Your cookies are all the rage, your pretzels draw crowds, and your sales staff are greeted like members of the family at the mall kiosks and franchise outlets that distribute your sweet and savory treats. But sometimes your snack food company's most important sales pitches happen in the meeting rooms of your headquarters.

A little selling on the home front—whether it's evangelizing to your 5,000 employees or entertaining some of your 2,000 franchisees—can go a long way toward keeping sales trends as hot as your cookies. To support this in-house sales movement, your company has decided to build a 300-seat corporate auditorium, outfitted with the latest audio-visual technology. Your mission: Get the auditorium up and running without busting the budget.

Your expertise is snack foods, not surround-sound, so plan to rely heavily on consultants to direct everything from space needs to system requirements and design to final installation and integration. Sophisticated audio-visual systems are far more accessible—and much less pricey—than they were a decade ago, so this should be a fairly straightforward, cost-efficient project.

The centerpiece of the room is a 9-by-12-foot projection screen that drops down or retracts at the touch of a button. Images can be projected onto it from a rear-screen projection room behind the main screen. The rear projector provides high-quality video regardless of the lighting level in the main room. Video can also be displayed through front-projection cameras or laptop stations that tap into the networked A-V system via an Internet protocol connection. A cabling canal buried under the center aisle and stage handles the connections for the IP network and for the DVD players, audio receivers, tuners, modems and other equipment that resides in the master control room.

System controls for volume, video sources, lighting and even the air conditioning are run through software on the IP network. They can be managed from the control room, a wall-mounted touch panel near the screen or a handheld wireless control at the podium. Dozens of hanging speakers and microphones—plus wall-mounted speakers, desk-mounted microphones and a wireless mike at the podium—are placed throughout the auditorium to ensure crystal-clear audio.

Once the space is secured and prepared, the design, installation and testing of the system can be done in as little as three months. Flexibility should be a must for any company's system. Most companies will use the full auditorium just a few times a month. But if the space and system are designed correctly, the front of the auditorium can double as a smaller conference room where you can host sales brainstorming sessions all week long.