Improving Sales Starts With Asking the Right Questions - The ABCI Questionnaire

This article and video shows how (and why!) to complete ABCI's famous (or infamous) Aviation Marketing Questionnaire.

If you’ve requested the New Client Questionnaire from ABCI, your first reaction was probably Holy Cow! This thing is HUGE!

Why So Many Nosy Questions?

You may be wondering why our Questionnaire is so long and involved. Many of our clients say they’ve never seen anything like it and they weren’t expecting something so elaborate, and that appears to be so time-consuming!

One thing we’ve learned from working with many, many aviation companies-

We must listen first, before we can act.

Even general assumptions we thought were safe, like “everybody who contacts a marketing company is interested in making more sales” turn out to be incorrect, or at least off-kilter.

“Success” has many different definitions:

One business (Business A) is new and wants to overtake all of its international competitors in the next ten years.

The primary objective of another business (Business B) is to sell their established business and retire within the next two years.

Our recommendations and subsequent marketing plan design for each of these companies will be quite different.

For Business A, the first priority will be to increase its worldwide customer base dramatically. That would include techniques including print advertising in global aviation publications.

For Business B, our focus would be to re-engage old customers, document a track record of steady sales as cost-effectively as possible, and to improve the net worth (and therefore sales price) of the business.

Some of the questions that surprise people the most are “What gets you out of bed in the morning?” and “What keeps you up at night?” These might seem personal and impertinent, but we’ve found that it’s really important for us to understand the motivations of each stakeholder. The motivations of each stakeholder will guide our thoughts about the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities to your business.

When you thoughtfully complete the Questionnaire, it provides a good picture of your company, along with a good starting place for conversations about how we can work together, and most importantly – prevents us from wasting time and money going down the wrong path because of a mistaken assumption.

See our quick Video for more details about how to fill it out and exactly what you receive in return: