Marketing for Aviation Consultants - Book Club Discussion - The Irresistible Consultant's Guide to Winning Clients

This book topic is a great opportunity for us to talk about marketing for aviation consultants! Many of our clients are consultants – including aircraft brokers, charter brokers, insurance and legal professionals, and aircraft maintenance and upgrade consultants.

This sales and marketing skills than anything they’ll teach in a Dale Carnegie or Sandler Sales course- so here we have the chance to dive into some of the particulars and talk about things that have worked for us and for our favorite aviation consultants

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Transcript – Book Club Discussion- Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients

Paula Williams:

Welcome to our Book Club Discussion-Irresistible Consultant’s Guide to Winning Clients.

John Williams:

Irresistible consultant?

Paula Williams:

Yes.

John Williams:

And you leave me to stand in front of here by myself.

Paula Williams:

Yes. The irresistible Consultant’s GUIDE to WINNING CLIENTS by David A. Fields. This was a book that we read in our Book Club quite a while ago, but we’re a little bit behind on our Book Club discussions because we’ve been focusing on other things. But this episode is brought to you by our Aviation Sales and Marketing Lab, which is, where we have our Book Club. Our lab members get a book each month that has something to do with sales, marketing, consulting. A topic that’s near and dear to all of our hearts.

Paula Williams:

And besides the books, we also do softwares, Leadfeeder, Canva. There are some other neat pieces of software, some SEO evaluators and other things that we use in that group. And then we provide coaching so that you know what the heck to do with this software and how it actually is going to help you make sales and the best part is you get to talk to her other lab members who are incredibly smart. They are the coolest people in the aviation industry and we’re going to talk about several of them today.

Paula Williams:

So, the reason we are so far behind is because this kid ran off to the circus.

John Williams:

Military not circus.

Paula Williams:

He’s actually in OCS right now and we’ve been doing several of these Book Club discussions with him, which gives you a different perspective. So today you’re just going to have John and me, but it will still be fun, I promise.

John Williams:

Whenever you say.

Paula Williams:

It will be fun. So I think that this book was great for some of the folks in our group and not so great for others. The people that it was probably really helpful for would be brokers, Aircraft brokers, Charter brokers, Insurance people, “Consultative” Maintenance Providers. I’m going to say not just the people who… When people know exactly what they need and they just schedule their phase inspections and those kinds of things, but people who actually do some kind of consulting having to do with maintenance and also High Ticket Items.

Paula Williams:

It was not so great for a Component Manufacturers, Widget Makers I think Distributors, Software people who sell downloadable software and Small Transaction people. So if you’re in our group, some of the books are going to apply to you better than others. That’s just the way it goes. But in order to be helpful, we have to be sort of specific. And we actually do have quite a few consultants in the groups and we’re going to talk about them at the end and how they use some of these points.

Paula Williams:

The thing I like best about this book, it is completely full of cartoons. I love that it is so much easier to learn something when every two or three pages there is a cartoon. And being the way people are, especially for reading, it’s sort of a semi pastime activity. You don’t do it during the workday, I need to be entertained personally when I’m reading. And this really helps you remember things better, it helps make the points, it makes you laugh all of those things. So, all of the points that I picked for this discussion are actually cartoons.

John Williams:

Unless into a tech manual, which there are no cartoons.

Paula Williams:

Heaven forbid, even tech manuals would be better if they put cartoons in them. I kid you not.

John Williams:

We can debate that one, but go on.

Paula Williams:

All right. So, this first cartoon is actually from the web and we’re using the fair use because some people are going to ask, “is it okay in my podcast and in my marketing materials to use other people’s stuff?”. And this is a book review. So, the fair use law says that in a book review or a movie review, you get to use excerpts and other things to do a review of the book. So, we’re using the fair use principle to lift a few cartoons. This one was from the web, some of them I actually just took a picture of with my cell phone cause I couldn’t find them anywhere and they were the best cartoons that I could find. This one here’s about metrics. Your Utilization is a 65% does that mean I’m not busy enough or that I’m too efficient?

