Empowering a sales team to become top dog

PetCare salespeople spend their days talking to retail customers about product quality and innovation, but many of them have never seen first- hand how the company produces its pet food. The costs of travel and lost productivity are just too high.

To address this gap, the company created a 360-degree video tour of one of its factories. Now, sales employees can put on Oculus Quest headsets for immersive learning experiences that are safer, less distracting, and more cost effective than in-person tours. They can better understand the production process and see how the company achieves its quality and food-safety standards. The virtual experience builds trust, and it inspires salespeople to convey that sense of trust to customers.

The sales team has always crunched vast amounts of data to plan the most effective retail shelf displays. And with Oculus for Business, they can adjust displays in a virtual space to respond more quickly to new sales data. Now, they render their retail planograms in VR along with 3D sales data that used to live only in Excel, so when they’re visiting stores they can fire up their Oculus Quest headsets, see up-to-date sales numbers, adjust the planograms virtually, and present them to store managers.

Max Andaker, Global Digital Innovation Manager for Nestlé, says that VR with Oculus makes training more accessible. “What I think is truly unique about the Oculus Quest is that it merges the high quality of an enterprise- grade device with the affordability of a consumer device,” he says, “and that will make it a lot more scalable for us.” He also sees advantages in the enterprise tools that are part of the Oculus for Business platform. “They simplify the whole device management piece, which had been a headache up until this point,” he says. “The Oculus team is also thinking about all the things around security and scalability that you have to take into consideration when you want to do something at the enterprise level.”

Nestlé Purina PetCare has only just begun to explore the possibilities of Oculus for Business. “VR is like an iceberg — you only see the top 10% of it,” Gene Feldman says. “We have no idea where this technology is going to take us, and that’s the most exciting part.”