The shift from physical to digital sales models is not a new trend, but by 2025, the focus should be entirely on virtual sales. In this interview Markus Peter and Miguel Lopez discuss the use of Augmented Reality (AR) for product demos and Virtual Reality (VR) for customer meetings. The key question: How can companies fully virtualize their sales processes?
Markus Peter is Partner at Etribes Connect, one of the leading digital consulting firms in the DACH area. Prior to his tenure at Etribes Markus spent more than 20 years on the corporate side both in Germany and abroad. His focus is to help B2B companies to successfully transform their business to build and enhance sustainable digital competitiveness.
Miguel Lopez is Head of Visualization Management at PERI Digital. He is leading the effort to establish and enhance PERI’s augmented reality solutions and shape them closely aligned with customer and user needs. He has spent his entire career in the construction industry and injects his knowledge to precisely shape PERI’s XR Ecosystem offering.
Markus Peter: Extended reality technologies have long been touted as promising emerging technologies, yet in practice, few use cases have been seen. Why is XR finally breaking through now?
Miguel Lopez:
Speaking for the construction industry as a whole, we are still behind when it comes to digitalization, but things are changing slowly due to the larger population's increasing openness to virtual workspaces and reality-extending gadgets.
While construction is in many parts still a haptic and analog industry, there has always been a need to visualize construction blueprints and to model adjacent structures like scaffolding for example. When previously this was very much based in 2D, a natural evolution to 3D visualization occurred in the past 10 years as CAD software has become more powerful and accessible.
My team at PERI has been tasked with taking the next step, bringing 3D into real-life environments with extended reality formats, which include remote virtual reality demonstrations, as well as augmented reality on-site demonstrations via tablet or the latest AR headsets.
When this was initially considered to be mainly a tool for engineers to aid and facilitate technical on-site construction, we also see a shift towards early involvement of 3D modeling & mixed reality in sales talks, greatly improving conversion rates and becoming a hygiene factor for bigger projects.
Markus Peter: Does “virtual sales” mean negotiations will involve VR headsets in the future or what does it entail beyond that?
Miguel Lopez:
I am a firm believer in technology being just a tool and not the end to all means. So I think in the near future mixed reality will be an important complementary sales feature, but we don’t have the goal to replace in-person negotiations entirely. The cultural aspect of sitting down together and investing time and effort to meet, cannot be emulated by virtual reality.
That being said, our sales reps have a whole digital toolbox from which they can display structural calculations, model in-prompt adaptations, and review client history to improve their impact in sales negotiations significantly. These digital tools are certainly here to stay.
Markus Peter: What role will virtual sales play in the future? Is it going to be niche? Will it enhance the physical sales process or replace it?
Miguel Lopez:
As I said, we don’t want to replace personal meetings. But in order to acquire bigger, complex projects, offering 3D visualization and BIM (building information modeling) services are already hygiene factors. There’s also EU legislation mandating the use of digital assets for better transparency and collaboration in the construction industry, so the shift is also politically motivated.
Despite this, what is the biggest proof-of-concept for me are the clients' reactions after engaging with extended reality formats for the first time. Initially, it’s often regarded as a playful gadget, but after they have seen their future project manifest in front of them on the construction site through the help of AR technology, they request it for every single future project and even start taking an interest into how we plan to develop the technology further.
Markus Peter: Which B2B industries do you think can benefit most from virtual sales technology and why?
Miguel Lopez:
I can only speak for the building industry, where mixed reality formats address a natural need due to the sheer physical dimension and interdependency of construction projects. But we are already seeing surprises in how our technology is being used: when initially we thought XR would be a necessity to primarily land big AAA projects, from looking at the architectural models that have been uploaded into our XR software, I can tell that today already 80% of use cases are smaller projects – like pedestrian bridges and residential buildings. For these client groups, the use of extended reality during negotiation phases can still create a novel magic moment, which is becoming a crucial customer conversion and brand recognition factor.
As for virtual sales tools in general, I think they are pretty much on the rise everywhere. When building the digital toolbox for our sales reps, we very much take inspiration from applications from across all industries.
Markus Peter: What do success stories of virtual sales teams look like? Can their impact be quantified?
Miguel Lopez:
Determining how much XR contributes to sales success can be difficult to measure due to a lot of possible confounding external factors, but in countries with high adaptation rates, we already see higher success and conversion rates than in countries, which do not.
Smaller clients tend to be a bit more conservative in their ways of working and are therefore more familiar with thinking in a 2D space, so interacting with a 3D environment usually takes some time getting used to. But you always see when it “clicks” with them and they can suddenly see solutions visualized for problems they were not able to grasp before.
Markus Peter: How does a company best experiment with this technology in a way that is risk-free?
Miguel Lopez:
The most important thing is to start small. Pick your target products, audience and test market, and develop and iterate on a small scale. Learn as you go and scale the investment and resources as you gather more and more market proof for your solution.
Secondly, it is important to create an independent unit within the larger company, which can operate fast to make the most of an iterative approach with a “fail-fast” attitude – adopting a start-up mentality within a larger organization, so to speak. It is important to give those innovation units the freedom to experiment – within the constraints of an approved budget and realistic set of goals, of course. And always test your products with customers. Always.
The bigger challenge is actually the business side of things. Once you have a tool that works, you need to think about commercial leveraging and potentially even monetization. Turning an idea into a product or service. For that, you have to redefine the internal process landscape and conduct training to make sure the tool is actively used so it even has a chance to succeed. To convince people that a behavioral change in their ways of working is required and beneficial to them is the hard part, which often takes more time than the tool development itself.
