“Knowledge is power they say. Knowledge is not only power, it is good fun.”

— E. M. Forster, English novelist

As I've mentioned in a previous column, I feel very fortunate to have homework that includes things like reading trade magazines and visiting technology newsgroups on the Internet; things I’d do regardless of my profession. In previous columns, I've covered some of the things that we do to stay on top of the technology including Sweetwater University and training meetings. Today I’d like to start with our Thursday morning meeting and finish up the “week in the life” edition of this column.

Thursday, 7:00 A.M. — Breakfast Sales Meeting — The Room. Yes, you read the time correctly; we actually do start this meeting at 7:00 in the morning. Back in the "old days" this meeting used to be held off-site at local restaurants but as we grew and started having more manufacturer involvement in the training we found it necessary to move the meeting back in-house. (Incidentally, Chuck still buys breakfast every Tuesday morning for any employee that wants to come on Tuesday mornings at 7 a.m. This is a great way to get some one-on-one time with Chuck and other folks that you don’t spend a lot of time with during a normal work day.)

Our meeting room, affectionately called the “Blue Diamond Lounge” due to the diamond shaped blue acoustic panels used to “tame” the room, is large enough to hold our entire company for company meetings (though it is starting to get cramped a bit since we’ve crested the 150 employee mark) and outfitted with the latest A/V technology. Having a nice, well equipped room is really important because we video tape all of our training sessions and Sweetwater University and the tapes must be interesting and well-recorded if they are to be watched and utilized for learning. Here's the basic rundown: We have a high resolution / high lumens projector mounted in the ceiling and we have top quality monitors mounted on either side of the screen. To ensure proper coverage we have two remote controlled cameras — one to provide an overhead shot of the gear being demonstrated and one to track the presenter if he or she happens to walk out of the field of view — and a document camera on a boom that zeros in on the LCD/LED displays of the gear being demonstrated. We also can take a feed off a computer and throw this on the big screen and/or record it. On the audio input side of the system we have wireless lavalier mics for the presenters and multiple overhead mics for audience questions and comments. All the A/V inputs are routed to a main mix position in the back of the room where the engineer will determine when and if we want a split screen and what exactly gets recorded and what gets run through the projector and thrown on the screen. This detailed picture of the room is to help you understand just how seriously we take training.

Breakfast and the meeting proper: Nothing like a little food to get rolling in the morning! We have the usual assortment of donuts, bagels, fruit, yogurt, juice, milk, and coffee and are all seated and chewing quietly by 7:00 when the meeting starts. Our Thursday meeting has become the choice time for in-depth product demonstrations from manufacturers. I reserve a small percentage of time for sales training, but the longer time frame lends itself well to heavy-duty product training.

As I've previously mentioned in the column, we ask much of our manufacturers in terms of being prepared for the meeting and guard these times jealously. Meetings are scheduled literally months in advance to sync up with new product introductions. Generally, the presenter arrives in Fort Wayne the day before the meeting to set up and prepare. We do all we can to prompt them as to our expectations and prepare them for the shock of seeing 50 plus wide awake Sweetwater employees in business attire (we're not a T-shirt and ripped up jeans environment; that doesn't mean we're stuffy, it just means we take our profession very seriously), pens in hands and ready to learn. Our presenters know they have to be prepared to field the tough questions we'll inevitably ask. We ask them not because we can, but because we need to know the answers in order to provide the level of expertise our customers deserve.

As I noted when I discussed our Tuesday morning meeting in a previous column, we actually evaluate each presenter and share the results with him or her following the meeting. I found this to be necessary because our needs are very different from the average retailers. We want the whole story: We need to know the company's history, accomplishments, product classifications, competition, unique points, target and secondary markets, positioning of the product(s), features, advantages, benefits, and more. Speaking from my background as a "factory guy," it’s very easy to get so close to a product that you began to assume everybody knows all of the cool stuff you know and you neglect to tell them the whole story. Worse yet, sometimes you can get so close to a product that the excitement wears off and you lose track of how cool it really is! I've had many manufacturers thank me for forcing them to take a fresh look at their products and revisit key points they’d started to gloss over or simply forgotten.

Why do we work so hard to know everything we can about the latest technologies and products? To ensure that when you call us you can count on getting accurate and up-to-date information. Why do we work harder than any other retailer in our industry to provide you with expert help (my admittedly very biased opinion)? Because we believe that our customers are more discerning than most and absolutely deserve a higher level of service.

More on our perspective regarding you, the customer, in our next issue. I'll also be introducing a new fun feature, so be sure to check out our next issue. Rock and Roll!

Jeff Radke is Vice President of Sales at Sweetwater.