As marketers, much of the role is centered around creating products and messaging targeted toward our customers and clients. However, at Vitalyst, a technology support services company, they wanted to do something a little different: turn their focus inward.
Twice a year, the company holds a kick-off meeting for its sales and account management teams. "It’s a one-day event where attendees can discuss learnings from the last few months as well as a strategy for the future", said Judy Arnold, the company’s Vice President of Marketing. The event also features a team building component and awards.
“We were looking for a team activity [for the event],” Arnold said. “We have a method that we use when we work with clients called the Vitalyst Propel Methodology because we help propel you forward in your digital transformation journey. We imprinted the four stages of our methodology on there thinking that we could use these for something after the event.” The piece Arnold and her team chose was the Red Paper Plane SleekPeeks® Virtual Reality Viewers that ship flat and assemble in minutes.
“I’ve seen Structural Graphics [Red Paper Plane’s parent company] at conferences years ago and always wanted to use your services but was never able to,” Arnold said. “It never fit in the programs I was doing or the budget. [This time] we were trying to come up with something creative and I went to your site and got inspired to do a VR viewer. I’ve got a guy on my team who is very tech-savvy and I said, ‘Hey, they’ve got these viewers, can we do something with them?’”
So, they did.
As Arnold tells it, there is one award given out every year in memory of a sales person who had been with the company for a short period of time and made a big impact. Unlike the other awards given out at the meeting, this one was a surprise - no one knew who would be receiving it.
“My teammate created a Virtual Reality photo, giving away clues to who [the winner] was and we put one at each of the event attendees’ places,” she said. “We gave them directions to look at their VR viewer for clues and then go to their emails to click a link we sent them to see if they could figure out who was going to win the award before we handed it out. It really was an interactive activity because people had to figure out how to put it [the viewer] together, download Google Cardboard or Google Play, put their phone in it. They’re standing up, they’re looking around and they’re all trying to guess who it is. It was an interactive tool for our sales team.”
The introduction of inexpensive VR headsets has made it possible for brands to deliver the ultimate interactive experience to consumers, allowing them to literally walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. With Red Paper Plane's SleekPeeks®, you can fully customize these viewers with your brand colors, logos and other imagery. Not only are they cost-effective, but they ship flat and take minutes to assemble.
But the team wasn’t done yet.
After the sales event, Arnold said that the team took their remaining 40 viewers and mailed them to a targeted list of senior level account relationship managers. “We mailed them out via two-day FedEx with a link to a landing page talking about our methodology and trying to engage them to have a conversation with us,” she said. “The CEPs are following up right now.”