My name is Jeff Rogers, and I am Sensory’s VP of Sales and a guest writer for the blog this month. I’m a big fan of the Star Trek movies, and other then the Holodeck (which I can’t figure out why anyone would ever leave once inside), the idea of being able to just beam somewhere would be GREAT! When I started at Sensory in 1994, I would come into the office in the morning and first check the fax machine for faxes from Asia and then I would check my voice mail. The internet and email changed all this quickly, and now it’s amazing to me how much more I can accomplish and for virtually free. The iPhone came along and now I can even check and respond to emails while sitting at a red light – yeah, I know, not while driving!
The one aspect of doing business that hasn’t changed in the 16 years I have been selling with Sensory are face to face meetings; in fact, I think it’s moved in the wrong direction. With the long lines at security and reduced flights from airlines there are fewer options, planes are nearly always full, and everything just takes more time. Sure would be nice just to beam to NYC.
While some aspects of Star Trek have become reality (personal communicators for example, i.e. the cell phone) I think we’re still many years away from beaming places. So the issue is how do I travel and show all these companies that we do business with the great new technologies that Sensory engineering continues to bring out? SALES VIDEOS!
I started doing these little 1-3 minute videos showing off Sensory chips, software and technologies some time ago. I quickly found that they were a big hit with companies. I can demonstrate Sensory without leaving the comforts of my office. Customers can view these videos at a convenient time without having to schedule time for a meeting and even better, they can then forward these to others around the company. I have had several companies tell me that they post these videos on their internal sites so that product designers, marketing and others can reference them and literally see how the technology works.
I recently made a video of our NLP-5x chip and how it could be applied in a microwave oven. I once used my son to help make a video of our sound sourcing technology running on our RSC-4x chip – what you can’t see in the video is me making a motion to my son to stop talking so that I could finish the video — he was having too much fun with the sound sourcing demo. You can view all of these video’s on our technologies web page.
Of course face to face meetings are still required and much can be accomplished in them, but when there’s not time and you want to show many people and companies something new, these sales videos are great! So while I can’t beam myself to Hong Kong, I can send sales videos!