How To Win More Sales, Faster Through Immersive Selling - Ben Powers, Visiting Media [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: Do you want to drive more revenue and happier guests and customers through a better sales process? I just got back from an event where the CEOs of Hilton and Marriott were talking about how groups are the fastest growing segment of business and I'm sure you're seeing this as well. There's a lot of opportunity right now if you know how to sell well. But even if you don't think a lot about sales, I encourage you to stay tuned because part of the beauty of many hotel businesses is their complexity. There's so much that they offer guests from a range of guest rooms to event spaces, and communicating that effectively is essential if you want to book the business that you could be booking. All that to say, I'm delighted to have Ben Powers, the CEO of Visiting Media, joining me today in a special sponsored episode because he's going to share a masterclass in how you can effectively sell today with immersive technology and multi-sensory experiences. Ben is going to show you how to make your customers feel like they're already on site, shortening sales cycles, and boosting your win rates. I learned a lot from Ben in this episode, and I think you will as well. Let's get into it.

Josiah: I always love our listeners to understand the people behind the companies, behind the ideas, behind the strategies. So I'm really interested for you, Ben, if you could tell our listeners a little bit about your journey into your role today and the exciting work that you're doing.

Ben: Yeah, that's great. You know, I've been called several times a serial entrepreneur. both in a good way and a bad way, I have a feeling. But, you know, long story short, I, in high school, was a disc jockey, and I saw a wedding photographer shooting this wedding that I was a disc jockey. And I said, what do you, what did you get paid to shoot this wedding? And it was like three times more than I got paid and a lot less equipment, right? So, okay, I'm going to be a wedding photographer. And that led to investing in wedding and event facilities because they fed a lot of wedding photographers business. And in running that company as a regional director of sales over a group of event facilities, I wanted to differentiate how we really connected with our consumer, how we used simple technology to make things easier and flow faster. And right around that time, this is probably 10 years ago, give or take, a gentleman named Ben Kaplan walked into my office. He was a Google photographer, never heard of Google Street View or anything 360, 3D, never really even heard of virtual tours. And he showed me what they called Street View product of a restaurant. And I remember the emotional, feeling I had of feeling like I was in that space. It was so palatable. I still remember the guy's name. I still remember the moment where I was sitting and I thought to myself, okay, there's something to this, right? There's something to this. I feel like I'm there, but I'm not. And at the end of the day, really bad application, but great visual experience. And so that was where the idea first started. to dabble into using virtual tours, which at the time you have to keep in mind were brand new, but using them in a very specific way in a sales process. So, not shotgun style, but what if I use it in the first conversation in this way or that way? I started to track ROI and how they affected consumer behavior, obviously very low tech at the time, I was just keeping notes. but I saw a pattern almost immediately. And so we developed the first version of what is our flagship product today, about eight, nine years ago, based on some of that early data. And it was really not about, you know, virtual tours. It was really about how the feeling of being in a place you're not in, which was something you could experience through a visual, a round photo. This is an audio event here, but I've got my arms up on the screen and I'm making this round photo. You're kind of inside it. You can look around inside it. And our brains react almost the same to that as if we're physically there. And that chemical change in the brain is what I was experiencing. And I wanted to be able to put that into a sales process. And over time, we now build software that does that with great accuracy and surgical precision. But that's how it all got started. From that, it was okay, can we make a product out of that? Yes. And originally it was selfish. We wanted to beat out our own competition, which we were able to do. And then it became this early stage product that's now led to our growth and now new platforms built on that initial platform. But that was the origin story of how we started to get to where we are today.

Josiah: Amazing. And where you are today is helping hoteliers on so many different levels. But I guess if you had to summarize it, how would you describe what visiting media does?

Ben: Yeah, you know, it's interesting that people look at our website and think, oh, you're a virtual tour company. And that's not untrue because we still are considered the global leader at creating those visual tools, but they're the fuel that loads into our engine. So we are, you know, through and through a software innovator. And we're interested in building software that people who sell for hospitality can turn on and learn how to use and whose functionality makes their lives a lot better in the sense that it drives a lot quicker decision-making and shortens the sales cycle. So if you say, well, what do you do? Well, we're a software company. Well, who do you serve? Hospitality, full stop. But it's all about making selling simple and easy. And that immersive history I was explaining how we started with Leveraging a virtual tour has now ballooned into so much more very data-driven beyond virtual tour. We can get into that in a bit, but that's really who we are and what we do. One thing I love about our company, I was thinking about this last night as I'm thinking about today, we're still all made up of the industry. Like everyone I work with came out of the industry and I almost consider my customers to be my partners in the business. And I love that about our culture. You know, it's kind of what hospitality is all about. Listeners on this show get that, like we all get that. It's something unique to hospitality. It's about people. It's always about people. But we're so glued to our customer and care so much almost to a fault about their problems. It keeps us up at night. But I still love that about our company. So, you know, yes, we're a software company, we're a technology company, but we're hearing our customers and solving for them at such a fast pace. And we're doing things that have never been done before. It's really, you know, zero to one. You think that's a problem, but that's actually not the problem. Here's the problem. It eliminates all of that entirely and a lot more. You know, it's a really fun way to be.

