Get Your AV Quotes Faster – Whiteboard Wednesday

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Sometimes getting an AV quote feels like a never-ending process. You go back and forth with your AV company, never really on the same page only to get your quote weeks later. By then you have made changes to your event and need to start the process all over again. Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be that way! On today’s Whiteboard Wednesday Will Curran teach you how to get your AV quotes faster. We’re covering 9 simple steps that will allow you to get AV your quotes faster so you can focus on the big picture of your event!

Video Transcription

How to Get Your AV Quotes Faster

How’s it goin’, Endless fans out there in the world? Welcome back to another edition of Whiteboard Wednesday, where today we’re talking about how to get your AV quotes faster than you ever thought possible before. We’re gonna be talking a little bit about this and what it takes to get just a little bit more out of your AV company so that way you can get your AV quotes faster, get your planning done faster, and hopefully be sipping some mai tais on the beach real soon.

Meetings Over Email

So first tip that we have for you is to consider doing a meeting instead of an email. Far too often, as an AV company do we see it where clients email us and say here’s this, this, and this, all this information, can you get me a quote right away? Look, I totally get it, we wanna get this done, have your people working for you while you work on other things, all these things like that, and meetings take time. But as you know, nothing beats something face-to-face, that’s why we’re event planners. AV companies truly do agree. Far too often do you email over some specs and I’ve even seen it where some AV companies will then come back and ask you more questions in email. And you end up spending more time actually emailing back and forth and trying to understand what’s going on, and the questions that you have, and this and this and that, and things get lost in translation. Ugh.

Let’s just solve it all by emailing at first and saying hey, let’s set up a meeting. During this meeting, a lot of questions are going to be answered and a lot of questions and things are going to get knocked out all at once, in a short one-hour long meeting. That’s all it takes. It shouldn’t be like a four-hour planning session or anything like that. In just a one-hour meeting, sometimes 45 minutes, you can go through all the details. They can ask a question. If you say something, it allows them to get a follow-up.

We all have way too much email, let’s reduce it, knock it out in a one-hour meeting. And you will find that you’ll end up being able to get your AV quotes faster because all the questions will be answered in one get-go. So you have that meeting, the next thing comes up to get prepared for your first meeting.

Prepare for Your First Meeting

Obviously, you wanna come prepared. And not, you know, be sucking up anybody’s time. You don’t wanna waste your time. So what I recommend is come prepared to the table with a couple of key pieces of information. And I know this seems like a little bit like basics but sometimes it gets forgotten and my gosh, it can slow down the process.

First is, your venue. Obviously knowing what venue you’re gonna have it in, but also, specific rooms that you’re going to be doing things in. Far too often, when it comes to the venue, everyone says okay cool, yeah, we’re gonna be at the XYZ Hotel and that’s it. Well, what rooms are you gonna be in? What’s going on inside those rooms? A lot of follow up questions. Again, see how a meeting can be really, really easy.

Next up as well, is come prepared with a contact for that venue. A lot of times it may seem like, hey, even if you’re bringing in an outside AV company or it’s the in-house AV company, a lot of times they wanna be connected with who your in-house contact is from the venue. The reason why this is important is that person can answer a lot of questions that you might not have the answers to. And instead of hey, here’s a bunch of questions you go to the venue, wait for a response, you get the information, you pass it off to the AV company. Instead, connect the AV company directly to that contact. What it’ll allow them to do is ask for things like layouts, ask them for standing procedures, it’ll also allow them to review any restrictions that you may have and make sure that you’re not falling into those restrictions as well. So again, saving you time. It allows them to do the work for you rather than you doing the work as well.

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