Beyond your Meeting Room: How to Make an Impact

It’s one thing trying to impress your clients on your home turf. But when you move out of a familiar work environment it can be a challenge to show the same confidence and streamlined delivery when you don’t know the meeting room setup you’ll be working with.

However, there are a number of things you can do with your own meeting room environment which can actually have a huge impact on your efficiency and organisation when presenting externally. We’ve taken an in-depth look at how you can use your touchscreen display and conference technology to make life easier for yourself even when you’re in an unfamiliar environment.

From team meeting to client meeting

The obvious challenge is how you and your team can use the top of the range touchscreen and collaborative technology in your own meeting room and convey all of that resulting creativity at the client presentation.

For simple, small documents, this can be as easy as sending an email with an attachment you can bring up once you arrive at the client’s office. However, if you want to show your client the product of a collaborative team meeting using design or video software, things can be a little trickier – particularly if you want to explain any annotations or alterations.

As the UK’s leading audiovisual specialists, we spend a lot of time working with the latest touchscreen technology and we’ve uncovered a number of ways you can use your inhouse meeting room technology to make a real impact when presenting to clients on their home turf.

It’s about selecting the right inhouse tools for the job and putting them to work for your specific circumstances. Take one of our most popular touchscreens, the ViewSonic CDE Series. This is far from the most expensive touchscreen device on the market, but this is because it boasts a range of features that you’ll feel the benefit of inhouse and on the go.

The Viewsonic CDE touchscreens facilitate interactive, collaborative meetings thanks to the in-built ViewBoard 2.1 Annotation Software, which allows you and your colleagues to annotate over any app or document.

Once you’ve finished collaborating, you can transfer your revised document via USB or to the cloud (it has a built-in computer with 8GB of storage or the option for a slot-in PC too), so you have access to your files on the road.

Everything is saved straight from the meeting so you can jump in to review and revise post-meeting before you meet with the client. No more depending on a colleague to share the original material with you.

Encouraging collaboration off-site

Your first challenge in impressing the client is to have some sufficiently amazing work to show them. It takes teamwork, productivity and collaboration to achieve this and sometimes you need a little extra from your touchscreen device get you there.

With new features, seamless integration with personal and office devices and more accessible price points than ever before, touchscreen technology is transforming how companies work. And if your competitors are using it, you’d better start keeping pace as it’s their presentations you’ll be up against.

A display like the NEC Multisync V423 when combined with the NEC MultiPresenter Stick can transform your ability to share and collaborate, both inside and outside the office:

Whether you’re working on a laptop or a handheld device, the V423 allows easy sharing within the room via the screen, so you can alter your content or media while your attendees contribute ideas.

Once you’re ready to share with your clients, you can send the updated document immediately via the cloud so they’re always kept up to date with your latest developments. Not only does this improve your in-house efficiency, but you’ll also impress your clients with your organisation and regular updates on developments.

Keep calm and carry it with you

Systems like this are great, but you can’t always plan in advance and sometimes having access to your office-based technology while on the road is a must to keep things moving.

There are now some brands out there that offer the option of installing their business software on your portable devices, so you can wow your clients at home and away.

InFocus is one such brand, providing impressive meeting room capabilities both through its industry leading line of touchscreens and displays, and through its advanced software:

The InFocus Mondopad is an excellent example of how a single product can truly transform the meeting room in your office, delivering the unbeatable combination of a Full HD display, a range of connections and even built-in 4-way video conferencing capabilities. In addition, the InFocus Big Note technology that comes as standard makes it possible for users to annotate and collaborate directly onto an image. This image can then be shared or stored as required.

Of course, this ease of sharing makes it possible for users to transport their documents to the client presentation simply, helping you to convey your efficiency and professionalism. However, you still don’t have the freedom of annotation and collaboration offered in your state of the art meeting room. Or do you?

With the Big Note software package installed on your laptop you do. Essentially this enables you to transport all the benefits of this remarkable productivity software to your clients. By turning your laptop into an interactive whiteboard, you can take notes, sketch, annotate and share while working together, regardless of your location. OK some of the touchscreen functionality is missing if your laptop itself isn’t touchscreen, but having a system you know well that allows you to annotate and mark-up client feedback then and there is still a pretty big jump forward.

Impress your client even further by taking advantage of the same ease of sharing offered by your touchscreen. Once you’ve saved your changes, simply email the files to them directly from your laptop or share them to the cloud for easy access for a specified group.

If you’d like to learn more about how meeting room technology can help your business beyond the meeting room, speak to our experts today on 0800 073 0833 or send us a message and we’ll get back to you shortly.