Paula Williams:

Not sure. So, that’s why a lot of people distrust consultants I think is because they provide a lot of data and not a lot of context. It’s easy to provide data. It is not easy to be right about context all the time.

John Williams:

I was a consultant for a long time and I did not approach it like that.

Paula Williams:

Neither did I, but you do know some that did, right?

John Williams:

Yes I do.

Paula Williams:

So don’t be that guy.

John Williams:

Exactly.

Paula Williams:

All right. So, what I did or what I found in the book most helpful for me personally. My context comes from my experience. Is most consultants… I talk about what most consultants do and maybe some of the advice that we’ve giving to people in our-

John Williams:

Talk much-

Paula Williams:

And when they have an alternate point of view or they have something that really emphasizes the point or maybe gives us a unique perspective I thought that was really cool too to highlight. So, first piece is, Most Consultants Insist On Finding New Customers Rather Than Selling More To Their Existing Customers. And the cartoon says, “it’s a lot easier to sell what people want to buy than to find people that will buy what you want to sell.” Very good point.

John Williams:

That’s what made me so successful as a consultant, as I sold more to existing clients. And it’s easy to do you don’t even have to sell you just listen to what they want and say, I can do that.

Paula Williams:

I can help you with that. So, if someone asks, “can you help me with this?” The answer you default with according to Richard Branson is Yes and then you figured out how to do it, or you find someone who can help them do it. You don’t want to overstretch your abilities and ruin your credibility, but you can almost always find someone else to refer them to or find a way to help them. It’s just a matter of putting in more effort and more time. The other piece of this I wanted to share is that when we started our consulting practice, we were doing copywriting for aviation and nobody wanted copywriting for aviation.

John Williams:

Didn’t even know what it was.

Paula Williams:

They didn’t even know what copywriting was. So, what we had to do is say, what do people in this industry want? And they wanted marketing help. They wanted websites, they wanted brochures, they wanted coaching, they wanted how do I set up my social media?, they wanted personal branding. So, that’s how we have developed every one of our products is in response to a request from a customer.

John Williams:

Made it a lot easier that you’d already been in marketing big time before you started the company.

Paula Williams:

Absolutely. I just thought that given the tools and software that we didn’t have and everything else, it would be easier to start with copywriting, but nobody wanted it. So that plan failed quickly and we realized we had to invest in some software and become a full service marketing company. So, do what your customers want. Don’t try to find new customer because if we were looking for aviation copywriting customers-

John Williams:

We would still be looking for clients if we only did copywriting!

Paula Williams:

Most Consultants Shoot Too High on the Totem Pole. And we’ve always advised, and a lot of our clients complain, that the person that they’re talking to can’t make a decision so we say, go shoot higher on the totem pole. There’s a whole chapter in this book that’s actually good that talks about, if you want to win more consulting business faster, stay at the lowest level of the organization that has sufficient need plus urgency plus budget. So-

John Williams:

Which is exactly what we did when we met in the company we were working for.

Paula Williams:

So, you want to shoot for the lowest point that they actually are qualified to make that decision. If you’re having trouble because they don’t have the authority to make that decision, then you need to go higher. But I thought that was a really interesting point and kind of at odds with what we have been saying, shoot for the highest point he thinks shoot for the lowest point, but in context.

John Williams:

But in context we do shoot for the lowest, interested to segment that they’re looking at is higher up the scale because they’re the ones who can say Yes or No.

Paula Williams:

So, it’s a different way of looking at it. It’s a very small semantic change, but it’s a really big mindset shift I think for us so I thought that was really insightful.

Most Consultants Try to Be Too Clever. They try to be super innovative and when you’re buying toothpaste… Innovative is great, it’ll whiten your teeth and have pink sparkles in it and all of these other wonderful things, that’s great. And you don’t mind spending $4 on something that if you don’t like it, you can throw it away. But if you’re starting a relationship with a consultant, you don’t want innovative, you want reliable. Right?

