Looking for a way to increase your selling impact and improve ROI on your immersive investment? The data-driven results are undeniable. When using TrueTour visuals early and often during the RFP process, the closing rates and the return on our customer’s TrueTour investment increases substantially.
Respond and Share Content Sooner to See 17x ROI
To provide our customers with the highest return on their investment, Visiting Media is working with a variety of customers to gather information on RFP response techniques across service level and around the globe. The properties who stand out from the crowd are those whose salespeople share their immersive visuals within 24 hours of an RFP submission, versus our observed average of 2-7 calendar days. Those who respond quickly and share their TrueTour content within the first RFP reply are seeing massive differences in their results than those who delay.
It’s commonly understood that business response times have an enormous impact on whether or not a customer will buy from you. In this digital age of instant results, buyers want useful information at their fingertips to make the best buying decision possible. Leading with many qualifying questions before providing resources — while a common practice in many industries — may now seem to bore (or worse, annoy) the information-centric shopper.
Within our short study between February and April 2021, properties see a 17-times higher ROI when their salespeople shared TrueTour™ content within their first RFP reply, versus those who shared their TrueTour content after 3 or more email exchanges. This phenomenon is observed in larger brand marketing studies across a variety of B-to-C industries.
According to the annual Adobe Brand Content Survey*, half of consumers would either stop paying attention to the brand or would not make a purchase if the content that was shared with them was not contextually relevant. Gen Z is the most likely to stop using the brand all together. By the time a customer has answered a list of qualifying questions, has gone back-and-forth trying to schedule a phone call, or has been shown less-than-engaging information, they may move on to your competitor who showed them exciting, relevant content to help them make buying decisions immediately.
Customers Who Use TrueTour™ Daily See 156% Higher ROI
Drilling deeper into the data, our surveys show that within the first four months of using their immersive content (360°/3D) within TrueTour™, salespeople who use TrueTour “every day” are reporting 156% higher return on investment with their immersive content than those who use their TrueTour “occasionally.”
Many of these customers fall into the same early-sharing category and are serving their immersive visuals immediately with new RFP inquiries (within the first or second correspondence), which underscores the impact of using TrueTour as early as possible in the customer’s buying cycle.
Two Methods — Which Will Increase Sales in the New Normal?
We are seeing a dramatic split in approach to responding to customer inquiries which we feel shouldn’t be ignored. Properties who are quicker to reply, ready to provide engaging content up front, and who are answering inquiries with an invitation to virtually tour immediately may rapidly gain the upper hand. This trend is one which we find important to track and report to our customers. With properties stretched thin and resources limited, slight adjustments to methods of engagement could help those limited hours and minutes become more potent and effective.
We’ll continue monitoring trends in these different approaches during the rebound from COVID-19 and the return to in-person events. At this point, these early results provide a lot of food for thought, and properties who are slower to serve immersive content to interested prospects may find themselves losing out on more bookings than they realize.
For more ideas and inspiration to use your immersive visuals as early as possible in the buying cycle, request a copy of our proprietary immersive integration guide, exclusively available to Visiting Media customers, by contacting our Communications Team below.