Josiah: When you have to be close to your customers to do that, right, to come up with those innovations, right? And I imagine folks that are working in sales and hospitality listening to this, you mentioned making it simple and easy. I'm thinking, yes, this sounds exciting, but there's a really wide range of market participants that listen to this show. Everything from owners and investors to people at brands to management companies. And I wonder if we could speak for just a moment about the importance of sales in general, in hospitality, because even within commercial functions, I've had some exposure to hotel marketing and revenue functions, and everyone thinks what they're doing is so important. And if you're working outside of a commercial function, you might be even more distant. from this, but I actually think sales is so important. I actually started my career in sales. Not a lot of people know this, but my first job was actually for a radio station selling ads. And then I spent a number of years working in sales capacity, selling it into hotels. And my observation through that process is that you know, if you have something the world needs, it's sort of your duty to become an effective seller of that, right? It really elevated my view of the profession of sales. But I'd be curious about your take because you mentioned everything from earlier in your career, you know, working in the events and wedding business, you know, that is a highly complex business. And then now as CEO of a company serving hospitality, broadly, I guess, across all of these experiences, what have you learned and observed about why sales is so important in hospitality?

Ben: You know, there's the basic answer, which is it's how we drive a lot of the revenue that is acquired to grow and prosper as a hospitality business. Any owner I sit with, manager, property DOS, or front desk staffer is going to say, yeah, of course, that matters. But I mentioned this earlier, it's a people business. Like when you boil it down, it's a bunch of people. And I think selling will always be so critical in this industry, especially because we're selling experiences. I don't care if it's a select service property in a major metro area with no event space or a luxury resort, it's still an experience that is interwoven in the life of our customer at some point. And having a human being at the time and place where really a human being is the best messenger. We talk a lot about AI and all these things coming. They'll supplement us as humans doing what we do best and being out of focus. But I still think it's a human-to-human sort of event at all levels of the game. So when you think about ownership, You know, they're often being sold on the vision of a development or the developers are working with the owners. It's still sales. It may just be more of a conversation at that point. But that ethos has to get down into a management company to understand, you know, the product that's being built or the product they're buying into or the conversion. It still all comes down to, again, the people. Where we fit into that, too, which is really an exciting part of, I think, our future especially, is the visualization combined with the salesperson creates that outcome where things move a lot quicker, especially in hospitality. Everything we just talked about is all around. We're selling physical space, really. We're selling real estate and the experience of being in it. And so we have found that sweet spot is when you can actually you know, wrap your arm around that customer and make them really comfortable as one good salesperson often can do. But then just show them and check every box quickly visually that allows them to become your partner so much faster.

Josiah: I appreciate that example because, actually, I interact a fair amount with owners and investors but that wasn't necessarily the first use case that came to mind, but it's an interesting one. Obviously a lot of money's at stake in those environments, but even within, let's say if there's a general manager listening to this that has a large property with event space, It seems that sales is kind of the way that you get, you know, these big-ticket events booked or meetings booked, which is going to be obvious to some of our listeners, but maybe not all. And I'm curious if you saw this even kind of when you were working in the events and wedding business. Is there something about the complexity of these kind of high-ticket items where you kind of have to have a salesperson there because just having a website is not going to do the trick?

Ben: A hundred percent, you know, a salesperson who's well-trained and, you know, people trust them immediately. Like there's things about a good salesperson, anyone listening who's in sales knows this, that you just can't train, you know, it's this ethos about them. And then you can train a lot of other things, process, you know, making sure that the, the way that they approach, they're very thoughtful about what works and what doesn't, so they're constantly improving. But yeah, when you look at a complex property, multiple revenue streams. The general manager is responsible at the end of the day for F&B revenue is just as much as events revenue, you know, daily, you know, room rates matter. But yeah, a human being has to master that, has to know the product well. And without that, you're really throwing yourself into a I like to say you're boxing with an arm tied behind your back. You know, that's where everyone could be, but the salesperson elevates the property, if they're good, to that next level. We really elevate the salesperson. So that's where we fit into that salesperson. We want to give them superpowers that allow them to create a ripple effect of what they can do in the time they can do it. But I'm still a huge proponent of salespeople and I think always will be. There's no way around that person being essential. You mentioned larger properties. I would argue that even the small property with no event space, you know, that's duking it out against 30 other similar properties in a downtown market, having the right salesperson who's proactive and understands the product and the customer well and their concerns and can respond even before the customer brings up a concern, eliminating it, like that person's always going to win against their competitors.

