Drop the mic on your demo
Demonstrations are a great way to give clients an idea of how a system will look and sound. For them to be truly effective, though, you need to put on a show. Anthony Grimani shares some tips for acing this part of the process.
If you’re one of those people who reads the first paragraph of a column and then goes on to the next one, then you’re in luck. I’m going to give you the TL;DR straight off. Ready? Here goes.
In the increasingly crowded and competitive home cinema market, where many products and services are competing for your clients’ resources and attention, a good demo in your high-quality showroom is the best way to close a deal. You may be selling gear, engineering and design, and labor, but your client is buying entertainment. So, above all, your demo should entertain them.
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There, that’s it – now you can go…
If you’re still here, let’s look at how you actually pull off one of these legendary demos. By far the most important thing is to be a good showman. Yes, you are putting on a little show for the client. If you tend to come off as shy or (let’s be honest) rude, or prefer sticking to facts and figures, then you might seriously want to let someone else at the firm be demo person. That person needs to know their stuff, but it’s equally important that they present a fun, relaxed, educational and, of course, entertaining experience to the client.
Be sure to prepare and rehearse your presentation ahead of time. As such, you may find it easier to do demos by appointment and work out with the client beforehand how long you’re going to be and what you’re going to listen to and watch. One of the best ways to pull off a successful demo is to get the client excited about it before they even walk through the door.
This sets up the next point perfectly, and that is the content of the demo. Too many demos are structured to impress, wow, blow away and/or otherwise flatten the client. Yes, it’s important to show off what your room can do, but not at the expense of the client’s entertainment.
If they are sitting there trying to figure out how to discreetly hold their ears or politely ask you to move on to the next clip, I can assure you they are not enjoying themselves. They may buy a home cinema from you, but it will be in spite of your demo, not because of it.
So, resist the urge to trot out Michael Bay’s greatest hits (sorry, Michael), and choose some material with variation, subtlety, and dynamics. I typically start with 2-channel music tracks, then proceed to movie clips, and conclude with a 5.1 or immersive music presentation. There should be some loud peaks and big bass hits, sure, but also checks for dialog clarity/quality, detail, and spatial rendering. Avoid “noisy” tracks that start at 10 and go to 11, simply spitting sound at you from all the speakers all the time.
Equally important to the technical structure of the content is the subject matter. I believe it’s always better to pre-approve content with the client before you show it. After all, have you ever bought a ticket at the cinema, sat down, and asked the cinema owner to surprise you with the movie?
This involves more than just making sure the content is not offensive in some way to the client. If you can use content that is of interest to the client and, even better, something the client is currently or has recently been watching or listening to – all the better.
Yes, you need to use material that gets your point across but try to start with the larger set of content the client likes and then selectively pull from that what you need to demonstrate your system. It’s always better to present the client with what they’re actually going to be seeing and hearing in their new room. This also avoids the confusion factor of dropping the client into a movie scenario they’ve never seen. You’re trying to point out technical details, and they’re stuck back at figuring out who everyone is and what they’re doing! If it’s a clip they’re familiar with, they know where you’ve dropped in and can get in the flow of things faster.
Next up is the delivery format you use for the demo. Your demo needs to be based on a high-quality delivery format like Ultra High Definition Blue Ray disc or Kaleidescape.
Streaming is the current format of choice, but it’s also extremely inconsistent and unreliable technically. You do not want to have sound/picture quality and reliability issues in your demo as a result of someone else’s choice of acceptable bitrate or when to do an app update!
Now, this does present something of a sticky situation, because clients must increasingly rely on streaming services for exclusive content – really big name and popular content – that is not available in a high-quality format. Some services deliver a much better stream than others (essentially a higher bitrate), and this is, on the surface level of the app UI, invisible.
Services don’t advertise that they use a bargain basement bitrate for 5.1 + Atmos audio and 4K Dolby Vision video – they just tell you something is available in 4K HDR with immersive audio. This makes it seem like one stream is comparable to another, but it’s not. Generally, services that offer on-demand content for purchase deliver higher quality streams than subscription-based services that allow you to watch as much as you like for a flat rate. Some on-demand streams are very good and nearly indistinguishable from disc. To date, I know of no free ad-based service with high quality streams.
