I was talking to a CMO of furniture company from Sweden last week. He was initially quite interested in 3D product visualization and WebAR since it seems to him a promising technology. We had several meetings for weeks and he was confident to start the project soon until something happened. He had a meeting with the CEO to allocate budget for this and the CEO denied it. Simply because their competitors are not using this. So he could not see the necessity of using 3D product visulization online (alhough they export to UK & US using online platform for sales).
I'm sure you have sort of similar sales experience happened at some point of time. This can easily put a motivational block in business and you question yourself whether running a business with WebAR is a worthy decision. Well, if this thought ever comes to your mind, then here's a story for you.
Its Storytime
People haven't noticed but Kodak completely disappeared from the scene due to a major mistake. The mistake they made goes back to December, 1975.
Kodak, in a nutshell, was the biggest camera company worldwide. A Kodak employee, Steven Sasson approached his bosses with a revolutionary discovery:
The Digital Camera – no more need for films.
Kodak rejected Steven's idea. At that time Kodak was making most of its money from selling films. Therefore it was riskier for them to venture into this new line of business.
Humiliated Steven approached Sony, Kodak's biggest rival at that time. Sony accepted the idea and launched digital camera which flooded the market.
Gradually Kodak began to fade away until January 19th, 2012 when Kodak officially filed for bankruptcy.
3D visualization and WebAR have revolutionized how users can browse and buy products online. This is not going anywhere. Ecommerce companies who deny the value of its ROI and delay its adoption will see their competitors getting succeeded shortly.
The truth about Sales for WebAR
Recently I finished a book – "The Truth about Outbound Sales" by Joshua Garrison. The book focused on how to elevate the game of outbound sales – from cold outreach to voice call to multichannel approach. If you are planning to start your outreach, this would be a great start. However, I'd like to add that for a new technology like WebAR, it's important to focus on educating your B2B prospects and show them the ROI in a short and long term. This article can deinitely help you to get the holistic overview.
How can you prepare sales technique
If you look at your niche prospective market, there could be thousands of B2B companies who could be your customers. You can be excited in the beginning to think that if 10% of them are onboarded as customers, it can make you a millionaire soon. But the reality often hits differently.
In any market, only 3% of the B2B customers are open for buying your solution and 3D is no different. You need to identify them based on certain criteria like:
– they have recently closed a funding round
– they are actively hiring people
– they are actively buying 3D related software etc.
Once you have identifie your Tier 1 prospects, don't spam them with only email campaigns. Instead try to build a relationship with them while sharing values about how they can solve certain industry problems with 3D and how it can bring more benefits over traditional marketing or user experience in customer life cycle. This could be in the form of LinkedIn connections, arranging webinars or sharing values over offering a limited freemium service to them.
Eventually once the customer is educated and realize the values of 3D commerce, they will be more willing to buy related services and that's your opportunity to close a deal with them. Of course, B2B deal closures are always much longer than B2C deal closure but I think the waiting time is worthy if you look at the deal size in general.