Virtual Reality enables companies to get in touch with buyers in a unique and unforgettable way. An immersive 360-degree video and audio experience – coupled with interactivity – can attract users’ attention, be informative and instructive and leave a lasting impression in seconds. Today, sales and marketing is all about experiences and with Virtual Reality, you have the tool at hand to really stand out. Here are five examples to show you how it can be done.
VR Sales Take Fire!
Hekatron Brandschutz are market leaders when it comes to fire and security products. Based in Sulzburg, Germany, they have built a reputation over fifty years with innovation in developing and providing systems and services for plant-specific fire protection.
Access to their ELBA facility – the most modern fire-alarm testing laboratory in the world – is naturally highly restrictive and hedged in with super-strict safety conditions. Transparency and customer focus are of key importance to Hekatron however, and so they have embraced VR to invite customers to safely look behind the scenes at their fire detector laboratory.
Hekatron’s interactive VR 360° round tour through the ELBA laboratory gives a unique insight into the company’s quality products and processes, in a place few are able to visit.
By jumping onboard with new technologies like VR, Hekatron are improving sales by positioning themselves as a future-proof partner for new clients. They are able to give a sales pitch presentation of the quality of their products being tested in an environment many would be fearful to tread. VR transforms touring the lab into a totally safe experience.
You can view the ELBA round tour experience on the company’s website ( in German ): https://www.hekatron-brandschutz.de/unternehmen/erprobungslabor-fuer-brandmelderapplikationen-elba/
Look Before You Book a Hotel Room
From virtual tours behind the scene, onto VR tours as a sales trend to entice visitors to book into your hotel.
The Flushing Meadows Hotel & Bar is a chic boutique hotel in Munich, Germany. It has eleven spectacular rooms inspired and created by selected designers, musicians, and artists. On the hotel’s top floor, a terrace bar presents guests with a stunning panoramic view of the cityscape of Munich all the way to the Alps. An amazing place to stay, and to increase booking sales it would be much better to show rather than just tell.
To convey the ambience of such a place using just words and photos would be a challenge. However, capturing the experience in an immersive virtual interactive tour allows a potential guest to explore the rooms and visit the bar for themselves, feeling as if they were really there. View The Flushing Meadows Hotel & Bar VR experience here http://tiny.cc/3ul9uy
VR is certainly the future of sales in the tourism industry, as customer tastes become more sophisticated. Grab their emotions by immersing them in the experience. Find out more about innovative sales using VR here.
Whetting the Customer’s Appetite
Restaurants are also increasingly focusing on giving their customers a unique experience beyond just providing them with quality food. The atmosphere and conviviality of a restaurant, together with the décor, the lighting, the concept, all add up to attract and keep diners.
A lot of marketing is expended on generating a social media buzz about ‘the latest hip place to eat’, and VR can take this a step further by giving potential diners an emotional immersive feel for a restaurant.
The Blackbird & Bistro in Munich embraced VR as the perfect medium to get across the key elements of quality and authenticity for their restaurant. Their VR experience, developed with VRdirect, allows potential guests to take a tour through the restaurant and meet the friendly barkeeper to learn about the famous house drinks. VR is powerful at engaging users on an emotional level, increasing sales by giving them a taster of the experience and making them hungry to dine for real at that special place.
Sales Pitch Presentations of Elsewhere Products
The examples so far have allowed a virtual exploration of places that do actually exist. Incorporating CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) into a VR experience can give the user a 360o feel for places existing only as a concept.
Advanced Computer Art GmbH (ACA) is one of the leading agencies in creating high-end product visualizations for airlines, VIP aircraft, and industrial and product designs. ACA use CGI to create 3D worlds on computer screens, from which can be produced real 3D products.
As a sales and development tool, VR can immerse clients in their creations in a way impossible to do otherwise. For example, the user can experience an aircraft cabin design not yet off the drawing board in 360o as if it was real.
Here you can read a discussion with ACA’s CEO Tobias Malangre about CGI-based 360° experiences and the benefits of building them with VRdirect.
Alternatively, your product might actually exist, but be impossible to bring along to a sales pitch at a Trade Fair because it is so freaking massive! You can use photographs or videos of it in operation, but that is not the same for the customer as standing there and seeing it working for themselves.
So for example, the LiftMaster is a serious piece of equipment that can lift large sheets of dye-cut steel and sort and load them onto the correct pallets. This is not something you want to haul to a trade show, even if there was enough room there to demo it. The marketing team selling the LiftMaster though have created a VR 360o experience; and there the mammoth LiftMaster is, in 3D, right in front of your customers as you deliver your sales pitch.
VR Gears Up to Pitch Future Sales
Finally, your sales pitch presentation might be for something still in prototype, but you want everyone to buy into the idea and be eager to purchase it when it starts rolling off the production lines.
EVUM Motors is a start-up company that has been working with researchers at the Technical University in Munich to come up with a solar-powered, electric modular utility vehicle so simple that no expensive special tools or spare parts are needed for maintenance. The e-mobility truck is designed with the needs of remote parts of Africa and challenging road conditions in mind.
The trial phase of the project was completed in 2018, and the e-mobility truck is due for commercial production in 2020, first to the European market and then to Africa and developing countries.
For such a technologically cutting-edge product, a matching innovative sales pitch presentation is needed. This is where VR fits the brief, and is being used to sell the e-mobility truck vision ahead of the actual launch.
VR Improves Sales Performance; Get in on this Sales Trend Now
In summary, VR can be used to take customers to places they couldn’t otherwise go, to places you hope they will be persuaded to go, to visualizations of products that don’t yet exist in the real world, and to showcase products it would be impossible to bring to them. In all cases, by engaging your customers emotionally using VR you raise their desire to purchase and hence increase sales. And as VRdirect experiences are deployable cross-platform, there is a greater pool of potential customers out there.
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