What is virtual reality (VR)?

What is a virtual reality sales room?

A VR sales room is a computer-generated, three-dimensional environment where buyers can interact with sellers for an enhanced virtual selling experience. Just like in a digital sales room, sales content populates the virtual setting for buyers to interact with.

So let’s explore the advantages and disadvantages of virtual reality sales rooms.

Pros

Memorable experience
If your goal in sales is to stand out from competitors, then a virtual reality sales room will accomplish just that. The experience will be unique and memorable for your prospect. In fact, you can play with your creativity and populate the virtual world with any type of content, CTA’s, and branding opportunities.


Unique branding opportunities
One of the trendy things, when the world switched to remote selling, was to create custom-made virtual backgrounds for zoom meetings. And of course, many companies used that opportunity to create office environments with their logos all over the place. The problem is, zoom backgrounds are static and non-interactive. Now imagine a virtual world, where logos can be anywhere in the computer-generated environment, and as soon as a prospect interacts with it, a video launches or a whitepaper is downloaded.

Engagement
Virtual reality is more immersive than a simple video-based online meeting, so your prospect’s engagement will be heightened. Your prospect will be able to “explore” the virtual world you’ve created

Tracking & Analytics
As with most online tools nowadays, you will be able to track and analyze how your prospects are engaging and interacting in your virtual reality sales room, which will give you insightful information to move the deal forward.

Cons

Cost
As is often the case with new technologies, virtual reality is not cheap. It might make your prospects more engaged and more curious, but in the end, if the return on investment is not there, it will not be worth it.


Bandwidth
“You’re breaking up, can you repeat?” How often have you heard that, or said that, in the past 18 months in your Zoom or Teams meetings? Or seen a presentation stuck on a slide even though the presenter keeps talking, thinking the deck is still moving? Expect a lot more lagging with virtual reality sales room unless you have a very strong internet connection. Keep in mind that few things are as frustrating as slow loading/lagging website, and virtual reality should be about enhancing the experience for your prospect.

Gear
There are, of course, different types of virtual reality experiences, as explained further up: non-immersive, semi-immersive, and fully immersive. And not all of them require goggles. But some do. And all of them will require a strong internet connection and a PC, which makes the experience more static than on-the-go with a mobile would.

Limited environment
Again, it’s all about the experience. And if you offer a virtual experience to your prospects, their expectations will be quite high. Creating a virtual world and populating it with just one slide deck will be extremely disappointing. So if you go down the virtual reality route, you’ll have to put the effort to create a lot of engaging content to populate the room and create one heck of an experience.


Conclusion
Make sure you evaluate all the pros and cons of a virtual reality sales room, and whether that will move you closer to a deal or not. In the end, think of your target audience: is it something they would engage with, or would they find it too high-tech?