Josiah: Amazing. So the promise of effective sales is compelling, right? You have an opportunity to bring a lot of revenue into the business. I'm curious about the challenges that you see that you're addressing now. You touched on some of these images, your example there of maybe being in this highly competitive market, you know, whether it's that or others, what are some of the challenges you saw or barriers that were holding people back from selling as effectively as they could be?

Ben: Yeah, boy, there's a lot of answers to that question. Sometimes it's just the wrong person's trying to do it. I think proper management, proper training, and knowing really who's right and who's wrong, that's table stakes. But when you get people who are good at it, I always believe that tools matter. You think of any profession the surgeon uses tools. When you get to the level of professionalism that a lot of industries ascend to, there are always tools. And you think about the tools that we as salespeople often have. We have our phone, we have our inbox, we have some training, and often that's it. So one of the things that can really differentiate a salesperson, and I don't hear really any pushback on this when we dig into it, is having the right tools. And that's another area that we try to help the customer not only understand, but really figure out the lay of the land. The other thing is keeping it simple. We often see when we're working with customers or ideating on problem-solving; it's just too complicated. They've made it so complicated. And I mentioned earlier, it's about people. And if we can bring it back down to that, basic level of we're all people, our customers are people, they have fears like us, they have, you know, all sorts of. Anxiety is probably like, like you and I have from time to time and we can relate to them. And that is the key, you know, once you're authentic and can be related to, then from there it all flows. But I'm not sure if I'm already off the answer to your question, but that's my, uh, my opining here.

Josiah: It makes a ton of sense. And I guess you referenced a few elements of this, but I'm curious how you've seen this evolve over the past couple of years because you touched on examples where it seems speed is so important. And it just feels, from my perspective, that people's expectations for responsiveness and getting things done has only accelerated. Have you noticed things around speed that have heightened the importance of providing some sort of immersive view into what you offer? Has that increased recently?

Ben: Yes, for sure. We think about it as often in training, like if you're my client, what do I know that I need to make sure you know, and the mindset that I want to work with you to get to, how does that turn into you winning more? And often it's very much correlated to the customer winning more. And what I mean by that is if you can save the customer time, or you're more convenient than the other three properties, or you give them the information they need sooner, or in a way that's more real, more authentic, more multi-sensory, it's one of the nerdy terms we use a lot, you will win more often, almost always. It's just human nature. But speed is a component of that. So we can think about speed in two ways. You know, I send a request to you for some info and you get back to me really fast. And then the hotel next door gets back to me a little slower. Well, you were faster, but maybe they texted me and you sent it to my email. Well, I'm still probably going to go with the guy who texted me personally because I was able to utilize it in a way faster. So being able to not only be quick, but be on target and understanding what the heck that target is, because for me, it might be here, but for a certain demographic, it might be the inbox. And that's all part of that business intelligence that can then help you really distill down what speed really means, you know. But if we boil it down even lower and lower, you want to serve the customer in a way that really makes them feel taken care of. And that is more complicated than just speed, but speed is a big component these days.

Josiah: It's a great point, though. And actually, I want to pick up on one of the words that you mentioned of this multi-sensory sort of experience. I think actually this is why hospitality sales is pretty exciting, because if you're selling, I don't know, IT security software, it's like, yeah, maybe you're selling a feeling to some extent. But in hospitality, there are real physical, often beautiful buildings and so many elements of the experience to work with. But I imagine it can also be challenging. And so maybe this is what you're getting at. It's like speed's important, but you also need to figure out a way to effectively communicate what you have in a way that responds maybe to needs that your client has expressed.

