What the finance director needs to see before saying yes
Before a 3D model of your product gets built, someone has to sign off the cost. What follows is where the return on that spend actually comes from, which figures to pull from your own records, and what we deliberately leave out of the calculation.
Getting the answer right means being careful about two things in particular. Saved hours are not the same as saved money, since payroll does not fall when a sales engineer gets an afternoon back, and an improvement measured at one company is not a forecast for another. Leave both out and the number gets smaller, and it holds up in the room where it matters.
Exhibitions still take 40.8 percent of B2B marketing budgets (CEIR, 2026), so the question is never whether to stop exhibiting. It is what has to travel. Across 224 US shows audited in 2025, material handling ran at $2.28 per pound, up 9.5 percent in a year, and drayage has risen 21.3 percent since 2022 against 2.7 percent general inflation, with 80 percent of exhibitors naming cost as their biggest challenge (The Exhibitor Advocate). Shipping a heavy machine from Helsinki to a US show runs to roughly 20,000 to 50,000 euros per event on our own estimates. An interactive model of the same machine deletes that line permanently, while the stand stays.
At Mobile World Congress 2023, Dell had to explain an open telecom ecosystem, which has no physical form at all. Visitors built it themselves on a multi-user touch table, moving 3D-printed tokens across the surface, and Dell ran more than fifty demonstrations in the first two days.
Our solution for Dell at the 2023 Mobile World Congress
Production costs move too. When Drive Int shifted its product marketing to 3D, costs fell 57 percent and delivery came in twice as fast as the competition.
Sales time is worth counting carefully. Maillefer replaced a sales presentation of over a hundred pages with one interactive tool, and for The Switch an explanation taking several slides now takes under two minutes.
The hours returning are real, and they turn into money only once they are resold, so we show them on their own line and keep them out of the headline figure.
Our solution for Maillefer, substituting hundreds of slide for an immersive 3D experience
On training, the strongest evidence is a systematic review in Scientific Reports (March 2026), covering 18 controlled trials and 678 participants. Immersive training wins decisively on demanding work under unpredictable conditions, with an effect size of 1.15, while for routine repetitive skills the advantage largely disappears, at 0.39. Knowing which of the two you are buying for is what makes the case solid. The study’s domain is motor competence, much of it sport-derived, so read it as the shape of the finding. Supporting figures: PwC (2020) found competence reached around four times faster than classroom, Pfizer reported 40 percent less training time, UPS cut an eight-hour course to two, and Delta moved from 3 trainees a day to over 150 (ArborXR, 2025).
None of these apply to every company, and the strongest case uses the two or three you can evidence from your own invoices. We will work through them with you before there is a proposal on the table.
