In this episode, I exploit John’s pain and suffering with a dental incident to make a point about how important it is to make a great first impression.  We also talk about things to prioritize when considering your customers’ first steps in a new relationship.

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Transcript – How to Make a Great First Impression

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Narrator: You’re listening to aviation marketing hangar flying. The community for the best sales and marketing professionals in the aviation industry. You can’t learn to fly just from a book. You learn from other pilots who know the tools, the skills and the territory. Your hosts, John and Paula Williams, are your sales and marketing test pilots.

 

They take the risks for you and share strategies, relevant examples, hacks and how to’s. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, so you won’t miss a thing. [SOUND]

Paula Williams: Welcome to aviation marketing Hanger Flying episode number 98, Sales and Marketing First Impressions. So I’m Paula Williams.

John Williams: I’m John Williams.

Paula Williams: And we are ABCI and ABCI’s mission is.

John Williams: To help ladies and gentlemen out there sell more products and services in the aviation world.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, so if you have any questions or comments about this episode as always. You can use the #AvGeekMarketing, and we will find them and reply to every tweet or message that we find.
Otherwise of course, you can put comments on our YouTube channel or our blog. And either way, we do check those pretty frequently, so we’ll get it and answer it. So about first impressions, three big ideas. The first one is that The Cliche is True, right?

John Williams: Absolutely, whether you like it or whether you don’t.

Paula Williams: First impressions are incredibly important, especially in any kind of a high end or high stress or high risk situation, right?

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH]

John Williams: And high cost.

Paula Williams: Yeah, exactly. So a second big idea is that first impressions are a really high priority to invest resources.
And of course, we’re going to go into detail about some of the ways that you can improve your customer’s first impressions of your business in lots of different ways. Whether they see you in person or whether they see you online first. And then the third thing we’re going to talk about is that visual elements are the most important.
And we all have to prioritize, right? We can’t make everything perfect all of the time, right?

John Williams: Well we haven’t figured it out.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] We tried really hard, but we understand. It’s really hard to make everything exactly the way you want it. But if you have to focus on something, we’ll talk about how to prioritize and prioritizing visual elements is usually the most important.

John Williams: Even Apple can’t do it right all the time.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: But they do pretty darn good.

John Williams: Yes, they do.

Paula Williams: Okay, so let’s start with the tooth story. You want to tell the tooth story?

John Williams: Well no.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH]

John Williams: It’s just my teeth, you can tell it.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Okay well it is your teeth, so I didn’t know what all you wanted to disclose. But John had a situation with a tooth where we were referred to another doctor actually. And this was somebody that we had never seen before. It was somebody that was recommended to us by our regular dentist, which is cool.

But it was kind of a high anxiety situation because they wanted to do some funky things to John’s tooth, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH] Yep.

Paula Williams: And so we go in there. It’s kind of a high stress situation, cuz you don’t really know what you’re getting into. A dentist is a really high stress situation.

Because you’re going to be sitting there in a chair with your mouth open with somebody’s hands in your mouth. And you’re probably going to be also paying this person a lot of money. So there’s possibly a potentially high dollar amount involved, and also a potential of pain and suffering. [LAUGH]

John Williams: And let’s just talk about the high dollar amount to start with. Every year, I review with interest, the possibility of getting dental insurance and every year the answer is the same. I’ll pay for a family about 250 to $300 depending on where and how. But they will not pay until the third year is their maximum year, you have to be in there 3 years, and then they will pay 40% to 60% of what I had done.
Well by the time I had paid all that out I would’ve paid almost three times what if I just did nothing and just wrote a check for it which is what I did.

Paula Williams: Exactly, so we just pay for cleanings and pay for other things-

John Williams: Yeah.

Paula Williams: As they come up, cuz we usually don’t have have anything come up, but every once in a while there’s a thing, right?

John Williams: Yeah.

Paula Williams: Okay.

John Williams: So you pay them now or you pay later.

Paula Williams: Right, so how is this related to aviation? Well number one, there is a high dollar amount. Number two is a high risk situation, potentially. This is your head that we’re talking about. [LAUGH] And thing number three is that it is potentially a high stress situation.
So a lot of people get kind of antsy about traveling, so in a lot of ways this is the same. A lot of the things that we’re going to be talking about in this story are the same as it would be for FBO marketing or charter marketing, any travel situation or anything else where you’re putting your life in somebody’s hands.
And potentially paying them a lot of money, right?

John Williams: Is this a picture of the office?