Ben: Well, so A lot of times we're, like I mentioned, we're assumed to be a virtual tour company, but really virtual tours are like a video production. It's a one-size-fits-all thing. You know, you can hand it to a client. It's the same for every client. We're in the immersion business. So we're in that business of making that customer feel really comfortable way earlier. Sometimes a visual experience does that, but not always. So we have all the data through the way where our technology is built to track all that. And so any one of our clients who's using our cloud products, they might be changing their strategy every six months based on the data. But we're talking right now, right? You and I were having this conversation. This would be a lot less interesting if you couldn't hear me. Just like it's more interesting if I can send you a link that shows my hotel, but what if I could talk to you too? So one of the things we discovered, there are really two tidbits that I talk about as like table stakes. If you're going to use immersion, and for the sake of our audience, we can just call those proper virtual tours. You have to combine them with non-immersive assets to make the most effective. So that PDF that shows the restaurant menu and talks about Sunday brunch on the patio, but you can click right there and look at the patio, that's more effective than that PDF without that virtual tour, just like if I'm sending you a photo of a guest room, the ability to click and step in is more effective when combined. But what's really effective is this thing called multi-sensory immersion. So, if I were to send you an image and then my voice started explaining it to you, that's absolutely the best. This is the oldest story in hospitality. As we all know, as salespeople, it's all about people. It's about the spaces and places, but it's a win to have that person physically located in the product, which, you know, if you look at data, it's going to be impossible in 10 or 20 years. Consumers won't put up with that anymore. They want to make these decisions remotely. They just can't do them well. And so our customers open up their customer base. Really, it's anyone on planet Earth with a smartphone because we're able to be best in class at delivering that experience of being on the property. whether it's the audio or the visual or smell someday, in that sales process early in that buying cycle. It's almost like, you know, the right immersive experience, you experience it really early in the buying cycle. It's like choosing to go a different direction than you would have otherwise. Hotels that can't do it aren't down that road. So it's a real pivot for that customer towards properties that can do this because it's so much easier for them.

Josiah: I would actually love, Ben, if we could talk a little bit more about how you're addressing these challenges. You spoke a little bit about this experience that you're empowering hoteliers with. So whether it's on the technology side or other ways that you're supporting the industry, I'd love to hear about how you come up with a solution to this, because I think that the problems are acute. The payoff is potentially big. And you've taken this approach of getting really close to your customers. You're listening closely to them. You're innovating with them. Tell us a little bit more about these innovations and what you're offering as a result of that sort of, I guess, perspective.

Ben: The area that we're really, really focused on, we always want to align with our clients on a couple of things. We want to agree on a few things and believe the same things. And one of them is that there is a right and wrong way to do what we do and to use immersion. And our clients care about doing it the right way. Well, they want to be best in class, and that means they want to follow data. And so really where we sit uniquely on planet earth is grabbing all that data because of the way our products developed and then using that data to give our clients agility to quickly pivot and move and adjust. But when you think about some of the problems we've run into or our customers have brought to us, one of them is simply what type of virtual tour technology should I be buying? And the answer is different depending on the market. The customer segment, the flag, if you're a Hilton, it's different than if you're a Hyatt because those brands have different strategies. So we are the company who can actually tell that Hilton Garden Inn in Bethesda, here's what you should be investing in today if you want to drive ROI in A, B, and C areas. And so we can do that math for them in a way that's very refreshing. And typically the answer is the least expensive. A lot of times the right blend ends up being the least expensive or close to it. They almost always are spending more than they need to. So that's one thing we solved really for the world was if you're in hospitality and you're trying to sell a property in EMEA or an Asia pack or North America, we can kind of give you a lot of guidance on where you should start. From there, it's that sales enablement. So human beings sitting at home or sitting in a hotel selling to other human beings. boy, what are the ways they could do that, the superpowers we could give them that we know will drive the outcome that we want, which at the end of the day is stronger sales and happier clients. But I'll tell you the area that I am personally most excited about, where I think there's the most opportunity is distribution.

Josiah: I would love to hear about distribution because it feels like you see a lot, and this is what excites you the most. So what excites you about distribution? 