John Williams:

Yes, absolutely.

Paula Williams:

So, don’t try to be too brilliant or too flashy or too innovative and make up a lot of fancy words.

John Williams:

I remember them asking, what can you do for us? And my response is, more of the point is what do you need help with? And we go from there.

Paula Williams:

So you don’t necessarily want to differentiate yourself from the other folks in the market. You want to be the most reliable option for getting the result that they want.

John Williams:

And it works.

Paula Williams:

All the time. Boring is helpful. Not in marketing, but in consulting it sure is. You want to provide consistent, measurable results.

Most Consultants Target Too Broad of a Market.

John Williams:

[inaudible 00:11:16] It is not the truth.

Paula Williams:

This cartoon says, “I work with grey-hatted men whose facial features have gone missing.” And of course in the cartoon you have a grey-hatted man who has no facial features. “Hey, that’s me”. So, another thing that they talk about here is the Fishing Line versus the Elevator Pitch. And this is a fishing line. And how is it different from an elevator pitch? It’s actually kind of cool. So, you’re working with someone or you’re at a networking event with someone and they ask you, “what do you do?”

Paula Williams:

You say, I work with, you’re sitting next to a grey-hatted men who has no facial features. You say, I work with grey- hatted men who have no facial features. No, you actually find something that you know about that person so far that ties into you and you say, I work with people like you. Really, tell me more, then you can go into your elevator pitch. But the fishing line is, your first conversation should be about the customer, not about you. So when they ask you what do you do, you return that with something about them. I thought that was incredibly clever.So-

John Williams:

I fixed your problems.

Paula Williams:

I fixed problems where people like you. Here’s another really good one.

Most consultants Don’t Spend Enough Time on Business Development.

John Williams:

Guilty as charged. [crosstalk 00:00:12:46]. My first, company failed after three years because I didn’t do that.

Paula Williams:

You had a really reliable customer and thought you’d have them forever.

John Williams:

I had him for three years out of four but I wasn’t budgeting correctly so that I could go ahead and bring in more help to expand it.

Paula Williams:

The pie chart that they use here is not really a cartoon, but it’s a visual for me. It’s talking about spending at a maximum of 20% on administration. That has not been our week so far. And sometimes it happens, you have to say-

John Williams:

Annually, we can go there.

Paula Williams:

Sometimes you’re going to have to make exceptions, but a maximum of 20% on administration and at least 20% on business development and then the other 60% on working with clients and doing your thing.

John Williams:

And that’s the rest of the numbers but I think we’re pretty close.

Paula Williams:

So 20%-

John Williams:

On annual basis.

Paula Williams:

And we actually try to do this very systematically because every Monday we work on the business and that’s our administration. And then every Friday we work on marketing and that is our business development. And then you know, Tuesday through Thursday we work on clients stuff. So, that’s the plan. Of course, there’s always exceptions when a client has an emergency or something breaks or you have to fix a printer and God knows what happens. But if you have a plan like that and you have a designated day of the week to do business development or administration or whatever, that is what really helps us.

John Williams:

Or the Air Handling Unit needs to be maintained or the Hot Water Heater decides to quit and spills water all over the floor [crosstalk 00:14:48]. And so forth. Sometimes that all happens in the same and you say, wait a minute, time out.

Paula Williams:

And sometimes you’re going to have a trade show which throws the whole thing out the window and the whole week is spent on business development. Sometimes a client has an emergency and you throw the whole thing out the window and spend all of your available time helping that client.

John Williams:

Which is why I say an annual basis, we’re probably pretty close.