Paula Williams: No, this is not a picture of the office, this was as close as I could get.

John Williams: Okay.

Paula Williams: I didn’t take pictures in the lobby.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: But what you’re seeing if you’re looking at this is a picture of a very nice lobby of an office building.
And this is very close to what this doctor’s office lobby looked like.

John Williams: Yeah, it looked very much like this. And on the second floor, windows looking out over mountains and so on and so forth, and very nice.

Paula Williams: Exactly, nice paintings on the wall, bookcases, chandeliers, wood floors, all of these things.
So the reason that I’m showing this picture is because a couple of things happen when we first showed up in this office. None of which made us feel any better about the situation.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: The first one was that they had some of information wrong on John’s file, which made us wonder.
Are they going to be yanking the wrong tooth? [LAUGH] What are we looking at?

John Williams: Well I knew that wasn’t going to happen, but still.

Paula Williams: Well yeah, but still, it doesn’t make you feel anymore comfortable when things aren’t going quite your way. And this happens a lot in business.

That somebody gets things not quite polished and it’s not quite perfect. And then people’s anxiety level just goes through the roof. But the reason we didn’t walk out when things started to go sideways was because the office and the lobby was so nice. And honestly if you think about it, we’re thinking okay, this dentist has to be doing okay.

He’s gotta be at least has the appearance of having invested a lot of money, about caring about his customers. The people at the front desk were very professional even though there was a mistake that was made. They were very upfront about it and very professional about it. So all of those things really made this first impression, a lot better than it could have been.

Because we have walked in to a place where there were card tables and a cement floor-

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: And hand drawn posters and things like that, and there’s [CROSSTALK]

John Williams: We would walk out. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: We would have walked out. Exactly, so a lot of people think well this is the last place, I want to spend money.
I want to spend all of the money on aircraft maintenance, I want to spend all of the money on safety. I want to spend all the money on the things that are important to me as the flight director, or as the CEO, or whatever. But honestly, even coming from us, I mean John is probably the most practical person I know.
But still, when you think about it, he was actually kind of reassured by the nice houses, weren’t you. Maybe not consciously, but subconsciously when we talked about it later, right?

John Williams: Yeah, well, after we got past the errors up front. There were a number of things that reinforced the fact that this was a good place to be.

Paula Williams: Right. Exactly. The people were dressed really nicely. They were very professional, very caring. They did their best to straighten out the situation and you told me afterwards, that this was the best dentist’s office visit you’d ever had, right?

John Williams: Yeah, because I didn’t overshadow it with what happened when I first got there.

But I have been to dentists in several states at various times throughout my life and this had to have been the best experience I’ve ever had not just. You might say that was a nit up front, but everything else from the doctor just imbued you with-

Paula Williams: Information.[LAUGH]

John Williams: knowledge, information, confidence, and gives you all these choices up front and if you do this, this is what’s going to happen, if you do that and so on. Even when he got the work, his assistant, I mean I’ve seen assistants for various doctors do pretty good, but this one was so far ahead of the doctors.

She’d say you need and she’d name off the number of tools and say right, and he’d say right. One time she missed it and he said no I want this other one and said okay and she got it for me but she knew every little detail. It’s actually pretty amazing and on top of that that’s the first time I’ve been to a dentist where there was actually zero, well aside from being injected a little pinch.

Paula Williams: Owie.

John Williams: But aside from that there was no pain.

Paula Williams: Right, exactly. And it’s really kind of a pleasure to do business with folks that like each other and that like working together, and this was obviously a team of people that had been together for a long time and they looked out for each other and took really good care of each other as well.
So that made us feel really well taken care of with John being a patient, they were really nice to me and everything else, so altogether, a really good experience. But it could have gone badly. And in your business, I’m sure this happens all the time, where you always pray that the mistake is not always the first thing that happens, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH] Right.

Paula Williams: You hope that that is after you’ve built some kind of credibility with people before you make your first mistake.

John Williams: Well, people are people and being human, mistakes are possible.

Paula Williams: Exactly, but you buy yourself some time and you buy yourself some good will by making yourself a really good visual first impression.
Right?

John Williams: Umm-hmm.

Paula Williams: Okay, so why is this? I got to thinking about this and I read a book not too long ago, “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. And he talks about this a lot. There’s system one and system two. System one is the gut reaction.
System two is the more analytical response. System one, which is the gut reaction, we spend almost all of our time operating from system one and the reason is because a lot of things happen in our lives that we really don’t have time to analyze every stinking little thing that happens.
We just act based on fast thinking right?