If this is the world in which your client lives, then at some point you have to ease them into the fact that what they see and hear at home may not match the quality of what they saw and heard at your demo. It’s probably best not to bring this up right off the bat, because you may argue yourself out of a sale; however, neither do you want your client to come back later and accuse you of being deceptive: “If I had known my shows were going to look and sound like this, I would have kept watching them on my phone! At least I can’t tell how bad they look and sound!”
I leave it to your discretion how to introduce this subject with each individual client.
Moving on, you obviously need a good sound and picture system in your demo room. Picking the gear can be tough, because you want equipment that is good enough to show off what you can do, but also not so high-end that your lower and middle tier clients get sticker shock and bow out because they think the performance is tied to cost, and they can’t (or simply don’t want to) spend that much.
If you can get by with simply selling the experience and committing to provide performance that is commensurate with the client’s budget no matter what it is, then great. Most people, though, are going to want to know how much what they are hearing and seeing costs – if not what the actual equipment is.
If you have the space, it may be beneficial to have at least a budget tier and a top tier example set up. Both should have excellent performance, but the more expensive one should perform demonstrably better in some specific, easily identifiable ways.
After all, if you can’t make better stuff perform better, then you need to rethink how you’re integrating it – or what you’re selling. We all know this, but it bears repeating: more expensive equipment does not always clearly outperform less expensive equipment!
Equally important to the quality of the system, though, is its maintenance. You absolutely must verify that the system is working up to standards before each demo. This does not mean putting up a few seconds of a movie clip or music track and saying, “Yep, everything works.”
Immersive sound has a lot of channels and speakers, and I challenge anyone to immediately tell that they’re all working from just a few seconds of a clip. At minimum, you should get one of the Dolby Atmos demo discs and play the wideband pink noise that cycles through each channel. This will confirm that every speaker is present and accounted for, and that the bandwidth is reasonably close to correct (you haven’t lost a tweeter or woofer or something along the way…).
It’s probably not necessary to pull out your sound level meters and analysers every time, but it doesn’t hurt to do routine checks with them every month, quarter, six months, etc. It ultimately depends on how much and how often you use the room.
OK, so now you’re actually in the demo with the client. What do you do? Please, please do not stroke your ego and blow them away with the volume! We all know this is a contentious issue. There is reference playback level, yes, but there are many clients who couldn’t care less how loud the director wants them to listen to a movie. They think directors are deaf anyway from watching too many loud movies!
Sound volume, somewhat like musical taste, is deeply personal, and there is no faster way to alienate a client than to make them sit and endure your loud volume just for the sake of your ego.
There are two ways to go about this. The first is to start at reference level and back off; the other is to start low and increase. In general, I think people are probably more likely to ask you to turn something up than to turn it down (audio guys have a reputation for getting cranky and defensive if you tell them to turn it down, and clients may rather sit there and suffer in “silence” than risk a confrontation). You will have to decide what works best for you.
In any event, ultimately give the client the volume control and tell them it’s important to their enjoyment and your design process for them to set it where they’re comfortable. You see, if your demo system is calibrated properly to reference level volume scale, you can tell from where the client sets the master volume how loud their system needs to play. You can specify gear that meets that need exactly without undershooting or overshooting the power and cost. Trick of the trade!
You should also talk the client through what they are seeing and hearing during the demo. Tell them what they are going to hear before you play it, then play it, then confirm what they heard. If you keep the clips short enough that people can hold on to what you said through the entire clip, the light bulb will go on, and they’ll realise they can hear “audiophile” things, too. There is a tremendous amount of subtlety and detail that goes into crafting a film mix. Tell the story of how a mix is crafted. (If you don’t know yourself, then you need to learn too. These folks are artists!)
If you can “initiate” a client into the finer points of sound design appreciation, then you’ll have them insisting on a better sound system. Do not plop them down in a seat, play a five-minute clip cold, then turn up the lights and ask, “Well, how did you like it?”
After you’ve had a great time entertaining the client and they are excited by the presentation, then is the moment to ask for the sale. After all, if the client has had a blast – and that fact is apparent to everyone – why would they not sign up? They came for entertainment, you provided entertainment, and they enjoyed it. It doesn’t really get much simpler than that!
Chase Walton ([email protected]) contributed to this article.
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