Welcome to 2015. A new year, a new beginning, and perhaps a time to reflect on how to improve, prosper and grow in the coming 12 months. If you’re a live sound pro or soundco, January provides a great chance to relax a bit and recover from the heavy schedule of extra concerts, parties and events that came with the annual December holiday work crunch.
While we’re at it, this is good phase to consider some upgrades in our lives and trades. These may include action items ranging from adopting a healthy lifestyle to expanding our business with a new concert rig, adding a truck or two or investing in a new revenue source, such as generators or portable stages. In any case, January marks an opportunity to plan new purchases and assess what we need to handle our (hopefully expanded) workload for the new year.
The Other Side
January also presents an opportunity for gear manufacturers to do some introspection on where they are, where they plan to be and what steps are necessary to move forward. Looking at past sales figures may provide a clue as to what’s working and what’s not working, in terms of equipment offerings — both current and planned. If truth be told, most manufacturers are pretty good at developing and building products, but many tend to fall down somewhat in the follow-up to the launch.
Much of this involves timing. Traditionally, tradeshows present a good time to debut a new product. However, here the timing can be critical and there’s little sense is showing your hand when it comes to a product that might be a year away, which may do nothing more than give competitors an advance look at your future plans and provide them time to adjust.
Murphy’s Law often prevails in such cases — particularly where software development is involved, and again, timing is critical in terms of having the hardware and software ready at the same time. The saving grace here is that a product can be released with a solid, basic feature set and more functions can be added in future software and/or firmware releases.
Ups and Downsides
From the developer side, the downside of any software-based product is having to predict what kind of computer the end user owns. This may also entail trying to second-guess the countless variations that may meet the system requirements yet present have other snags, such as the quirks found between Intel versus AMD processors, or myriad unseen conflicts that inevitably crop up due to minor OS variations/versions or interactions with other apps.
None of these matter to the customer, but one thing is certain. After purchasing an app or device, no one wants to be an unwilling beta tester. Yet it happens every day, and manufacturers should make sure that the actual pre-release beta process is complete and some sort of enforceable cut-off date is established, where the software team stops adding features to Rev 1.0 and focuses instead on reliability and bug fixes based on the results from the beta users.
Support is equally important, and hiring, training and maintaining a top-notch support team is an expensive proposition, that often may be necessary. Yet the cost of quality support can be substantially reduced by developing a library of thorough manuals and quick start guides, troubleshooting FAQ’s, video tutorials, schematics and datasheets — all of which can be made available for 24/7 access via the web.
There’s nothing more infuriating than not being able to determine something as simple as the fabled “hold down these keys and power up” factory reset routine when you’re doing a setup on a holiday weekend where the chances of reaching a human voice on the phone are practically nil. Here the investment in decent online support docs can go a long way towards retaining a repeat customer. And realizing the need for a solid plan for adding or establishing a well-grounded support structure needs to be factored and adequately figured into the budget for any new product development.
Bring on the Shows!
With the new year comes the start of the tradeshow season, kicking off with this month’s CES and Winter NAMM shows, followed by ISE, NAB, Musikmesse/ProLight+Sound, Euro AES, GearFest, InfoComm, Summer NAMM, IBC, PLAZA, CEDIA, AES and LDI — to name a few. Each of these — plus localized or more specialized shows — present an opportunity to press the flesh with your customer base and offer some hands-on time that doesn’t always translate to the virtual on-line environment. And judging from the recent numbers at AES, LDI and (projections from) Winter NAMM 2015, this in-person experience is still an essential part of finding solutions that meet your needs.
The other side of tradeshows, of course is the educational and social aspects, which for attendees are just as important as the action on the show floor. The parties may offer social interaction, while seminars, workshops and learning events at every show all provide opportunities to expand your knowledge base with topics never broached in schools or college. Often, more business is done in the hotel bar than in the convention center, and I can guarantee that more than a few product concepts began as a diagram scrawled on a cocktail napkin.
It’s 2015. So bring on the shows, the new gear, the interaction, and we’ll see you at NAMM!
