Sales and marketing can’t go back to business as usual. Kaon Interactive’s customer engagement platform has transformed Fortune 500 B2B business strategies.

The desires and needs of customers drive the market. Due to the rapid pace of change customers’ needs tend to evolve, and it is essential for brands to keep up with the pace of those changes. Interactive content is highly effective in this change because it directly connects the users with brands on various levels. Creative and unique experiences can be rendered through interactive marketing because it is personalized to each user. The engagement will drastically increase, and the chances of the users seeking out the brands are higher. One major part of interactive marketing is that it gives users some control over their experience. This makes the content seem more memorable and personal.

Marketing initiatives in interactive marketing will trigger customers’ preferences and behaviors. The shift from traditional campaign-based marketing efforts is strenuous, so Kaon Interactive makes sure that the transition is smooth and provides a high-velocity marketing platform that will revamp the company’s sales. Kaon’s patented technology platform helps global B2B companies implement and deliver high-impact digital transformation applications throughout their sales and marketing operations. Their interactive applications engage customers directly and are used by customers themselves rather than just providing presentation tools for salespeople or marketers. Created once and delivered in real-time to any device, anywhere online and offline, the platform provides marketing efficiencies, so companies do not have to spend money on one-off solutions for a particular event, venue, or product. Kaon’s applications include advanced technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality. They are extensible and evolve to include a new product, solution, and customer stories as companies evolve over time. Customers can use these same applications in any format – be it a fully immersive VR environment, a tablet-based touchscreen experience, or a web-based interactive session in a browser.

Kaon Interactive is an interactive sales and marketing application provider based in Massachusetts, and it was founded in 1996.

In conversation with Gavin Finn, President and CEO of Kaon Interactive

Q. Why do companies need interactive sales and marketing solutions?

Studies have shown that the number one reason that B2B companies lose deals they should win is the inability of their sales teams to explain their competitive value differentiation consistently. Complexity in products and solutions makes it very difficult for prospects to understand how these products and solutions are relevant to the customer’s specific problems, and how they are different and better than other solutions. Especially now, when salespeople and marketers can’t meet in person with their prospects and customers, companies need digital engagement tools that go beyond the basic connectivity of people talking and seeing each other on a video conference. The customer needs to be directly engaged and involved, rather than participating as an observer of someone else’s presentation. Even the best-in-class global companies have diverse and distributed sales and marketing teams that are inherently inconsistent in their effectiveness at delivering relevant value stories. They need an agile solution that helps everyone deliver the right value message to the right customer at the right time. Traditional sales and marketing tools, such as video and slide presentations, are passive, lack customer engagement, and are ineffective at conveying complex stories.

Q. How efficient and effective are your interactive applications at creating an engaging customer interaction?

Because customers are directly engaged with the interactive applications, and because they are designed to be non-linear in their navigation system, each person has a completely personalized and unique experience. If they need detailed product information, they can explore three-dimensional interactive product tours. If they need industry solutions, they can explore how the solutions apply to their specific markets. These sales and marketing applications, therefore, help each persona in the buying ecosystem develop their understanding of the value of the company’s solution to their specific needs – all at their own pace. Research has shown that customers learn much faster and retain much more relevant information when they engage in this manner.

Q. Creating interactive sales and marketing applications can be a resource and budget intensive task - you need tools, technology, staff training, customer understanding, and all of this can have a high cost. How do you manage to give your clients a cost effective sustained digital solution?

Kaon has its own (patented and award-winning) platform. We use this platform as the springboard for each new customer application. Therefore, no individual customer is paying for the totality of the technology that is delivered – these R&D and technology infrastructure costs are shared across the hundreds of companies that use the Kaon platform every day. No other company can provide a rich set of benefits because the costs of building these on an application-by-application basis would be much higher. This allows Kaon’s customers to use a wide variety of capabilities at a fraction of the cost. This results in incredibly cost-effective solutions that deliver valuable results in terms of increased win rates, shorter sales cycles, and more effective marketing events.

Q. What is the future of B2B customer engagement?

In the future, customer engagement will focus entirely on delivering the most effective personalized experiences to each customer using whatever tools and technologies make sense for them. From Augmented Reality to Virtual Reality, and everything in-between, customers will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own journey. Presentations will be phased out, as customers recognize that those kinds of passive experiences deliver no value to them, and as their time becomes their most scarce resource.

Q. What are your plans for the future development of your company?

Our goal is to be mission-critical to our clients, and we are continuing to provide architecture and infrastructure tools and methods to make Kaon’s solutions scale dramatically to be available to as many users as possible within each of our customers. We see this evolution as a strategic focus for Kaon, as we support the digital transformation strategies of the world’s leading global companies.

Meet the leader behind the success of Kaon Interactive

Gavin Finn is the President and CEO of Kaon Interactive, the leader in B2B interactive sales and marketing applications that transform customer engagements, accelerate B2B sales, and improve marketing effectiveness. Gavin holds both a Ph.D. and an MS from MIT and is also a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, where he teaches Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Sales, and New Product Development.

“Our 3D interactive sales and marketing applications simplify our clients’ complex product or solution stories giving them the ability to effectively differentiate their VALUE at every customer touch-point.”