John Williams: Well, and you know what? That’s interesting, because there was a time in my life, when I was looking for a job and I took me- I started looking in March, April, May, and I didn’t get a job until the end of August.

And I ended up interviewing at least eight companies per day. And I got good enough that I could walk in and before a minute was up I would know whether it’s worth wasting my time to go ahead and talk to this person or not. And sometimes I didn’t and they would look at me this funny, I’m not going to give you the opportunity to waste my time, because you’re going to turn me down, and she said well, why do you say that?

And I said it’s a feeling I got, I said I do this pretty much as a profession right now. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Looking for a job has become my profession yeah.

John Williams: And every once in a while I get fooled, but the longer I did it I had to keep going, because I had a family and my reserves were running thin by the time I found a job.
But I did it.

Paula Williams: But you got really good at it and so you were processing a lot of information that maybe you couldn’t even articulate if you wanted to.

John Williams: No, you’re right and some of it’s just reading people. It’s like in some cases, I would tell the ladies that, well you’ve already actually chosen somebody.
And right now, you’re doing the legal thing so it looks like you had all these people.

Paula Williams: Enough applicants to make this legitimate. Right.

John Williams: And in that case I did that, she looked at me, her mouth is open and she started to say, how did you know if she didn’t do that.
She got a part of the word how out, and I said see you. Turned around and walked out [LAUGH] [CROSSTALK].

Paula Williams: Exactly. And when you watch the Sherlock Holmes movies and with the tv shows, they do a pretty good job of this. They slow the camera way down.

John Williams: I’m not as good as he is.

Paula Williams: It’s the same thing though. They slow the visuals way down and they show you what he’s thinking in a split second. All of the details that he’s taking in about the dog hair on the guys pants that shows that he has a white dog and this matches the fact that this other person who was a suspect in this other crime has a white dog.

All of these little factors that you process really, really quickly. But the thing that your System 1 does, and you act out of your System 1 almost all of the time unless it hits a speed bump, something isn’t right. And then you launch into System 2, and then you start the analytical part of your brain going.
Why is something not right? [LAUGH] You know? And that’s what you don’t want to do. When you’re working with prospects and you’re working with very new customers, you want them to see everything as a very coherent story, you want to inspire confidence. You want to make everything consistent with your primary story.

The way that you do that is you arrange a lot of the visual details and Disney is fantastic at this. Arrange all of the visual details to match the story that you’re talking about. And if you think about the way that Disney does this, they arrange an entire scene.

So that if you are in Tomorrowland, everything is futuristic, and the fonts on all the signs change and the color of the street changes, and everything changes just to match that coherent story that is going on in your head right? So think like that and it will help you.

The way that you do this if you are visiting someone else and you are a salesperson. Of course, this a fairly well known graphic that’s all over the internet of things that you can do. And people might say well this is just surface stuff but quite frankly, if you don’t get past the surface stuff, you’ll never get anywhere.[CROSSTALK]

John Williams: You’re not going anywhere anyway.

Paula Williams: Right exactly. So a nice haircut, clean shaven, warm smile, full of confidence, formal dress, dressed in maybe just a little bit nicer than the people that you’re meeting with.

John Williams: And what’s interesting is that.

John Williams: I’m going to be judgmental here and say that millennials, a lot of them don’t.
They say I have this attitude, well why should I have to get dressed up to go get a job? Well, this is the answer. We are human whether you like it or not, and we do have first impressions. All of us do. Whether we [INAUDIBLE] them or not, or admit to them that happens.

Paula Williams: Yeah. Well in defense of millennials, we’ve got some of them as clients who dress better with anybody else. [LAUGH]

John Williams: Right?

Paula Williams: That’s true, actually. [LAUGH]

John Williams: Yeah, and it works for them. Because [INAUDIBLE].

Paula Williams: Of course it does. And they didn’t expect that, but it does.

John Williams: Exactly. Okay, so that’s first impression’s kind of in person. First impressions if you’re working on the web, the very best resource for that is, Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability. We use this book to create our 31-point checklist, that we go through websites whenever we’re analyzing a website for a client.
We have a checklist that we use to talk about all of these things, to say here are the things that people expect on a website, and some of the things that work and some of the things that don’t. And once again, you don’t want to throw any speedbumps in the way.
And have people go, this is a fly-by-night organization. They’ve got a card table in their lobby. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Or the digital equivalent of a card table in their lobby, right?

