With a billion augmented reality enabled devices already out there, and mobile AR becoming the primary drive of a $108 billion immersive market by the year 2021, businesses need to rethink their strategy to incorporate augmented reality technology in order to stay competitive. The one area of business that can be enhanced by augmented reality technology, and stand much to gain, is the sales process.
The gap between someone’s expectations and reality is a common challenge seen in sales. Frequently, customers think they’re getting one thing, and in actuality, get another. This is a costly process of the product going through customer dissatisfaction, inaccuracy, product returns and resells, and product revisions.
However, leveraging 3D and augmented reality technology is proving to be ideal for the sales process for achieving customer confidence in the purchasing process. The ability to see, hear, touch, walk around, interact with, and even control a product using this technology will immensely help save time and generate greater, more profitable sales revenues for businesses.
Immersive Products
In many retail or industrial businesses, it can be quite the challenge to communicate the features and benefits of products to their customer base. Augmented reality overcomes this hurdle by creating 3D experiences that bring your products to life.
By promoting products in a visually impactful demonstration, sales teams can best communicate the value proposition tailored to each customer, as well as facilitate the quest for information. With augmented reality technology, this type of visualization is extremely helpful for communicating difficult concepts that may tend to overwhelm.
Atlatl Software, a cloud-based sales platform, says that visual configuration helps increase sales efficiency by 24%, boost conversation rates by 10%, and decrease the sales process by 30%. Furthermore, companies that have reached ‘digital maturity’ yield 19% higher lead-conversion rates, 35% more quotes, 34% superior performance, and 105% larger deal size when compared to those who rely on outdated legacy systems and sales processes.
Interactivity and Sales Engagement
For sales teams, using augmented reality technology will evolve into facilitating an experience. It can provide the added benefit to showcase extremely large, or even extremely small, products, at any time, and from anywhere in the world.
You can engage with customers with a better, overall understanding of how a product will integrate into their existing environment, as well as have customers be able to experience a more personalized demonstration.
According to Harvard Business, this type of personalization can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend, and can lift sales by 10% or more.
Cut Costs & Grow Sales
Given that the hard work of deploying augmented reality enabled devices is already done, leveraging this technology is actually very cost effective.
Augmented reality lets you take your products to market in real time, allowing customers to gain more confidence in the value of your products. In fact, sales teams will no longer need to bring piles of brochures and pamphlets to meetings, or go over a 2D Powerpoint presentation that forces customers to imagine your product, as opposed to interacting with it themselves.
With more clarity on the features of products, businesses can avoid the back-and-forth, the amount of user documentation required, and any delays in getting an order correct. Augmented reality interaction with your product ensures the product is right the first time. The customer gets exactly what they were expecting, increasing satisfaction and loyalty to the product.
Effective Implementation
This technology is available today, but it’s important to emphasize that it needs to be an organizational fit, and businesses need to be committed to taking the right steps to implement it effectively.
The commitment to adding augmented reality technology, or any other technology for that matter, needs to be made from the top down. Executives and management teams need to support training that leads to proficiency. Businesses that don’t commit to good training on new technology are destined to be revolving doors, churning salespeople constantly, and incurring the high cost of employee turnover.
Augmented reality technology is the next advantageous tool for salespeople. However, if they aren’t taught how to effectively use it to close the sale, then salespeople will lapse into old habits, or not use these tools, and waste company time and resources.
When augmented reality sales presentations are brought into the organizational fold correctly, businesses will reap a much more profitable harvest than they could have before. So, effective implementation is key.
Businesses that aren’t working on employing an augmented reality technology strategy for business will be hit by a wave of innovation their competitors will be riding. There are not many businesses able to produce augmented reality technology on a scale that makes sense for the sales process, which is why the first ones to adopt this should enjoy a 3-5 year advantage in their industry.
