Janus is the Roman god of choices, doorways, beginnings, and endings. And it's a good way of illustrating the phenomenon of multiple faces or personalities.

Many of the companies we consult with have split personalities.  Here are some of the ways multiple personalities can manifest within organizations.

• The salespeople are enthusiastic, helpful and responsive. Their customer service representatives are, shall we say, less so.
• Substantial inconsistencies are seen between a company’s Facebook page and the same company’s printed materials.
• One advertisement emphasizes that a product is an excellent value, the next offers the same product at 50% off.
• The owner’s manual uses one name for a particular feature, while the sales materials call the same feature something else.

Inconsistencies are a problem in marketing in any industry, but they are particularly troublesome in aviation marketing.

Aviation professionals are used to being very detail oriented. They tend to be very analytical and verify everything against checklists.

At best, confused customers take more time from your sales staff as they answer questions and sort things out for them.  At worst, confused customers doubt your sincerity or credibility.

How do you prevent inconsistencies from getting in the way of sales?

Appoint a consistency czar.

Every company has a person that drives everyone crazy by asking questions and pointing out details.  Take this person to (a very nice)  lunch. Give him a raise if you can. Formalize the position. Put his new (or additional) title on his office door. Buy him a box of red pens.  And above all, listen to him.   Mentally count to ten before you respond next time he points out an annoying detail.

Ensure he has a chance to look at every brochure, web page, or product sheet before it’s published.  Make sure this one person sees everything, even if (or especially if) sales materials, customer service materials, web pages and social media presences are run by separate people or departments. Run everything buy him, and fix (or at least consider) everything he puts a red mark on.

The benefits:

• Your organization will look much more professional.
• Your sales process will function more smoothly.
• Your sales cycle will get shorter.
• Customers will ask fewer questions.
• Customer satisfaction will be higher, because they had clearer expectations.
• You will prevent problems, arguments, or possibly even legal issues.

In case you’re wondering, ABCI has a consistency czar.  And yes, he drives me crazy.   But we certainly couldn’t be successful without him.

In most businesses, sadly, sales is an act, not a process.

In aviation in particular, we’ve found that companies fail in sales for one of two reasons

1. They consider sales as an afterthought, thinking that the “product will sell itself,” or
2. They consider each sale as an improvisational act, impulsively cold-calling leads, offering ad-hoc discounts, or otherwise “trying things” in an attempt to make a sale.

Sometimes it can be a pendulum between the two – companies start out with ultra-low-key  (or nonexistent) sales efforts, then when the cash flow situation (or the salesperson’s personal finances) start to get desperate, the desperation becomes apparent to the client.

Whether they turn people off with high-pressure sales tactics or not, desperate salespeople  are ironically repellent. This applies to anybody who comes into contact with the customer – whether this person is designated by a “sales” title, wears plaid golf pants, or is the CEO of a company.  Lack of confidence on the part of the person interacting with potential buyers makes people suspicious. They think a nervous salesperson must have a reason, and jump to the conclusion that the reason for the salesperson’s unease translates into danger for them – something illegal, immoral or fishy is going on.   So, the prospective customer finds reasons not to buy, and the salesperson gets even more desperate.

How can you avoid these extremes?

1. Integrate sales as part of the marketing process.  If you’ve done the marketing correctly and taken enough time, sales becomes easier. Your marketing materials have brought you leads that are educated about your product, have decided that your product is a good possibility to meet their needs, and have come to you when they have a need.  Having a “full pipeline” of prospective customers is one of the most important objectives of an effective marketing system.
   
2. Be proactive about sales.   The majority of aviation companies vastly underestimate the importance and difficulty of marketing and sales, and do nothing about setting or meeting realistic sales objectives until the lack of sales becomes a crisis. Even when you have a “full pipeline” of prospective customers, it usually takes human interaction from an intelligent, skilled salesperson to get over that final hurdle to a completed transaction.
3. Get some help.  In many aviation companies, people wear several hats.  Its fine not to have dedicated sales staff, as long as the people who are responsible for making sales have the knowledge and skills to make it happen – whether they’re also the CEO, the chief pilot, the service provider,  doctor or legal expert.  Engaging a coach so that you can confidently make an effective sales presentation may be the biggest factor in improving your sales figures for the year.