Ben: I mean, I got a pile of yellow pads over there by my chair. You can't see this because it's audio, but every morning I get up ideally around 5, 530 and I get my coffee and I sit there and I develop product. And 99.9% of the things I come up with never leave the yellow pad. They go straight here into the trash. And then a few of them get over to our product team and 99% of those get up in the trash. But the area where I really love thinking about ideating and solving is distribution. And we can go down that rabbit hole for a bit if you don't mind. Yeah. So we already discussed how if we're thinking of immersion, it's not just virtual tours. It's my ability to speak to my client before I actually could previously before we're actually talking. How do you distribute that? Well, if a human being is selling and using software, they can do it through the software. But how do you do it on .com or how do you do it in the booking engine? We talk about where we're relevant to ownership. Well, we're relevant to ownership because we figured out how we do that distribution and the outcome we should expect is, for example, more room upgrades. But that being bundled in a distribution platform is what I'm most excited about. I'll walk you down a basic road here of what this could be, right? And I'll start with how it is today. If you're a management company, I have so many amazing management company customers who the moment they could change from before to after, it was just when we bonded, you know, cause it was just like such, such problem-solving. But you talk to one of these companies. before and let's say they're leveraging virtual tours. Well, they probably have five or six different kinds, and the way they distribute them, I'm not kidding, is they take the link and they paste it as many places as they can, right? So imagine they have to reshoot that hotel because something changes. Well, now you're redoing that all over. How do you track the analytics? you know, maybe it's not accessible, not ADA accessible, the virtual tour platform. So now you're actually spreading links everywhere that are technically really not what you should be doing, right? So what we do is load it into one ADN, asset distribution network. It's powered by an API. And then we can go to Hyatt or Hilton or, you know, hotels.com or Cvent and say, here's how you access that API. Every hotel is coded with their nomenclature, the unique hotel ID code. For example, if you're a Hyatt, that's called their spirit ID. And then every item in our system is coded. for the ecosystem, for everybody in the world to easily identify that, hey, that's a Corner King suite at that Hyatt in San Jose. And then for free, we've opened up that API to the world. And so not only does it allow these sites like Take a Trip Advisor or Hotels.com, they're getting links copy pasted, right? That's the before. They're probably not ADA-accessible. They're probably not coded for GDPR. It's just a wild west. It's chaos. And they don't even really realize it. And now they can just pull the API. By the time it hits them, it's fully accessible. It's all managed. It's tracked. It's on brand because the brands can control the distribution settings. And we can do more than just send, say, a virtual tour. We can send a virtual tour with the director of sales thanking that viewer on hotels.com or whatever, maybe. So we're able to, from a single source of truth, send these things out across the internet, but they're always under control of the customer. So if that pillow in the lobby changes and you have to reshoot, you go to one place and strike one key, and maybe in 700 places globally, and maybe a couple thousand clients and their proposals, it's just updated. It's all instantaneous. And that's never been done before. And we solved that. And so for me, You know, I'm like a proud parent seeing that thing spool up for a management company and the traffic that it creates for them and the simplicity.

Josiah: So much time and money savings. It's amazing. Now, you mentioned something earlier that caught my attention in that the use cases could be quite different depending on where people are using these technologies and these approaches. You mentioned a management company. Is there another client that comes to mind in terms of maybe a different business or different implementation? I'm curious how this might look at a different context.

Ben: So the vertical I think about is the property and then above the property, the management company. And within that layer of the pancake, if you will, if you think about like a stack of pancakes, you've got regional directors of sales. When they log into a tool like ours, they see their portfolios. You've got the revenue folks, the distribution team that's used to be copy pasting everything that's now enjoying automation. Then you've got the brand. We haven't really talked about the brand, but the fun part about hospitality that again, I just love this. The brand, you know, they got all these hotels, some are managed, some are franchise. You go down to the management level, well, they got six different brands and a bunch of independents. Jump back up to the ownership, well, one manager might have 26 owners they're dealing with. And then if you go up to ownership and drop back down, well, they've got six brands at the ownership level and 20 managers. So it's this insanely interconnected business, right? But every persona within each of these pancakes or buckets has different needs. They have different problems they're trying to solve and different things that they're trying to get out of what we do. And we have built our platform to serve all of those needs. Okay, so the brand is a fun one. Some of my most exciting conversations are with large brands. I'm thinking Hyatt and Hilton, who both are heavily engaged in our cloud products at the brand level. You know, I mentioned this a bit earlier, but I'll take us down this road again. Imagine you're a brand, let's say you're Hilton, and up to now, you've allowed your hotels to submit virtual tour links to you, and you're taking them and putting them on the website someplace. We did a penetration test, a code scan once of a major brand's portfolio of websites, which wasn't Hilton, by the way, and we found over 1,500 links from their websites out to other companies, basically, servers in different parts of the world, controlled by who knows, You asked the brand, can you monitor for uptime? Can you monitor for malware? Can you monitor for those links being redirected to whatever websites? The answer is absolutely not. No way. We don't know if they're accessible or if they're compliant. It's just crazy. The brand cares a lot when it realize the liability. by linking their site and sending their customer to all these places they cannot monitor or control by using, for example, our redistribution tool. We just solve that overnight, but that's a big problem to brands. The other one, I would argue, imagine, you know, you're that Hyatt, and you've got franchised properties, and then you've got your manage. So you're, you're a management company too. How do you make sure everyone's playing by the same playbook? You know, how do you make sure that everyone is following brand standards? Well, with virtual tours, you can't. So what we do is load them all into this software and it allows the brand to set standards. So that management company that has maybe five brands they serve, the brand is actually setting the brand standards in the settings. Those flow down to all the management companies. So that management company, as I mentioned earlier if they're producing virtual tours and then sharing them with a Hilton versus a Hyatt, different things are happening with those assets per what the brand has actually set in the software. So it gives the brand global control and global visibility. And they care a lot about that. Also on that distribution side, they have certain relationships and certain rules about how they want to use assets that are very unique to the brand. And managing all that is something we make pretty easy. One of the things also about immersion and virtual tours is if you can manage them and distribute them, you can apply them to every inch of your marketing effort. So for hotels that care about social media or about utilizing the channels on the internet, most provide value to them. Think about all these places, all the stuff you're already doing, even the front desk or QR codes. Immersion literally blends into all of that and increases the value of the ROI, the performance of everything. That's one thing I love about it. It's not just putting it on the site and hoping it works. It's everywhere. And that drives so much value for those thinking about the few dollars that maybe you do have to spend and how you can actually maximize the results.

