbal energy loop. This exciting repartee appears to the producer to be the beginning of a great relationship. This is rarely what is happening. What is happening is that the producer is overselling. In such situations, the prospect will often suddenly take a deep breath and draw the meeting to a close. When this happens, you can be sure you've just unsold yourself on the project you'd sold. In other words, you've snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Subliminally, the prospect has realized that you need him a lot more than he needs you. He slows down, sizes up the deal, draws back and wonders a lot of things, not the least of which is, "If this guy is so good, how come he's selling me so hard?" The tragedy of an oversell is that the deal was closed and the seller didn't know it. You have to know that singular moment when it happens, hand over the pen and let him sign on the dotted line.

Overselling is hard enough to avoid in the video marketplace, but when you walk in with the latest laptops, interactive CDs, a portable Internet connection to your own website, and the usual videocassette show reels, it's a little hard to know when to stop.

Remember What You Are Selling

In my case, I had been invited to visit a client to show him my interactive CD-ROM capability with attention to the video quality. I wasn't there to sell video, or animation, or website design or magazine articles. You could say I had a "license" to demonstrate this limited bag of tricks. Just like a farmer who allows you on his farm to shoot the first day of season deer, don't abuse your invitation and shoot a few turkeys. In other words, don't violate your license.

Now, when the prospect sees how cool your new laptop is and wants to check out your website by succinctly expressing his desire to broaden the license a bit, he give you a subtle sign, like, "Hey, websites! You do them too? Great! Fire one up!"

When this happens, evaluate whether you have fulfilled the original license's mandate. In the case described above, I had. The IBM760 had established the high ground for video playback quality. The Canon 360 had successfully demonstrated a more economic form of video playback with all the attendant capabilities that my company could bring to CDs. So I decided to allow him to expand the license. I took a brief look at my watch and said, "Are you sure you have the time for this addition to the presentation?"

By looking at your watch, you've obviated the need for him to do so and given him an opportunity to restate (and thereby confirm on a deeper level) his decision to expand the parameters of the meeting. It also suggests that you are in no great push to show him everything on the first date, so to speak.

In my case, I'd flown several hours to meet this prospect, he was excited, wanted to see more and by yiminy, I would have shown him snapshots of my neighbors' kids if he'd asked me to. As it turned out, the reconfirmation question was the perfect meeting (and deal) closer. After a moment's thought, he said, "You know, you don't have to show me your website. I'm sure it's great and you can show me when we meet in New York next week."

"New York?" I asked.

"You've got the job. I want to get started right away."

My website remained unvisited that day. The videocassettes never came out of the briefcase. The customizable training program I'd invented in 1991 called, "Meeting in a Box TM" that takes a separate case and goes on every sales trip I make stayed in it's case. A special CD-ROM demonstrating the ability of a website to update a database and display its results on the net never came out. Entire symbolic armies of persuasion remained uncalled on a distant hill to my rear. I had closed the deal. I was done. I could go home.

By the way, you can also decide not to expand the license of your presentation by politely directing the progress of the meeting in a different direction, with a statement like, "I'm sorry, but that's about all I have time for this visit. Would you like to come by my office next week?" Stepping back from the opportunity to advance shows maturity and self-control. In a courteous manner, you're saying, "I'm a busy, in-demand producer with lots of clients and I've got to share myself equitably with each and every one."

Of course, it takes a lot of macho (or a lot of embra) to close a meeting when you're broke, the rent's due and you've nothing to produce this season, but that's how a real producer plays the game to win.