Always Be (Virtually) Closing
Virtual Reality and the Future of Sales
Even in our increasingly digital world, sales is as personal as ever. People still cross oceans to seal a deal with a handshake. That’s because in sales, trust is everything and nothing builds trust quite like looking in someone in the eyes.
However, while the final sale still often requires human contact, the process leading up to that moment has become more digital and complicated than ever. CRM databases are crucial to managing large numbers of existing and potential customers. Marketing is constantly pushing the envelope to stand out from the crowd, rushing from ebooks to infographics to even newer technologies like virtual reality.
But that last marketing trend — virtual reality — has the potential to remake the sales process from the ground up. That’s because virtual reality can do something no sales tool could ever do before: bring you face-to-face with your customers.
I’m not talking about video-chatting, which still often feels like you’re just talking to a screen. In virtual reality, you and your customers can sit down at a table and discuss business together even if you’re continents apart. No need for travel. No need for installing expensive equipment. Virtual reality is the future of sales and it’s just getting started.
Top of the Virtual Funnel
Right now, virtual reality is establishing itself in the sales pipeline as the breakout marketing tool of 2016. Everyone from McDonalds to General Electric are crafting virtual reality marketing experiences designed to showcase their brand. These experiences range from allowing the customer to try the product to simply making the brand seem more cutting edge.
But VR marketing, like the virtual reality industry itself, is in its infancy. Most VR marketing experiences are simply 360 videos that involve little to no interaction. While these experiences allow customers to immerse themselves in cool environments, they give little agency to the customer besides the ability to look around. They’re essentially just ads that wrap themselves around the viewer.
The next wave of VR marketing experiences are closer to videogames than traditional advertisements. Customers can go through these experiences at their own pace as they walk around and interact with objects. These digital worlds will feel just like our own but with the fantastical ability for marketers to change the environment to fit the brand’s message. Companies like IKEA and TopShop have already developed these types of experiences with measured success.
But these marketing experiences are just generating leads, not closing them. They do relatively well at driving consumer sales, but it’s hard to see how they fit into a complicated B2B sales framework. That’s because none of them have incorporated one of the most powerful aspects of virtual reality: when you’re in a virtual environment, anyone can be there with you.
Remote Sales in VR
The power of virtual reality comes from it’s ability to make you feel like the virtual objects and environment you’re seeing around you are real. This sensation, called presence, has been the holy grail of virtual reality going all the way back to early research in the 50s because it allows you to go anywhere and do anything you can imagine. Now with modern consumer VR headsets we can finally induce presence on a global scale at a reasonable price point.
But it’s not just objects your brain will believe are real in virtual reality. If you are in a virtual environment and someone else is in that virtual environment with you, you can converse and talk with that person just like you would in real life. This is called Social VR and if you’ve never tried it, check out vTime for Android.
Social VR takes those marketing demos and turns them into a virtual sales meeting. Not only can you talk with potential clients across the world as if you were in the same room, but you can turn that room into the potential customer’s office or factory, show how the client could use your product in their workflow, and dazzle them with built in graphics and special effects. All they need is a VR headset, now at the low price of $100 per unit.
This is what takes VR marketing from the consumer realm to the high-touch world of B2B. It’s like a webinar on steroids. Instead of staring at 2D screen as a presenter drones on in the background, audiences are immersed in an interactive 3D environment where they can have a real conversation with the presenter. At Agora, we call these VR marketing presentations Siminars and we’ve developed them for everything from content marketing on the power of exponential change to showing off the latest medical device.
The Future of Sales
Right now these Siminars are limited by graphics, motion capture technology, and hardware distribution. While they are incredibly effective at showing off new products in all their intricate detail, the avatars, or 3D representations of the other people in the environment, aren’t entirely photorealistic yet. Most people don’t have VR headsets, so we have to send headsets directly to potential customers. That’s why we’ve focused on use cases where seeing products up close and personal is incredibly important and the cost of a single deal far outways the cost of a headset, like industrial manufacturing, aviation, robotics, and construction.
But this is only the beginning of the VR sales revolution. In the next three to five years, graphics and motion capture technology will improve dramatically allowing us to capture our movements down to the smallest eye twitch. The number of first virtual reality and then augmented reality headsets will grow into the hundreds of millions by 2020. And when that happens, the sales call as we know it will be dead.
Why fly or drive to a potential client’s office when both of you can just put on a VR headset and the experience is not only the same but better? You’ll be able to pull charts, graphics, and product demos out of thin air. If the client doesn’t like the color? Change it with a tap. The client wants to see internal components? Show an exploded view with a flick of the wrist. Need an expert on site to answer technical questions? Have one of your engineers put on their own VR headset and suddenly they’re in the room with you too.
But more important than all the fancy gizmos is that with virtual reality, we won’t have to sacrifice a personal connection for the convenience of digital communications. Now we can have the best of both worlds. In virtual reality, you’ll still be able to look your clients in the eyes and seal the deal with a handshake, even if it is a virtual one.
