web conferencing in a virtual 3D environment for remote meetings, training, sales enablement, and sales support

On March 28, 2012 Corporate Visions @corpv tweeted:

“Key findings: Sales enablement tools for customer conversations in a virtual environment are missing”

I would suggest to take a look at AvayaLive Engage.

AvayaLive Engage (formerly named web.alive and originally developed at Nortel) is web conferencing in a virtual 3D environment for remote meetings, training, sales [enablement], and [sales] support. I’m no longer affiliated with the product or any of the companies behind it, but I used to do product marketing for it back in 2009. On the website AvayaLive.com you can sign up for your chance to participate in the beta program. You’ll get 90 days of FREE AvayaLive Connect service. There is also a free trial with your own environment for 15 days.

“[...] rich and immersive avatar-based collaboration [...]

• [...] allows you for the first time to meet with your online customer in the same way as if they crossed the physical threshold of your business’ front door. Unleash your real-time voice and existing highly skilled staff to go and talk to your customers, either one-on-one or in a crowd. By doing so, you provide them relevant information to help them down ‘off of the fence’ [...]. The same environment can be used to provide support, and a community of users with knowledge can help deepen your relationship with customers, as well as providing a place to work with your customers [...]“

The importance of video in Sales 2.0

Over at newsaleseconomy.com Chad Levitt wrote the great blog post ‘Next Generation Sales Reps Use Video To Win’, on February 7th, 2009. Mike Meisner commented:

“[...] I don’t see many [...] posts out there about the importance of video in web/sales 2.0. People would rather casually watch a demo/video than have to attend a scheduled presentation or even a webinar [...]. It’s the ultimate in providing accessible information. [...]“

From Chad’s post:

“[...] The next generation of sales reps are using technology to grab mindshare through surrounding their prospects with helpful content. They do this without being intrusive and let the customer engage at their own pace. The content you can surround your prospect with is endless.

Video Presentations are the easiest way to surround your customer

[...] sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Viddler allow you to store and share your videos easily.  [...] Once your video presentations are created you can begin to e-mail your customers links to your presentations and create many types of interesting campaigns. [...] By using video, you give your presentation more reach and increase the chances of it being watched again. Your prospect can review the parts that were important to them on their own time in their comfort zone. And prospects make the buying decision in their comfort zone first and then tell you about it later. [...]

Video presentations are less intrusive than standing in front of your customer delivering a live presentation. The world is moving towards less intrusive ways of connecting with people and you can get ahead of the pack by developing videos of your sales presentations. Your video presentation will also help reinforce the message you delivered in your live presentation and increase the chances of you making the sale. [...]“

Obviously the text above has been written from a sales perspective. If you are in marketing you should google the term ‘social media release’ as a video should be a part of every social media press release. The nice thing about having your video uploaded to a public site is that everyone can email the link to others and once in a while even in a b2b settings things go viral.

Those of you who have posted videos on YouTube might know this already; the ‘Insights’ part where the owner of a video can track metrics around it has been improved by Google. The following is a screen shot for a video I posted during my studies and for me it is interesting to observe who is embedding it / where it gets how many views from and which audiences I reach:

When it comes to Sales Enablement, it goes without saying how important it is to not only provide sales people with streaming versions of videos but to also provide downloadable versions of these videos in the Sales Enablement application/site. That ensures that the sales people can screen high quality video in front of the customer even in situations without access to the intranet or internet.

Environment for web-based customer meetings, collaboration, eLearning and virtual conferences

I have blogged about web.alive, now avayalive engage, the immersive internet experience, a couple of times already.

www.netmedia.info has some great screen shots and photos of it.

Integrating streaming video, all kinds of documents like PDF, PPT, etc… and a web browser – as in the screen shot below – this environment can be used for for web-based customer meetings, assisted eCommerce, online collaboration, eLearning and virtual conferences. Try it out at the Lenovo virtual showroom. The product page is www.avayalive.com.

What stands out about web.alive is:

• It is easy to get started: Download the plug-in when you first visit a website with web.alive, grab a stereo-headset if possible and then start walking around with the A-W-D-S keys on your keyboard.
• It can be embedded into any website.

• It has 3D spatial audio. (That is proximity based audio, which lets you use your voice and makes using text chat the exception. Walking away from others lets their voice get softer and therefore allows for break-out sessions which conference calls don’t.)
• You always know who is speaking and won’t be in the situation not to know someone’s name.
• The host/admin can mute people with bad background noise.
• It is SPAM free.
• It has low hardware/graphics requirements.

Why not have your Sales 2.0-type webinars in web.alive?

[Disclosure: Until Ocober 1, 2009, I used to work for the company behind web.alive]

How can Sales 2.0 webinars, presentations and virtual conferences evolve beyond the 1.0 style?

In her blog post Making Webinars and Presentations Sales 2.0 Anneke Seley, author of The Sales 2.0 Book, says

“I’ve had many opportunities to  participate in Web and speaking events on the topic of Sales 2.0. While I am grateful for the invitations to  spread the important message of reinventing sales to achieve better results, something has been troubling me:  the typical approach many of us take to presentations is best described as Sales 1.0.  Sales 2.0 is about collaborative, two-way communication and sharing of ideas with prospects and customers.   Sales 1.0 describes the traditional feature/benefit-oriented pitches or presentations that we often make in one direction – to our customer or audience – without engaging them and letting them tell us about themselves and their business objectives.

Isn’t the PowerPoint presentation the ultimate Sales 1.0 offender, whether given face-to-face or online? [...]“

I could not agree more. Besides the fact that customers should be there as additional speakers and present their own case study I would even go further and say that as few people as possible should be in ‘listen only mode’. ‘In browser virtual worlds’ with 3D spatial audio like the Lenovo eLounge, where anybody can un-mute their avatar at any time or decide for their own audio stream who to mute (for example people on a bad connection), would be a great space for really 2.0-like webinars, presentations and virtual conferences that break the one-to-many pattern. Listen to this MP3 example of 3D spatial audio. @skribe wrote a review of former web.alive now avayalive engage, the technology used for the Lenovo eLounge.

[Disclosure: Until Ocober 1, 2009, I used to work for the company behind web.alive]

As you can see in the comment below @skribe also did a video walk through of the Lenovo eLounge