On Monday, we published the first of three articles on how to maximize VR to increase sales at your company. If you haven’t read it yet, that one is titled How to Introduce VR to Your Sales Team. Today we delve into what content your Sales/Marketing team should be building using InstaVR to impress clients and win deals.
As we’ve discussed before, companies using VR instantly get a brand lift, being thought of as more forward-thinking and modern. But creating compelling VR content is still essential to the sales process. If you’re in a client meeting, you need a reason for your potential client to put on a VR headset. And you need them to go home with a positive opinion of your company or products formed by viewing your VR.
The most important step then in creating VR for sales presentations is deciding what to showcase. It doesn’t matter if you’re using an 8K camera and spatial audio, if you’re not providing value to your audience. Thus, we’ll spend the rest of this post covering some successful content approaches to VR presentations for salespeople.
The Immersive Before & After VR Experience
Image courtesy of PremiseLED.com
Since this article series was inspired by our conversation with our client Premise LED, what better place to start than their use case. With lighting, one of the main values is showing how much brighter and more visually appealing an area can be with an upgrade. You could show the client side-by-side photos. You could show them before-and-after videos. Or… you can immerse them in the actual space so they can experience the value of upgrading their lighting.
You can see what they’ve done with their prototype app at Premise LED. Putting the potential client fully into the world through VR creates an engaging and memorable experience. But more importantly, it’s the most valuable way for them to truly get an immersive feel for that changes possible.
The before & after VR app is perfect for interior designers, event planners, architects, engineers, and more!
The Self-Guided VR Tour
Image Courtesy of TUI Group
Earlier this year, we had a major aviation company use our service to create an app for salespeople to use at client meetings and trade shows. Why did they choose VR? Because you can’t easily bring a jet into an exhibition space or an office. But you can take the viewer to the jet through virtual reality.
In this particular use case, the InstaVR client allowed potential buyers to make decisions on where to spend time during their VR tour — in the seats, in the kitchen, by the cockpit. And they gave the prospect the ability to make changes in the virtual environment. Want to change the color of the jet upholstery? Just gaze at the Navigation Link on a seat and be taken to the same jet with a whole different interior.
The self-guided VR tour is perfect for travel/tourism, automotive, real estate, and more!
The Guided VR Tour
Image Courtesy of Toyota High Group
For some products and services, a self-guided VR tour won’t provide enough information to the headset wearer. You’ll need to add an element of guidance for the wearer to learn within the 360 experience.
There’s a couple approaches to achieving this. One would be to use our new Guided Co-Viewing add-on module. This would allow you to control the POV of your VR app users. You might use this at say a group sales meeting or a talk at an exhibition. That way all the VR users would be looking in the same location at the same time. This is powerful as all of your VR viewers would have focused attention on the areas you wanted them to focus on.
An alternate approach is to have someone in front of the 360 tour walking the user through the VR experience. (or adding audio narration) Toyota, for instance, used that approach in creating a VR app to showcase their offices and employees to college job fair attendees. Our heatmap data shows that users will focus on the person leading the VR tour, so you don’t have to worry about users looking back at the cameraman.
The guided VR tour is perfect for commercial real estate, demos of complicated products/solutions, allowing potential clients to virtually meet your employees, and more!
The POV VR app
Image Courtesy of Left of Creative
In a perfect world, you’d be able to try everything before you buy it. Sometimes that’s not feasible though. VR gives you the closest preview you can get to actually owning and using something.
For instance, if you create a POV app for an automobile, you can feel what’s actually like to drive that new Tesla down Highway 1. Or you can see what it’s like to go scuba diving in the Blue Hole off of Belize. Or whether a standing desk would look good in an office space.
If you put together a great POV app for your sales team, you make their job incredibly easy. The product or experience can almost sell itself. For proof, just read about TUI Group’s success using InstaVR + Gear VR headsets to book visitors on their vacation excursions.
POV VR is perfect for experiential sales like travel/tourism, big ticket item sales like automotive, and much more.
Conclusion
VR can be a very powerful sales tool. But choosing the right content to feature is incredibly important. Just showcasing VR for the sake of impressing a client with the technology is not enough. You have to understand what value VR can bring to the client, and tailor your content to get maximum value out of the medium. Before ever picking up a 360 camera, spend some time thinking about why a client would be better off seeing something in a VR headset.