John Williams: Yep.

Paula Williams: Okay, so yeah, those are the two resources that we use all the time. And when we do a website refresh or something like that, we want to use those industry standards and those science based ideas, to decide what goes where and not just say, I like this better but this is what tests best among people visiting websites.
And he’s done a ton of research, and a ton of statistics, and he’s Like this. I don’t even remember what his PhD is in. [LAUGH]

John Williams: But some kind of statistical math and he uses that to the hilt. But he actually is a pretty good writer too. So you can actually read his books and almost get it, right?[LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Cool. So I want to give a shout out to XSpec Aviation in this particular podcast, because they have done a phenomenal job with this, right? As far as updating their website, so that it gives a much better first impression. And also, we met with these guys. It’s a family business.

It’s Aaron Hill and his father, and we met with them and talked about video conferencing, if you’re selling a multi thousand dollar product and people meet you on a video conference, what do you want to look like? And so these guys dress to the nines, they look really nice, incredibly professional online presence and everything else.

So they’ve really taken this advice and run with it, and it’s working for them. They’ve made a lot more sales just in the couple of weeks that we’ve been talking about this, and they really applied it and made it work for them. So I just wanted to give them a lot of kudos for this, because they are the masters of the first impression, right?

John Williams: They are now.

Paula Williams: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let’s talk about things that you can invest in. So in the Real World, how do customers see you first? And so, there’s different kinds of businesses. Some kinds of businesses, people walk in and see you for the first time.

Some kinds of businesses, and I would say probably 80% nowadays, will see you on the web or call you on the phone first. So unless they happen to be on the field and walk into your establishment like an FBO or something like that, then you may fall in the first column.

The Real World column as the first impression column. But you also have two first impressions. You’ve got the online one and then the reality. [INAUDIBLE] [CROSSTALK]

John Williams: Not just online, but also email. Because I can tell you one thing. I get an email from XYZ Company. It doesn’t say, name@xyzcompany.com.

I just pretty much discard these  because, why would you not have your email that a matter of fact. [LAUGH] A credit union I won’t name sent me an email with something other than their name and their .com. I walked down there and I said, I think this is spam, or probably worse than that.

Paula Williams: Yeah or phishing.

John Williams: And people behind the counter said, yeah it looks like it to me. So they called headquarters and said, no did you request it? No I didn’t request anything from these guys.

Paula Williams: Yeah.

John Williams: So, I have told them I said you know what, you better change that because I mean not only me but my software, we have some really good anti-spam software and it won’t let it come through.

Paula Williams: Right exactly. So, we’ll get back to that in just a minute, but let’s talk about Real World first. So, how do customers see you for the first time? And of course your lobby or your reception area, I think, investing a little bit of money in some interior design there, is a really good return on investment.

What do you think, John?

John Williams: Well, based on what happened with the dentist I’d say yes.

Paula Williams: Absolutely, so if people do see you for the first time, you want to storyboard this and we’re actually going to be talking about this in a later podcast. What happens from the time people pull into a parking space at your establishment, what does your parking area look like?

What does your doorway look like? What does your reception area look like? What are the things that they’re thinking and feeling, while they’re walking through these places, right?

John Williams: You need to be selling for the first time they get this idea they want to come see you.

Paula Williams: Exactly.

A receptionist can be incredibly important, and can make, or break the whole experience, or office manager, or whatever you call that person that.

John Williams: It’s the first person they see.

Paula Williams: Exactly, this could happen at a trade show booth. So once again you want to kinda storyboard, somebody sees you from across a crowded trade show floor [LAUGH], do they get the right impression of your product or service?

Do they know what you do from across a crowded room? Can they get an impression that you have invested a lot in what you do, compared to the other booths in the area, does yours look cheap? Does yours look appropriate for the venue? If it’s 10 x 10 and every body else is a 20 x 20, are you doing a ten by ten?

You want to look at what is everybody else doing? And do you look like you’re part of the group that should be there, right? Clothes, we talked about that a little bit before. If your folks are in polo shirts and slacks, that’s great. As long as they are nice polo shirts and slacks, and that’s the kind of business that you’re doing, that’s great.
Right?

John Williams: Yep.

Paula Williams: Your car.

John Williams: You need to be dressed so that when somebody says, well you can come business casual, then you can be dressed down one notch and still be dressed right. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Yeah exactly. Your car. I have had clients and or other people pick me up from the airport in their car.

