Los Angeles Tech Writer

This morning I was reminiscing over one of my most memorable technical writing assignments: a project to create a product-technology-sales book to complement a training film take-off on the movie Men in Black.

The year was 1999. The client was Alpine Electronics of America, the awesome car audio company. The assignment was to introduce the company's new products and technology to Circuit City's car audio sales staff nationwide.

The challenges were several:
--The sales staff training occurred before store opening over a couple of weekends to all 5000 salespeople nationwide. We wanted to make it worthwhile for the sales staff who would be coming in before 8am weekend mornings.
--The other car audio company lines that Circuit City carried were also introducing their new products during the same training sessions, using video presentations and written material, and the competition was fierce.
--We had approximately 45 minutes for our presentation.
--The impact of these presentations, particularly the video presentations, had become increasingly dramatic over the past several years, and we wanted to produce something truly memorable.

Producing the film was The Association media production company in Burbank, and Corporate Knowledge, Inc. (CKI) in Toluca Lake would produce the accompanying written materials. To learn how we could fashion the most effective training session, my boss at CKI and I visited numerous Circuit Citys to survey their car audio sales teams as well as their installation teams. If you have ever done surveys, real surveys, you know that you must throw your pre-conceived notions out the window because the real circumstances are never what others think they are. That was the case here too.

Armed with our survey results, we now knew that the overall presentation needed to convey key product and technology details (why and how to sell the product), as well as teach basic sales techniques. We also had the list of presentation objectives identified by the Alpine stakeholders. Now to package it in engaging fashion!

The fine fellows at The Association came up with a terrific idea for the video. The movie Men in Black had been out a year or so and was still popular, and since the subject was car audio, why not capitalize on a popular theme and make the environment a rolling one? A lot of the footage was shot in and around autos, using a variation of the famous MIB "neuralyzer." Audio component combinations were presented as burger menus at a drive-through, including the "royale" made famous in Pulp Fiction a few years before. It was over-the-top campy, but really conveyed key points about Alpine products and how to sell them. Here are links to two short clips, though I am hoping to be able to post a link to the entire video - even after all these years, I still really love it.
Courtesy of The Association:
Men in Blue Black clip
Men in Blue Black additional clip

I would be writing the new technology portion of the manual, so while others were formulating the sales technique portions, I got to work understanding Alpine's very sophisticated audio technology, absorbing all their technology documents and even attending their in-house classes for dealers and installation technicians. (There was one poor tech support soul who was my primary subject matter expert, and I'm sure he was very, very glad to see the project finished.)

Anyway, once I had some understanding of what, at that time, made an Alpine an Alpine (noise cancellation, their then-brand new intelligent information delivery system, ergonomic design, digital/analog conversion, Barcus-Berry Electronics and so on), then came creation of the manual. To match the tone of the overall presentation (Men in Blue Black, remember) it had to be simple and hip. It's not so easy to be simple or hip describing the 4 volt pre-out with a DC to DC converter, or the newest vibration dampening for Alpine's CD players!

The training manual ended up being about 100 pages, with lots of straight sales technique, descriptions of new models, how to sell Alpine's technology in a "features and benefits" manner, a complete car audio terms glossary, a product decoder and so on. I was just looking through my copy of the training book, and I still think it's an awfully good product.

In best resume-writing fashion, I cannot fail to mention the accomplishments. The training presentations were successfully delivered to the Circuit City sales teams. I attended one of the "screenings."
--We accomplished all the stakeholder objectives with high ratings
--The sales teams very much liked the film, and by survey felt it was the best presentation that year
--The personnel's understanding of Alpine's technology and new products increased
--The personnel found the training manual helpful, many stating that they would study it and wanted to keep it for reference. Some sales managers used it for basic sales training thereafter
--The presentation handled the key obstacles we identified during the survey process
--85% of the attendees returned the post-presentation survey (via fax) to the client, an overwhelming response

Thanks for reading!