Aviation products and services are typically  high-trust, complex transactions. They aren’t purchased on impulse or whims.  It usually takes well-positioned, well-designed and well-written marketing messages plus repeated interactions with an articulate, knowledgeable and confident human being to “close a sale,” or consummate a transaction.

Sales Presentation Checkride

We’re thrilled to have Mark Leeper on board as our VP of sales.  He’s agreed to provide right-seat perspective on your sales presentation.  For an introductory price of  $299, Mark will sit in on one of your sales presentations  on the phone (a real one, or  Mark will pose as your “prospective customer,” and provide a thorough review with some very helpful pointers.

Don’t wait until your salespeople start getting desperate.  Give us a call at 702-987-1679 to schedule your Sales Presentation Checkride today!

Our Long Cycle Marketing system is based on rational, respectful interaction between the company and the prospective client over a reasonable period of time.  Now, our coaching programs includes rational, respectful, confident interaction with a salesperson  as well.

ABCI is thrilled to welcome Mark Leeper as Vice President of Sales.

Mark specializes in relationship marketing, customer and lead follow-up systems as well as business incentives and rewards.

ABCI has always concentrated on the parts of marketing that we’re good at, leaving the actual sales presentation up to our clients.  Some of our clients were getting lots of leads but could be closing sales with more of them.  Mark is a great coach.  He can diagnose problems with the sales presentation and help our clients fix those problems, making ABCI’s marketing that much more effective.

We’re excited because Mark has such a talent for that crucial part of the process. The best marketing in the world doesn’t amount to much if the sales presentation falls flat when you get in a room or on the phone with a potential customer.

Now we can offer consultation and coaching on that critical step.

Mark’s experience -

Mark Leeper has an entrepreneurial bent, and is the owner of startup Seabright Company, a sales consulting and management concern.  Prior to Seabright, Mark was CEO of Advanced Laser Technology, a practice management company, specializing in the development of medical laser clinics. Under his supervision and implementation of a comprehensive business plan, Advanced Laser Technologies expanded to 8 clinics throughout WA, CA, NV and AZ.

Mark attended Pacific Lutheran University and studied business administration.

With over 25 years of sales and management experience, Mark graduated from the Zig Ziglar Performance Training Institute and is a Certified Trainer and Facilitator.

Mark resides in Gig Harbor, WA with his wife Carolyn, and 14 year old son Jeff. Mark has grown up with the aviation bug. His father-in-law is a WWII P51 Ace; and his father, Don Leeper,  is a Retired Air Force Lt. Colonel fighter pilot.

Mark is a licensed pilot since 1980 with IFR and Commercial ratings.

Meet Mark at our January Sales & Marketing Coaching Webinar on January 11th. The topic, of course,  is Sales Presentations.  The webinar is free to Coaching Program and Master Class Members, watch for your invitation in email.

Not a Master Class or Coaching Program Member?   We have a limited number of free tickets to the webinar, email paula@avaitionbusinessconsultants.com if you’d like one.

Fine.

How much improvement do you expect, and how are you going to make it happen?

New Year’s Resolutions are popular, but also popularly discarded before January is over.  It’s usually not for lack of willpower – it’s because there are a number of problems with them -

• A year usually is too long to break down into daily actionable tasks.
• Conversely, a year is usually too short to use for long-range planning.
• Resolutions are usually not very specific, measurable, attainable, or relevant.

ABCI highly recommends three and five year business objectives to manage your company’s growth, but when it comes down to personal and professional resolutions, we prefer setting monthly sales and marketing goals.

We outline the process in our Sales and Marketing Calendar lesson, but here’s a synopsis:

A Word about Goals and Objectives

When it comes to setting goals and objectives, there is a word (an acronym, really) that can be quite helpful.  The word is “SMART.”