And they’ve got McDonald’s bags and things, and it might be a really nice car, but it’s just not a very good first impression, if they have to clean off the seat for you. [LAUGH] Right?

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: Okay, information package that might be a real world thing that comes to you, making a first impression of a company.

You request an information package, they send you something. What does it look like? What does it feel like? How is it packaged? Does it look like they paid attention to detail or did they just throw some badly copied sheets in an envelope and send them to you, you know?

Those things make a difference. So, that’s the real world stuff. Now let’s talk about the online and phone stuff. And you already talked about email, but I want to add one thing to that and it seems to me, in the aviation industry, there have been a few people working for, what would otherwise be, very credible companies.

But then their email, when they send me an email or give me a business card, their email is at gmail.com.

John Williams: Yup.

Paula Williams: Maybe the company name at gmail.com and they ask, well what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that is that it doesn’t look like you have a domain or it doesn’t look like you invested in the infrastructure to set up your company the right way, right?

John Williams: That’s right.

Paula Williams: Okay.

John Williams: Because it takes [COUGH] more thought and it takes actually more technology to be able to do that correctly. Not that much more and it’s not that much more expensive. But nonetheless, it needs to be done.

Paula Williams: Yeah, it’s equivalent to the card table in the lobby.
It looks like you just set up yesterday if you don’t have that done.

John Williams: Our first day in business, we were something at aviationbusiness.com.

Paula Williams: Right.

John Williams: We never did go through the Gmail phase.

Paula Williams: Right. And we actually ended up making a shortcut for that. ABCI1.com, because it’s so dang long.

Aviationbusinessconsultants.com. But still, it meets our branding and all of those other things. So, okay. So website and especially your home page, if that’s the one that people visit the most, and you can look at Google Analytics and find out where do most people come into your website. And it’s often your home page or some landing page.

But that’s where you want to spend the time and money and make sure that that looks good, right? Okay. Search page, this is when somebody searches for, in our case, like aviation marketing. What does that look like on google.com or yahoo.com or bing.com or whatever? Does it have a description of our company or does it say, welcome!

John Williams: [LAUGH].

Paula Williams: It’s amazing how many companies just have that as their search page. Welcome to abci.flywheelstaging.com. This is the best real estate in the world for advertising your business and it’s free to make that 67 characters that you really, really like, and that say this is what we do.
So you don’t want to waste that on welcome, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Welcome to Fantasy Island. [LAUGH] Not quite appropriate.

John Williams: Unless you’re running Fantasy Island.

Paula Williams: Exactly. Audio quality. In our case, we do a podcast. So a lot of people, the first time they come in contact with us, it’s because somebody shared a podcast with them.

And they will say, I really liked your voices, you guys sound like somebody that I could do business with. Which is kind of scary because we’re not radio people.

John Williams: No believe me.

Paula Williams: They’re supposed to have better voices than we do.

John Williams: But we go out of our way to have quality audio equipment.

And a matter of fact, the microphones she’s using, I believe was made around 1948, 49. But I had it because it’s really operating a long time ago. So somebody gave it to me and I just rebuilt it and there she goes.

Paula Williams: Yep, it’s the glamorous Frank Sinatra microphone.

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: So yeah, we’ve invested a little bit in that because a lot of people find us that way first. Your LinkedIn profile. Maybe people are looking for what you do on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is the first way they come in contact with you. So do you have a nice picture, a professional picture, especially you in front of an airplane, or you doing your thing.

If you do public speaking, you standing at a podium. Whatever it is that you do, that’s a great first impression. It might be an email signature line, right? If you prospect by email, you want to make sure that your signature line has the ways to get in touch with you.

What drives me the most crazy, I think, is when there is no phone number in people’s email signature line, right? If I have to go looking for your phone number, I’m going to find somebody else to do business with [LAUGH] because I can tell you haven’t put any thought into making it convenient for me, right?

John Williams: Right.

Paula Williams: Okay, a phone script or outline. So if you’re doing prospecting by phone, you want to make sure that you sound really polished and professional whether it’s a human being picking up the phone or whether it’s an answering machine. And you don’t want to sound robotic and you want to adapt to whatever the other person say.
But you want to have something in mind and not be winging it every time, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH] Exactly.

Paula Williams: You can see that a mile away. Okay, and then the last thing is your teleconference visible area, right? And what I mean by that is what does your webcam see, right?