Josiah: I appreciate you walking through those use cases, because if you think about what selling can look like today, given the technologies that exist that you provide, how that changes the game for the individual seller at a property, to someone working at a management company on a regional level, let's say, to somebody overseeing multiple brands at some of the biggest hospitality companies in the world. Those use cases are really important because you can have kind of the promise or the premise of a really interesting technology, but you have to think about it in your context, right? That's where you get stuff done. And you think about the complexities of that. I've seen and spent a lot of my career in hotel technology. I saw a lot of projects fall flat for people who understand those dynamics and think about how to take this opportunity and fit it within our needs and opportunities as an organization. You have to combine the two.

Ben: Yeah. And that's, you know, I keep coming back to this as a common sense, just basic building block of our industry, which I absolutely love, is it's again about the people. That's what I love about our team here. You know, just last week alone, I had two people, clients of mine, ask if they could work for us. That's common. Like we, we pull people out of the industry. all the time, and they come in here with the knowledge that everyone's needs are quite frankly different. And without a team of folks from the industry, we wouldn't have that DNA, right? And so being able to understand that and then ask a lot of questions, have that constant feedback loop. But it is very, very fascinating. And you know, back to when we came up with this idea when I was running wedding venues, you know, 10 years ago, that was a one size fits all, square peg, square hole, hope it works for you kind of deal. Now the platform is so nimble, that even within a brand, let's take like a Hilton, where some of their call centers use a call center tool we built, so they could take what the properties are investing in and pull it up to the call center instantly, and then use it to drive revenue at the call center level. Even one call center to another call center, they have different needs. And we're able to actually meet those needs very, very surgically and acutely, which is really critical to the overall value of any tool, you know, frankly.

Josiah: Yeah. If you're going to implement something like this, you need to be working with the right partner. So I think a partner that has deep industry expertise that works closely with clients is a key piece of it. I think another element of this is looking at data. I think within your organization, you, Ben, actually mentioned doing this kind of across your business, all the hospitality businesses you interact with. Have there been data points that have stood out to you recently that kind of surprised you or made you say, hey, this is really interesting to see things trending in this direction?

Ben: Yeah, I feel like I'm on a, you know, the world that I see in my head is five or 10 years from now. And I'm, so I'm living in this world where I'm beating my head into my desk all the time. Like, why is it happening this way? But data helps us tell that story. And data is like a little gift. You know, you get the right data and you discover something. First of all, there are a couple of triangulations here. Sometimes you can't get the data. And so the first thing we asked ourselves is what data would we need to be able to determine A, B, and C? And what would the value be of that realization if we could, right? And so we worked backward. And the way we created our software to syndicate out to all these endpoints and feed to all the salespeople and all pull back to one source of what we call truth. Now we could see data that we could never see before. In human history, we could never see it before that. Now we can. So then we started to look at that data. And so you asked the question, what were some surprising little gifts that we found? Two that I've already mentioned today were that if you're going to use virtual tours, first of all, there are a lot that don't work. Most don't work. But the ones that do work, work really, really well. So you gotta be able to know which ones. The data taught us that. But it also taught us that combining things like virtual tours with your PDFs, as an example, you know, 10x ROI. So just that one little pivot meant that if you're going to use virtual tours and you have the right ones, you're going to see a far better return. and then combining the non-immersive with the immersive sales tools with your voice, like I talked about earlier, that extra layer of immersion, again, boom, now we're up to a whole nother plateau. And so the data just gave us those gifts that we could then go back to our clients. I remember I was in Chicago late last year, sitting with new general managers who flew into HQ, doing training; it's something we've done now twice in Chicago. And I remember all these really excited directors of sales in the room, and I just said, okay, If you try this, you should see this change. If you just try, you know, this one little thing, the data showed us, you know, in the last quarter for the first time ever that this was true. And the feedback I would get from emails over the next quarter because they went back to their busy, crazy lives, but they changed one little thing. And boy, did they sure see what we predicted. And it's just like, ah, for me, that is the best part of my, one of the best parts of my job. You can't beat that. And it's just something we didn't know before that we now know. And data is what makes that possible.