Paula Williams:

That’s a nice paradigm. Here’s another one that says it’s got the Chinese menu. Choose Any Two, for marketing, speaking, writing, networking, trade associations, digital presence. We get to add SEO, email marketing, digital marketing, direct mail marketing campaigns. As a full service marketing firm, of course we could add a million other marketing activities, but you want to be really good at least two marketing activities because one could go south on you. And you don’t have to do everything, you don’t have to be fantastic at everything. But the more you spread that out, the more you cover your bases and the more people you’re likely to find that work that way.

John Williams:

And when you get enough business in one area, you hire appropriately.

Since we have lots of consultants in our Marketing Lab, we get to talk about how they really manage marketing for aviation consultants:

Paula Williams:

A few of our favorite consultants and some of the things that they have done, having not even known about these cartoons yet or maybe they did.

Sherry Chaput – Avion Trace

Sherry Chaput she owns Avion Trace and she is the Sherlock Holmes of aircraft records. So, when an airline can’t fly an airplane because it’s missing a piece of documentation, they call Sherry and say, “help us get this remediated, help us find this document or get another one from, wherever it needs to come from and make sure that all of our documentation is safe and legal and checked off and all of the back to back traces on all of the life limited parts are done and all that stuff.”

John Williams:

You wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of business there, but she is inundated.

Paula Williams:

And a year ago she was not a person that enjoyed public speaking, and now she’s being asked to host panels and do all kinds of things and be a moderator. She’s really become a thought leader in the industry because, she was willing and able to step up and do some public speaking, which is fantastic. She’s really jumped out of her comfort zone and is doing a fantastic job with that.

Gene Clow, Great Circle Aircraft

Paula Williams:

Gene Clow. Great Circle Aircraft, he is another one of our favorite consultants and he does a fantastic job of using humor. In fact, he’s used cartoons. He was probably our first client ever to suggest using cartoons and he puts out a monthly state of the industry report for business jets and it can be pretty dry, but he puts a lot of humor into that by by using a lot of cartoons-

John Williams:

And not only that, but he knows in depth how to change the data into information. So if got a question, he’s the guy to go to and that stuff.

Paula Williams:

He’s not going to tell you anything with data. He’s definitely going to tell you what’s behind the data.

John Williams:

In words you can understand for crying out loud.

Jet Values Jeremy

Paula Williams:

Jeremy Cox of JetValuesJeremy.com He values-

John Williams:

Everything that flies-

Paula Williams:

And doesn’t fly-

John Williams:

Everything that was designed to fly that may not be flyable. If it’s a [inaudible 00:18:32], if it’s unflyable, he will value whatever it is.

Paula Williams:

It doesn’t even have to be a complete airplane. It can be a piece of an airplane in a museum and he can provide a value for the insurance-

John Williams:

And not just U.S Stuff, in worldwide he does this.

Paula Williams:

And he is super busy doing all of that and he is so engaging and so into networking. We flew into… we didn’t fly into, we drove into St.Louis and went to the St.Louis Airport and he introduced us to everybody at that airport. And he didn’t chew me out, but I felt a little chagrined because I had not done any calling around or any prospecting there to let people know that we were in town. But Jeremy did it for me while we’re sitting at lunch-

John Williams:

He made phone calls to all these people made appointments.

Paula Williams:

He is one of [inaudible 00:19:29] is always networking and always selling and always helping someone with something. And everybody’s always thrilled to get his phone calls because he is so personable and so helpful. He’s got the networking down like nobody we’ve ever seen.

Marketing for aviation consultants - Doug Goldstrom

Doug Goldstrom, Special Services Corporation

Paula Williams:

Doug Goldstrom from Special Services Corporation. That is one of the best run organizations for managing an airplane and doing maintenance and flying charters and everything else out of South Carolina. And they’re southern gentleman, they’re really good at what they do. Very good at hospitality and-

John Williams:

They get a client, the client never wants to go away.

Paula Williams:

And Doug does a really good job of following up. Some of the folks that he works with managing their planes are people that he has known forever and their circumstances change and he doesn’t give up on him and he stays with them and follows their needs and makes sure that he’s able to have a solution that works for them. So, their company has become… The name is Special Services Corporation so, they literally customize a plan for single aircraft owner, every single person that comes in with a maintenance problem and so on.