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

Choose a “SMART” objective for sales, and a supporting objective for marketing. Then, you can  build your pipeline of potential customers and clients over time and ensure an excellent (and growing) cash flow for the company.

Decide on a Sales Objective for Each Month.

If you have more than one product, you may want to rotate the focus so that your marketing efforts are balanced.  If you have a de-icing product, you may want to focus on that in the fall and winter.  Air conditioning maintenance repair would do better in spring or summer.

Decide on a Marketing Objective for the month.

Determine where your marketing system is weak or could use more attention.  What is your most pressing issue? Which phase or activity is the weakest?  If you have a great sales process but not enough leads, focus on a prospecting activity first.  If you have lots of leads but aren’t making enough sales, focus on your sales presentations. If you have lots of enthusiastic veteran customers but few new ones, spend a month working on a referral process.

It’s a good idea to create objectives to each phase to keep your system balanced, but address your most pressing needs first.  Create an objective that is attainable with 30 days of effort.  Some ideas include the following:

Phase One – Prospecting (Pre-Sales)

• Attract 20 new leads per month by creating an ebook or white paper that website visitors can download.
• Engage with your top 10 most-desired prospective clients with a targeted Facebook campaign.
• Work with a videographer to create video materials like product demos or video tours.

Phase Two – Credibility and Closing (Sales)

• Request recommendations for your product on LinkedIn.
• Get some sales coaching.
• Create articles about the most common concerns or objections to purchasing your product and publicize them on your blog.

Phase Three – Referrals, Resells and Recaptures (Post-Sales)

• Encourage current clients to mingle with prospective clients at a Trade Show event.
• Devote one month to creating a great referral program.

You may have noticed links throughout this article – each of them refers to a specific lesson that we delivered in our 2011 Aviation Marketing Master Class.

This is the first day that these courses are available “a la carte,” without an ongoing subscription.  We’re doing this for two rather self-serving reasons:

• Some companies need an instant boost to help their cash flow before they can afford our other services.  The right information at the right time can do just that.
• Some people want to see a sample of the quality of our courses before subscribing.

Downloading one of those courses accomplishes both of those things for us, but what is more important is what they do for you. If you want usable, actionable techniques with examples that have really worked for aviation companies, you can now get precisely that information when you want it. Each lesson includes an instantly downloadable video, together with a workbook and action list.   Many also contain sample documents and audio files.

 So, if you need some specific information to get started with those (ahem) New Year’s Resolutions (read Smart Goals and Objectives!) download just what you need to get started today.

Your satisfaction is absolutely guaranteed.

The Subject Line:

“Marketing Done Right – Sign Up Today, Reach over 70,000 Aviators Tomorrow.”

The Fine Print:

You’re receiving this email because of your relationship with <<Company Name.>> We suggest creating a separate folder from your inbox for our broadcast emails. This will keep your inbox from being overwhelmed with emails. To ensure that you continue to receive emails from us, add us  to your address book today.

_________________________________________________

So, what’s wrong with this picture? 

A broadcast email is advertising, NOT marketing.

Advertising and marketing are NOT synonyms.

Advertising is actually a single facet of a marketing program.

The difference is not trivial. In fact, I suspect it leads many companies to misuse their budgets, fail to make sales, fail to bring in adequate income, fail to pay their bills, and have to downsize or even close their doors.

ad·ver·tis·ing    [ad-ver-tahy-zing] noun

1. the act or practice of calling public attention to one’s product, service, need, etc., especially by paid announcements in newspapers and magazines, over radio or television, on billboards, etc.: to get more customers by advertising.

2. paid announcements; advertisements.

3. the profession of planning, designing, and writing advertisements.

mar·ket·ing    [mahr-ki-ting] noun

1. the act of buying or selling in a market.