Josiah: Yeah. Well, it's an exciting time. It's really exciting to kind of not only have data that allows us to see opportunity, but I think what you're speaking to is a very collaborative environment, right? Where you also have to be the sort of hospitality leader who is looking for best practices. You're looking to learn from your peers. You're looking to work with your partners, like yourselves, who invest heavily in this, right? You can't just imagine you're just going to sit, you know, in your office and come up with all the best ideas. Innovation doesn't work like that.

Ben: Well, you know, I'm glad you kind of hit on this thread because I think today, I mean, we're now kind of in the game, right? When we started out, we were the ones knocking on the doors and come look at what we do and try to just constantly explain. We're not a virtual tour company. We sit above that, you know, we aggregate that to revenue and all this, but some of our, again, most successful partners, we all agree on so many things, but they're curious. They come to work every day realizing they don't know everything. and that what was a huge new success story 10 years ago, like something that was brand new then, like the smartphone, is now table stakes. And that next huge leap in incremental revenue generation may very well only be known by a few people today or by a small group. It's the whole movement philosophy that takes all these followers to create a tipping point. We're at the first time in human history where three things have come together: devices and technology. I'm holding it in my hand; of course, you can all see this perfectly through the radio, through the podcast, and my smartphone here. Media that can be viewed on this device, immersion, VR, 360, and 3D, didn't exist at this level 10, 15 years ago. Smartphones came out, you know, in July of 2007 with the iPhone. the right media coming together, and guess what? A global pandemic hit us. And that bumped consumer behavior permanently, accelerated by at least 30 years, to allow these immersive experiences to take the place of physical visitation, for example. So we're now in a world where these three things came together and opened up this huge opportunity to tackle a market in a way, as a salesperson, that we hadn't done before. And that market is responding. And so when you think about the people who are on at that table, thinking about it, if you're an owner or a management company or a brand, taking that very seriously with a deep level of curiosity, you're just turning a blind eye to this massive flow of new customer. And if we fast forward one, two, three, four decades, that's the majority of your customers. The trend is insanely fast-paced in that way. So to me, that's what it's all about is being curious and not just thinking, oh, I've got a link to this thing. I'm good to go, right? Because most often that's going to hurt you.

Josiah: Well, the trend and the opportunity is so much bigger than that. And it is evolving quickly, as you pointed out. I imagine our listeners are saying, Hey, you know, this sounds great. I want to level up my sales program. I think from our conversation, we talked about there are so many different dimensions to this, and it's going to be dependent on the environment. You find yourself and even sales itself is so broad. So maybe let's take it off the table. You have to have the right people on the bus. You have to make sure they're trained. Maybe let's talk specifically about technology and processes. For our listeners, what would you suggest as some practical steps they can take after listening to our conversation to move in this direction of capitalizing on the opportunity that exists to sell more effectively?

Ben: Yeah, I think a couple of things to start out by explaining really some of the things we hear a lot and have to work through as objections maybe or as assumptions. This sort of sales enablement works for all hotels. It doesn't matter if you're a very small select service property where you think it would never be necessary or helpful or if you're a mega-resort. The data is clear, it works for all. In fact, it indexes towards a higher ROI with the smaller hotel. It's also the future in a big way. And if you're listening and you know what virtual tours are, and you think they're even remotely helpful for hospitality, or you believe a little bit of what we're talking about, you're probably in that bucket of, you know, learning more can only be helpful. And there's a lot of people listening who probably own immersive assets and want to turn them into revenue and know how to go about it. So depending on who's, who's coming to us, it's a pretty simple process, but it all starts with alignment and education. And, you know, I'm more interested in people getting curious and coming to learn. Whether they become a client of ours or another company is not so important to me. It's more that they learn and they're empowered and they have what they need to make the best choice. Typically that process leads to people being highly excited and interested. But number one is, you know, get curious and learning. Whether it's my website or any other, go look, go look at the case studies. It's all there. It's really, really easy to prove this works. That's one thing I wrote in my notes in prepping for today that I love about what we do. It absolutely works. There is no question. There is no gray. It works always. You just have to believe that enough to take the next step. And so education, alignment, getting excited. That's the first step. From there, we tend to do a trial. So the process is really easy. We can spool up. And it's funny, Josiah, I sell a visual product, and I'm in a visual business, and we're here on a podcast. I was struggling in my head, like, how do I explain all this? Cause it's so visual. So I guess my advice would be to go see it. Go kick the tires, go experience what I experienced 10 years ago with that aha moment because it's so much more powerful today. And you'll know really fast if it's something that makes sense. When we do bring on new clients, like we had a portfolio join us last hour, I was on a call last hour implementing them. They had already invested in virtual tours for about half of their properties, but all of their hotels had photos, videos, PDFs, you know, diagramming software, CRM, all that loads into our product. So by the end of the week, they'll be fully implemented. We'll just put all that stuff into our world and then start training their teams per our SOP. So it's very, very easy, at least to dip your toe in and try. And usually with the product being so addictive, that leads to all good things downstream. And then, some of our clients need us to visit their properties and create these brand-approved, really best-in-class visual assets. That's something we do at no additional cost, by the way. I think that's a surprise to most of our clients, but we don't raise the rate on our software product and our partnership. to visit the property and create the visual assets. We've made that so inexpensive and so essential that we consider it a must-have. But whether we're creating them or they already have them, the software and the implementation is really fast. And then it's about winning the hearts and minds of the salespeople by having a lot of compassion and grace and consistency and patience. But we came out of the industry and we were them not too long ago. So it helps a lot to see them as peers for sure.

