Five Questions for Customers Interested in Portable Projectors
Quick Bio
COMPANY: Panasonic Solutions Company
HEADQUARTERS: Secaucus, NJ
OBJECTIVE: Help clients determine their exact needs and then make the right portable projector recommendation to yield the highest return on investment.
As an integrator, you are tasked with being a trusted advisor in helping your clients determine their exact needs and in making the right product recommendation that will yield the highest return on investment (ROI). Asking the following questions will help you determine which portable projector to recommend for the job:
1 How mobile does the projector need to be?
Because portable projectors come in a variety of form factors, determining how mobile the device needs to be will help you and your customer determine its ideal size and weight. If users are members of an organization’s sales team who travel extensively to client and partner meetings, then you should consider recommending a smaller, lightweight device. But if your customer is a smallor medium-sized business (SMB) looking to purchase a projector to bring out for periodic staff meetings and occasional client visits, small size and light weight may not be top priorities.
2 How many lumens of brightness does your application require?
There are several factors to keep in mind when determining the optimal brightness of your projector. First, you should determine the size of the projected image that will be required for easy viewing by the audience. The larger the audience, the larger the image size will probably be. In this case, brightness is reduced as the light is spread over a larger area. A dark room provides the best image regardless of projector brightness, and the screen used can also have an impact on image brightness and quality. In a small or medium room, you will need a projector that can deliver approximately 2,500-3,500 lumens.
3 What are your maintenance capabilities?
Does your customer have a full-time IT staff that will be responsible for maintaining new projectors? Knowing your customers’ maintenance capabilities will help you recommend a projector that their resources will be able to easily upkeep. When maintenance capabilities are minimal, lamp and filter replacement lifecycles are important. Although devices with longer lamp and filter replacement cycles can be more expensive up front, it is important to communicate to your end users the advantages of these features.
4 What type of content will you be projecting?
Knowing the type of content your customers will be projecting is another factor that will help you determine the best recommendation to meet their needs. If the projector will only display large text and graphs, you can recommend devices with a lower contrast ratio, but with high brightness. However, if image quality is a high priority and your customer will be presenting photographs and videos, you will want to make sure the resolution of their content will match that of the device you recommend.
5 What special features are you looking for?
With a large variety of portable projectors comes an even bigger variety of features to choose from. In order to narrow them down, you should ask your customers which features are absolute “must-haves.” If the customer that is going to be using the device isn’t very tech-savvy, you may want to recommend a projector with features that simplify operation and improve picture display, such as keystone correction, which automatically corrects vertical image distortion, or functions that display connection instructions on the screen for easy setup.
Art Rankin is the director of the Higher Education Sector and head of the Projector Division across all markets at Panasonic, where he spearheads overall strategy, sales efforts, and product development.