So, a lot of us do business by GoToMeeting or by Dial Me In or whatever service you use for teleconferencing. And the webcam tells no lies, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: If somebody’s doing business in their garage or whatever, it kinda looks like it. And if you’ve got kids running around in the background or kids, dogs, chimpanzees, whatever, [LAUGH] going on in your house, it doesn’t give the same impression if you’re trying to sell a million dollar product.

That’s not the kind of impression that you want to give. If you are wearing a t-shirt and your pajamas or whatever, that’s fine as long as you look good from whatever is visible from the camera, right?

John Williams: $1 million product, that doesn’t matter if it’s a $5,000 product or up, it’s still.

Paula Williams: Yeah, you want to look like somebody that they want to do business with and not dialing in a performance of some kind.

John Williams: Exactly.

Paula Williams: Okay. Cool so, those are things that you can and should invest in and, in some cases, it doesn’t take any money. It just takes some thought and energy into arranging the lighting in your room or maybe hanging a backdrop or something like that, so that you’ve got a more professional appearance there.

John Williams: We have gone through a lot of effort to do that for Ms. Paula. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Yes we have and John’s is just kind of natural and you’ve got your messy whiteboard, but that’s okay. It looks like we’re busy right?

John Williams: [LAUGH] At least I’m busy.

Paula Williams: [LAUGH] Yeah wait, yeah if you see somebody with a clean office you know they’re not getting anything done.

Okay. So the point is, you want to think about what your prospects see first and what do they hear first. And you actually process a lot more information. And you go back to that book thinking fast and slow. You process a whole lot more information visually than you do auditorily.

So, if you have to prioritize, think about what do people see? But you also want to think about the other senses, as well. And actually, one of the things that I really liked about the dentist’s office is how it smelled. It didn’t smell like a horrible dentist office, right?

You know how a dentist’s office sometimes have that horrible disinfectant.

John Williams: Yeah whatever.

Paula Williams: The cheap, I don’t even know the brand name of it but it’s awful. And it just makes your teeth hurt just walking in the door because you associate that with the dentist office. This place had the little wax burners and things around the reception areas so that it smelled nice.

So you want to think about the other senses, but primarily if you have to prioritize, you think about visual first, right? Okay, so once again big ideas, the cliche is true, right? First impressions are incredibly important. And just to wrap up, this is a really high priority to invest resources.

Because it doesn’t matter what kind of marketing you do. If the first impression that people get when they call your office or they walk in is a bad one, your advertising has just been wasted.

John Williams: [CROSSTALK] All your marketing and you made a sale, then whenever they obtain the product or service you need to continue marketing.

Paula Williams: Exactly. Yeah, you’re never really done. But the first impression is the most important time to establish that relationship in a way that’s going to give you some slack in case you screw up somewhere down the road, right?

John Williams: [LAUGH]

Paula Williams: Not that that’s ever going to happen. But it could.
And we’re all human, so those things happen. So put a little bit of energy into the front end. And once again, visual elements are the most important to prioritize first, right?

John Williams: Yep.

Paula Williams: Okay, cool. [SOUND]

This episode has been brought to you by our aviation sales and marketing concierge service.

This is how we help our customer who are doing a lot more with a lot fewer people in the last few years it seems. And a lot of the things like reports, budgets, plans, sales support, evaluations, copy writing, e-mail, direct mail, trade show prep and follow-up. Those kinds of things sometimes don’t get done just because you don’t have enough time or enough people to make them happen.

aviation sales and marketing concierge serviceAnd without those little details, executing even the most creative and effective campaigns, isn’t going to work as well as you’d like it to because those details are really important. So this is our way of helping you out. By providing an extra pair of hands on some of those really critical tasks.

Ask us about our aviation sales and marketing concierge service or go to abci1.com/concierge to find out more. [SOUND]

 

Subscribe to our podcast, aviation marketing Hanger Flying on iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play. Wherever you get your podcast. And refer a friend. Let them know about this. The better people do with marketing in the aviation industry, really, I think the better for the industry and the better for the industry, the better for all of us.

Because a thriving aviation industry is. And it feeds [CROSSTALK] yeah it really feeds off of itself and each other right?

John Williams: Mm-hm.

Paula Williams: Okay so and please do also leave us a review because that’s how other people find us. So thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next week.

John Williams: See ya, ciao. [SOUND]

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us for aviation marketing Hangar Flying. The best place to learn what really works in sales and marketing in the aviation industry. Remember to subscribe on iTunes and leave a rating.[MUSIC]…