Customer trends have evolved over the last few years, the Coronavirus pandemic turned out to be a major driving factor in all of this. With newer types of digital tools and technologies enabling brands to completely change how they interact with their prospects and customers, the onus now lies on customer facing leaders like marketing and sales heads to understand more on what they can do better using newer tech advances to drive better brand ROI and eventual growth.
Today’s consumers who are already facing the wrath of dealing with too many brands in a crowded digital ecosystem are craving not just deeper and more meaningful brand interactions but also, more immersive and easier experiences and customer journeys.
AR/VR can transform how brands interact, nurture and engage with their prospects and customers. With newer advances in data services (5G) and easier/faster connections, the AR/VR trends will percolate across more industries and use cases over the next few years – this has been an ongoing prediction by several key market leaders based on various studies and reports.
Brands now have the ability to offer digital users the convenience of shopping online like as if they were at a physical store. Many leading B2C brands have already jumped onto the AR/VR bandwagon and now successfully offer their users virtual try-ons for them to better understand and test shortlisted purchases.
When it comes to B2B sales though, should more sales leaders and sales teams look at using Augmented Reality to drive their end goals?
Read More: Looking For Better Ways To Build Effective B2B Sales Coaching Programs?
Here are a few starting points to get you interested in the benefits of AR/VR for B2B sales:
Enables Better B2B Sales Training
Your next sales hire could be from your industry or maybe not. Either way, a comprehensive sales coaching program is an integral part of onboarding new sales hires. While it is useful to dovetail programs based on who your new hires are, what their strong points are, which industry they have come over from and many such factors, it is also just as crucial to drive sales coaching experiences using an element of fun to deepen learning absorption.
Enter: Augmented Reality!
At a time when a lot of B2B tech companies are still working through hybrid models, a lot of customer facing teams will be working remote or partly-remote as the case may be. Onboarding new sales hires in this set up requires a greater emphasis on creating strong sales training programs while also using newer tools and tech capabilities to make the experience more immersive and easier to learn through. This can potentially reduce the time taken for new sales hires to adjust to new processes at a new role while also boosting how quickly they start delivering ROI through their own sales initiatives.
AR Can Drive Better Customer Onboarding Too
In the B2B tech industry, most buyers today prefer avoiding a sales person and like to navigate a tech brand’s website to review what they want before making a buying decision. But once a product or tool is bought, a good customer onboarding program is needed to ensure a new paying customer is able to extract the top benefits of their newest tech investment.
While several B2B buyers might want to do their own research and understand on their own what needs to be done to ensure they use their new tech investment to the best of its capability, brands still need to have a customer onboarding process in place as a choice.
Using Augmented Reality to get new customers to see for themselves how new integrations need to be done or how a new tool needs to be set up can actually quicken the process, make it easier for them and also boost the customer experience at the end of the day.
Can Increase Confidence in a Brand/Product
One of the main downsides of investing in a new technology or even one like Augmented Reality is the cost that could be associated with it. But at a time when customers need more differentiated experiences to be able to look at your brand as one that’s better than the rest investing in new tech advances and capabilities can help sales-marketing leaders get ahead of the competition when they are still evaluating how to use these capabilities for themselves.
A brand that invests in new tools to boost customer engagement is more likely to win over the market than one that is still using slightly older models or techniques to gain market share.
Read More: SalesTechStar Interview with Mitali Pattnaik, Sr Director of Product for LinkedIn Sales Solutions
Final Note
The benefits of augmented reality are several. These capabilities can increase how sales and marketing teams grow brand presence and eventual ROI. Good use of AR/VR can significantly drive revenue for a brand if used in the right ways. Augmented Reality can be used in so many ways, to educate new trainees and customers, to entertain potential buyers, to help them evaluate your product by creating a more seamless and immersive buying experience. Now is as good a time as any for B2B teams to capitalize on the augmented reality trend to drive growth and output.