2. the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

Source – Dictionary.com

Advertising is one of many activities in a marketing campaign.   And advertising without a complete marketing campaign is a waste of money. It simply doesn’t make sense to spend advertising dollars without careful consideration for the product, the offer, the competition, the pricing, the sales techniques of the people answering the phone or following up on inquiries, and the follow up process. Many companies don’t even capture contact information for inquiries – if people don’t buy immediately, they don’t make any attempt to keep in contact with them.

We don’t have an issue with this particular company.   They just happen to be unlucky enough to have hit my “pet peeve” on the wrong day – using terminology for advertising and marketing indiscriminately, and implying that mass advertising is all you have to do to sell a product, which is doing a disservice to  businesspeople in this economy.

We tell our clients not to send more emails than they are willing to respond to personally. It’s good business to be willing to spend the time with potential clients if you’re going to insist on taking up THEIR time with your advertisement, the least you can do is sign your own name, have replies to an address in your own company domain,  and make sure every inquiry is followed up by a human being. If you’re unwilling to spend the time responding to replies to you’re message, then you’re sending spam to people you don’t care about.  This is not an ideal projection of your company image, and can be against the law (CAN-SPAM act of 2003 restricts the use of unsolicited emails as advertising.)

The first step in planning  a marketing campaign is to figure out how best to reach your ideal target market.  It takes some pretty rigorous study to come up with a good list – and highly targeted is much better than broadcasting.

The second step is to figure out how best to reach those people multiple times in multiple ways – including a variety of media that take the strengths and weakness of each medium into account.

The third is to designing  a good response offer.

In addition to the first three steps, it is also necessary to ensure you have trained sales and customer service personnel, a good sales presentation, a closing technique, and a follow up program. Without having completed these steps, it is likely that you’ll have low response rate and very low (if any) sales.

Sending 70,000 emails may be a component in a properly planned marketing campaign, but it is certainly not, by itself, “Marketing Done Right.”

If you have a sales process, follow it! Shortcuts often cause more problems than they solve.

“I don’t have time to complete your questionnaire.  Can you just give me a ballpark price on the work I want done right now?”

In the past, on occasion, I’ve been tempted to answer this question to the best of my ability, given the information I had on hand at the time.

Each time I succumbed to that temptation, I regretted it.

If I don’t take the time to really understand the customer’s long term strategy, short term objectives, and competition, we often find later we have missed an opportunity that would have made our work much more valuable to that customer.

This is a wasted opportunity for us, and a disservice to our customer.

As an example, we may write a brochure for a company, only to realize later we could have spent the same amount of time writing material we could have contributed to an aviation publication, positioning our customer as an expert in his field and obtaining much more visibility for his product or service than the brochure.  And we could have used the same (or similar) text for his brochure, anyway.

Another example – we may find that our customer’s competitor has dominated the market for a particular keyword, but but positioning the product with a slightly different target market, we could help him make many more sales. Sometimes the customer assumes that he knows exactly who his target market is. He could be wrong, no matter how strongly he holds that assumption.  We could also be wrong, if we take his word for it and fail to do the homework.

Our experience has shown that we can provide much greater value to our customer when we follow our process.  Of course, we’re continually improving the process and we adapt as we go based on the customer’s needs.

During our consultations with companies about their own sales processes, we have found that most salespeople have the same pressure from time to time.   “Just tell me the price!”   their customers say.

And if they shortcut the process and jump to that step, they almost always lose the customer, find out they’re talking to the wrong person in the organization (not the person who has the authority to make the purchase decision) or they missed out on value they could have provided, no matter how educated or compelled the customer may seem at the time.

The more successful salesperson will follow the process, educate the customer how to shop for the product or service he is looking for, and demonstrate his product to be the better value taken in the total context.  And if he can’t do that, he’ll encourage the customer to buy the competitor’s product in that rare instance; and get a loyal source of referrals.

While working with Franklin Covey, we  often quoted Steven Covey -  “With people, if you want to save time, don’t be efficient. Slow is fast and fast is slow.” 

