What a week!

170,000 people descended on Moscone Center in San Francisco to learn, discuss, and share. They were there to improve their sales teams, improve their sales processes, and increase customer success. And InstaVR had the honor of exhibiting as part of the Salesforce Expo.

We met many existing and future clients. We learned what the main challenges they’re facing that VR can address. And we left with greater conviction than ever — VR is and will continue to be an integral tool for sales professionals.

For those that couldn’t attend and talk to one of InstaVR team members, we’ll use the rest of the space in this week’s blog to discuss the two main questions visitors had:

1. How does VR fit into my sales process? 
2. How does InstaVR work with Salesforce? 

When we first started going to conferences 2 1/2 years ago, our main job was to introduce Virtual Reality technology to the uninitiated. Have people try on a headset for the first time, watch their first 360-degree video, and then discuss how InstaVR makes those applications happen.

Now, it’s a (very) rare visitor who stops by having never seen VR before. Instead, people want to know how they can take VR back to their company and apply it. They see the impact of VR — it’s immersive, it’s interactive, it’s memorable — but they want to explore the specifics of how it can impact their organization.

Based on the hundreds of conversations we had last week, here are the most prevalent use cases within sales teams at companies:

Sales Team Training –  Sales organizations are people driven. But people need to continually sharpen their skills. Because of the immersive, 1st person, memorable nature of VR experiences, creating sales trainings in VR has a high ROI.

Marketers like to use the word “sticky”. It applies to sales trainings too. You want the learning that happens in-headset or on-phone to remain with the reps for a long time afterwards.

InstaVR enables sales teams to easily create and distribute 360-degree immersive trainings. These can be “role play” based or educational (ie by industry) or showcase an exemplary sales meeting. The possibilities are limitless.

The great thing about InstaVR is it allows sales teams to create and distribute these applications easily. The whole process can be brought in-house. You don’t have to waste development funds on hiring an outside agency or wait for their availability.

In talking with sales managers at Dreamforce, it’s clear their teams are distributed and hungry for new training techniques. We delved deep into how InstaVR adds a powerful new arrow to their sales training quiver!

Client Presentations – Sales cycles are as competitive as ever. Because the barrier to entry for building a product or service has dropped via technology, sales teams need to really go above and beyond for clients to showcase their company.

The old approach of leaving behind a glossy “one sheet” or sending a “follow up email” often aren’t enough to show a potential client who you are and that you really care and understand them.

VR allows you to create a personalized, memorable, impactful sales presentation. For some of the attendees we spoke with, their company’s offering was intangible (ie a service) or on a computer screen (ie software). How could they meaningfully display the impact their company was having?

VR, of course!

Utilizing InstaVR, companies can create exciting presentations that showcase the real world results of what their businesses achieve. You can show outcomes in a very memorable fashion.

Why leave a potential client with a piece of paper when you can supply them with a VR application you’ve built specifically for them?

Event/Conference VR – Besides sales professionals, we spoke with a ton of marketers. Most marketers are already exploring VR for their companies, so those conversations largely consisted of how InstaVR makes the process of VR app development so simple.

The one point we got back to again and again regarding marketing is how VR can dramatically impact the recall of a company’s offering.

To wit, every booth at Dreamforce had a tv screen. I challenged marketers to remember any single thing about a company they saw on those monitors. Then I asked them if they could remember what they just saw in the VR headset I handed them?

As you might expect, most marketers agreed that the VR headset is a better delivery mechanism for a company’s message than a tv screen.

Bonus thought: just by having VR headsets, we had people stop by to see what we were showing in them. VR starts conversations that might not have happened otherwise!

Client Training – The main focus of the Expo is “Customer Success”. Customer Success relies on desired outcomes being achieved by customers.

For many companies, training their clients for success remains a major obstacle. As does scalability — you can’t hire a Customer Success Rep for each and every client.

So we discussed with a lot of Salesforce users how they can educate and train their clients easily using InstaVR. It could be showing the interior of a car, using hotspot overlays to point out important features. It could be a 360-degree video showing how to set up a canopy. It could be an immersive video explaining the layout of a data center and how to address problems in it.

Just like with sales presentations, VR client training is more memorable and impactful than traditional video. There’s no better way to communicate information — and have it stick — than with 360-degree video.

Employee Recruiting – Last, but certainly not least, we had a lot of discussions on how companies could use InstaVR to create compelling VR applications for potential new employees.

Be it an interactive office tour, a “meet your new team” virtual app, or a 360-degree music video showcasing a company’s product/service in action.

Recruiting is as competitive as ever in our tight labor market. So standing out via VR has a lot of impact. Employees want to work for tech-forward companies, so even the most “old school” company can still create a compelling VR application for recruiting, using our solution.

Well, first off, they’re a client of ours. They use InstaVR for interactive tours for clients, like this 360-degree tour of a New Balance store.

But as part of Dreamforce, we also unveiled a prototype that lets you use InstaVR generated apps + Salesforce.com for either generating customer leads or noting the VR used in the sales cycle.

Why is this important?

For lead generation, you can get users to enter their name or email prior to viewing the VR experience you’ve built. This can port into Salesforce, creating a lead, and allowing you to increase your flow of potential customers. (If your application is more for enterprise users, your sales reps can enter the viewer’s name or email prior to handing them a headset, also creating a lead)

For the sales funnel, you can identify which VR applications “move the needle.” Working your way back from Closed Won opportunities, you can see which VR videos they watched. This will give you a sense of which VR experiences you’re creating that are actually successful, versus which ones are not.

And like with any material used in a sales cycle — you want to focus on your converting VR apps, and make more like them!

Thanks for visiting with InstaVR at Dreamforce! If you’d like a personal consultation on how InstaVR can be a transformative part of your sales process, please email our Head of Sales at “andrew@instavr.co” to schedule a call or demo.