Selling VR/AR To Your Boss: A Guide For Trainers
Let’s paint this picture: Last weekend you visited the mall and saw a Virtual Reality booth. You were feeling adventurous and tried it. The experience was awesome, and immediately prompted ideas for ways to transform training at your organization. In advance of your next team meeting, you research how other teams have incorporated VR, and the success metrics they’ve witnessed. Monday comes, you feel confident and courageous about your new idea, so you pitch it to your direct manager. This is how your conversation goes:
You: “We should incorporate Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) into training. We’ve received tons of feedback and everyone’s tired of powerpoints, e-learning, and mounds of paper.”
Boss: “What the heck is VR/AR?! Sounds too expensive.”
How are you going to respond?
Selling new, innovative ideas can always be an uphill battle at large, change-resistant organizations. There are numerous ways you could try to build the business case, but experience has shown us that there are three key talking points that tend to generate the most traction for aspiring change-makers:
1. Would you rather our people make mistakes in a safe but realistic practice environment, or on the job with “live ammunition?”
In some industries such as oil & gas, heavy manufacturing, and of course healthcare, employee mistakes can have life-threatening consequences? Even in environments emphasizing soft skills, avoidable mistakes can cost employers a fortune. Managers who can’t navigate difficult conversations will drive key talent out the door. Sales reps who mistakenly promote off-label can draw your company into legal action, regulatory penalties, and recklessly endanger patients. Can we really risk relying on passive tools like e-learning and once-a-year role-plays to ensure our people get the mission-critical practice repetitions they need to consistently make the right on-the-job decisions? VR/AR has the ability to provide a simulated environment for any time, anywhere practice, a luxury that the aerospace industry has enjoyed for decades through flight simulation, but until recently was largely out of reach for healthcare. What exciting times!
2. Let’s give our trainees a fighting chance of actually retaining what they learn.
We’ve all heard that statistic that 90% of training content is forgotten within a few weeks. How often do you catch someone falling asleep or becoming distracted in a training class/e-learning setting? Let’s face the harsh reality: most people click through e-learns just for the record to show they’ve completed it. How do we make training more interesting? Here’s the new science: VR/AR has proven to show an 80% retention rate of content after one year. VR puts people in a fully immersed environment, mitigating distractions. In addition to a person being fully immersed and less distracted, the power behind the technology allows users to be more engaged. In this world, a person is able to move around and interact, creating a more memorable experience outside of traditional video and print materials.
3. What if I could show you how VR/AR would actually REDUCE our travel & facilitator costs?
Ask your boss how much budget is allocated to a specific sales training event that could be administered in virtual reality? (airfare, gas, lodging, food, facilitator fees, etc). I’m almost certain this will hit home. Companies spend tons of money on training. Think about it - they have to pay a facilitator or instructor, book blocks of rooms at hotels, sometimes purchase lots of plane tickets, and pay for food. Most times there’s not a need to send an entire salesforce to a central location for training. VR/AR can help eliminate this issue, we can send training to the reps. What would it look like if we could allocate this budget to something else? We’ve seen clients experience an immediate 35% reduction in training-related travel costs by migrating existing in-person programs to VR. The double win comes when we consider the opportunity costs we can offset when we avoid taking sales reps out of the field. Talk about a proposal managers can get behind!
These are just a few of the arguments in support of adding VR/AR to the mix of training modalities used at your organization. To further strengthen your case, consider how elements like real-time personalization, branching paths, and gamification could be overlaid to further boost resonance with learners. And lastly, as an assessment tool, VR/AR can provide a unique window into learner behaviors that help you more accurately diagnose recurring skill gaps. We’ve seen companies radically re-target their entire training program based on insights gleaned in VR/AR. We can’t promise it’ll be an easy sell the first time around, but once your team starts actively experimenting, this technology typically sells itself.
Written by Tajh Aiken
Business Development Manager, Lucid Dream VR