If you’re in too much of a hurry to make the sale, if you don’t care enough about the client to get to know him, his needs and his situation; and if you deal with people who will treat your product or service like a commodity (like a sack of beans he can buy just as easily from the next guy down the street) you’ll lose out on the opportunity to do your best work, and to develop a relationship with a truly satisfied customer.

We’ve created a new video about our new client process.

If you don’t have a sales process, or if your sales process isn’t working properly, ABCI can help! We’ll show you how.

And no, we don’t take shortcuts.

Get started with ABCI.

I’ve worked in companies (Wells Fargo and Pearson Education) where the salespeople are in a class by themselves.  They drive Porsches, (I drive a four-wheel drive Ford Ranger, which looks funny in the parking lot.)  They wear very nice Italian suits, and they speak amongst themselves in a very strange language and use the fabulous marketing materials, scripts, procedures  and research I (in the Marketing Department)  provided them to cast  spells on unsuspecting customers.

When we started ABCI, my job was marketing and getting new clients. As a “sales muggle,” or so I thought, I have focused on excellent marketing to support the business.  ABCI’s marketing system attracts leads and draws them through a process that includes educational materials,  sales presentations and so on to the point where they can decide  which of ABCI’s services are correct for them.

I haven’t really had to “do sales,” or so I thought.

As it turns out, I’ve had a lot of personal contact with ABCI clients as they go through the sales decision process.  And we’ve improved results for our clients using sales process engineering (I like to call it “sales choreography”) and sales training.

So, I’ve unsuspectingly, step by step, become a salesperson.

It didn’t hurt. Really!

There were no explosions or flashes of light, I didn’t start setting fire to ordinary objects (like the kids in Harry Potter at Hogwarts as they learned to get their new skills under control.)

While there are people who seem to have an uncanny natural talent, I have learned that sales is a skill that can be taught and learned like any other. It’s simply a matter of study, practice, and courage.

By popular demand we’re adding sales as major topic (and including it in the title) of our Sales and Marketing Coaching program, beginning in January.  And our first guest instructor is Mark Leeper, an excellent salesperson (one of those uncannily talented ones) from Seabright Enterprises.   Mark will teach us some of his secrets for selling to hard-nosed businesspeople armed with gatekeepers.  If you have specific questions about sales or your sales process, let us know or leave them as comments on this article and we’ll make sure we get them addressed.

Meanwhile, here are a few tips that have helped me immensely:

• Do your homework. The more you know about the person you’re selling to, the more comfortable you’ll be and the better you’ll be able to anticipate their needs and questions. Research their company, and research the person you’ll be meeting with.
• Give before you get.  Offer information of value to your prospect, refer a customer to your prospect, spend the time to show that you have an interest in growing their business, not just selling them something.
• Put the “deal” in terms of value to them.  Businesspeople tend not to be excited about saving money, they all want to know how to grow their business, make more profit from each sale. People don’t mind paying for something that provides significant value.
• Practice your presentation skills. Every time you make a sales presentation, you get better.   Offer to speak on your topic of expertise at your chamber of commerce. (Don’t give a sales pitch on your product – although you will probably make contacts and answer questions after the speech that may result in sales.) Volunteer to give a presentation at your local high school.  (High school kids are the scariest audience. If you can get and keep their attention, you’ve improved your skills immensely and need never be afraid of a prospect again!)  You may get more selective over time, but if you’re just starting out with your sales skills, give a sales presentation to any customer even if they’re not as “qualified” as you’d like.  You’ll learn a lot and may get referral business even if they don’t contract with you directly.
• Avoid chiselers. The exception to the tip above.  If someone asks us to match price with a competitor, we point out the differences in value between the two offers.  If they are intent on saving that extra hundred dollars (and willing to put up with an inferior product to do it) walk away.  These aren’t the customers we want. And we don’t feel comfortable referring customers to this type of business.

Soon you’ll be amazing your friends, racking up the sales, and driving a nicer car.  (You can keep your “muggle” car if you want to.  I’m keeping my cute little Ford Ranger. It looks funny in a parking lot full of Porsches, but I’m okay with that.)