08.08.2007 — Capitol Sales is a major CE distributor based near Minneapolis. The company, best known for its tech support and customer service, is launching a series of online training videos taped at a recent dealer event.

Those training sessions, attended by some 325 dealers, will be available online come CEDIA."We can send the education we do at our show to a whole new arena of people who couldn’t attend,” says Capitol CEO Curt Hayes, adding, “There may be a dealer that has 10 people and they can’t send five people. This will allow us to get to the them.”

The online sessions are not raw video of the training. They are edited, with Powerpoints incorporated into the presentations, and chaptered for easy access to areas of interest.

Training videos are accessible free of charge to Capitol Sales customers.

The distributor will offer 12 online training sessions, the first four of which will be showcased at CEDIA:

Introduction to Projectors and Screens
Instructor: Holden Hanson, Capitol Sales

Business Practices for Profitability
Instructor: Fred Harding, Capitol Sales

A real Wireless Phone System Solution: KX-TAW848
Instructor: Mike Marko, Capitol Sales

New Product Introduction + Intro to IR
Instructor: Robert Choate, Xantech

Capitol Sales takes service seriously, which I saw first hand recently when I visited the company HQ yesterday.

One lingering image is a telephone guru fielding a call in the telephone-guru room, where more than a dozen phone systems were installed and live for troubleshooting purposes. Evidently, a dealer was on the other side with a problem that Capitol Sales could duplicate in its facility. (No, the hero wasn’t telephone expert and CE Pro columnist Fred Harding.)