Josiah: Amazing. Well, visiting media.com is a place where people can learn more about all of this. I wonder before we go, Ben, actually, if you have kind of a couple of thoughts on questions our listeners can ask as they evaluate technology because we're heading into a conference season. I'm trying to help our community get better at shopping for tech. Because it can feel intimidating if you haven't done a lot of these evaluations before. You've been a part of many of them, I think on both sides of the equation here. What would be some questions, whether it's at a trade show or I'm out there shopping, trying to educate myself that our listeners should be asking themselves?

Ben: Yeah, it depends on what kind of technology, but honestly, if we're talking salespeople, almost always any technology that makes it more complicated or adds more steps or puts a distance between you and your human customer will probably fail for several reasons. One of them is just, you may not choose to ever use or adopt it. So I always look at what I know to be factual, like here's how I'm performing today and what I'm doing today, if I'm talking about myself as a salesperson. And then how does that technology actually automate the things that I don't need to personally be doing and give me more time to lean into those personal touches or absolutely simplify, you know, dictation software is a good example. It's a great investment. You know, you can do three times as much in an hour. But if I had to go and key in a deal into some deal software versus just sticking in an email and here's the price, I wouldn't do it because it would slow me down, even if it looks prettier. So I always boil it down to simple, simple, simple, simple. How can we simplify some of it? So that you can do the things that only a human being can do more often and eliminate all of the other stuff in between.

Josiah: I'm curious if you have any cautionary points or things to look out for as people look for help in this area. What have you noticed that might save our listeners some time and accelerate their process a bit?

Ben: Yeah, in this area, I can certainly opine at length on that, but you know, virtual tours are technology. They're all different. You've got to understand a lot more than you think, often to make good choices. So if you think about virtual tours, pretty much anyone with a camera can go and create virtual tours. So you've got now, you know, 10,000 vendors out there. They are core technology. So you're really buying a tech product, not a photo product. So it does really matter to know the data behind. Just take 3D for example, seven or eight different technologies that produce 3D models, Matterport being one we've all heard of. And then, if you look at Matterport's technology, there are three different versions, right? And if you go and buy 3D through a Matterport photographer, I've never heard the question asked, what version of 3D do you, which generation are you using? They just don't know, but only one generation of the three is going to actually work for you. And it's only going to work in a few places. So I would say arm yourself with a bit of education on what you're actually buying because it's not one size fits all. It's so, so different. It's actually quite complicated. And find an expert who can work with you, almost like a broker, to help you make the right choices. And be very, very aware of what the brands approve and don't allow, because that will determine how you can actually use it. These are all, of course, things that we've built into our software, so it's all automated. But these are the mistakes I see made all the time when people don't educate themselves.

Josiah: We'll include some links in the show notes, Ben, where people can learn more. But for folks that are listening just to the audio, where would you point people to learn more about you and your work?

Ben: Yeah. There's a really good blog on our website that's quite valuable. There's a lot of case study data. You'll find no fewer than probably a hundred video and audio testimonials throughout our website. We are really, really glued to our clients. So if you are a client of ours, you're hearing this thing, yep. Gotten a call from those guys and work closely on a case study or I'm part of the customer advisory board, but we're very, very vocal about our customer success throughout the website. You can always call us and ask for the names and contact info of some of your peers who really have found success with us. We really welcome that. And, of course, it's one click away from setting up some time to actually talk about your situation, your specific business, your needs, and your problems. Everyone's different, but at least giving you a sense of what we can do for you through looking at your specific circumstances.

Josiah: Excellent. Well, I encourage all our listeners to take you up on that offer. There's no better way to learn about solutions that will help you than conversations with the people that provide those and also your peers that are trying this out in the market. So Ben, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation, learned a lot from you, and appreciate you taking the time to join us today.

Ben: Absolutely. I enjoyed it very much and thank you as well.