John Williams:

And even their 135 charter folks, they take care of them like you wouldn’t believe.

Paula Williams:

They are the non-big charter company there. With the rules and all that stuff. They do whatever is needed to-

John Williams:

They have been around for 55 plus years.

Paula Williams:

There is a super respected company, so that works really well for them and they’ve been adapting since they were born. They started as an insurance company with a flight department.

John Williams:

If I recall, they started with the [inaudible 00:21:26]

Paula Williams:

So, talk about adapting over the years to stay in business and stay relevant. That’s a a really phenomenal job there.

Adam Sipe, Citation Specialist

Adam Sipe. Adam does the Airplane Intel Podcast and he has a huge audience from that. So anything that he does in his life and he’s a pretty young guy, he’s going to carry that audience and that authority with him wherever he goes and all of those relationships and things because he has already built an empire.

Paula Williams:

Being good at technology and being willing and able to do a podcast where he’s interviewing different airplane owners and other folks about different issues and things and really establishing a lot of street cred in the aviation industry.

John Williams:

He’s actually compiling information for a course he’s writing now, so you need to stand by and see what happens with that.

Paula Williams:

If you own a citation, Adam is really the guy to talk to about how to avoid some of the pitfalls that people have with with citations and how to get the most out of your ownership experience without having it being a problem for you.

John Williams:

From maintenance to insurance, everything.

Deidra Toye, AeroStar Training Services

Paula Williams:

Deidra, is the owner of AeroStar Training Services, which is a part 141 and 142 training organization. I think they are the only one that I know of where you can start with zero flight experience. You can just be a high school graduate and start from your very first lesson and end up at the same facility with a type rating and a [crosstalk 00:23:24] 137-

John Williams:

Or an Airbus 320.

Paula Williams:

And an ATP CTP certificates.

John Williams:

Before you even walk out the door.

Paula Williams:

And be ready for the first officer candidate in an airline. So, it’s a really great organization. And the thing that Deidra does better than just about anybody else is, she puts a mentorship program together and she really emphasizes that in the organization. So, people that start with their very first lesson will have a mentor who can help them design their whole career. From high school all the way through getting their recurrent-

John Williams:

And even providing advice on a given airline on how to work up through the ranks.

Paula Williams:

Because she knows people from all of the airlines so she can help people match up with folks that can help them. And if you look the Google reviews on Aerostar’s Google or on their Facebook or anywhere else, they have incredible reviews and tons of them from people who have really enjoyed their program.

Joni Schultz, James A Gardner Aviation Insurance

Paula Williams:

Joni Schultz. All of these people have been with us for a really long time, for more than a year. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about them. And they’ve been in our lab and they work with each other and they work with us so we know how they work. And Joni actually started with us as the president of the Whirly-Girls. She was a scholarship recipient a couple of years ago and then she came back later in a second life… How the Phoenix rises from a situation and she is now a [crosstalk 00:25:10] insurance broker for all aircraft but specializing in rotorcraft because that’s where her area expertise is.

John Williams:

In fact, she is, commercial instrument, et cetera or rotorcraft and she has her own rotorcraft.

Paula Williams:

And she really sweats the details. Not only does she insist on getting all of these ratings herself so that she has the, the credibility and the knowledge and things to to put that into her insurance practice. But she’s also very helpful to our other members in just about everything they do and is willing and able to find out what she doesn’t know and put that together.

Paula Williams:

So, really good at networking, really good at sweating those details and putting things in context and making things make sense. These are folks that we really enjoy working with. And so if you want to know how to do consulting well, if all you did was talk to these folks, you could do a whole lot worse, [crosstalk 00:26:14] especially since they’re all in aviation. And I don’t know of any other organization where you can get that kind of horsepower and in one group of people that will answer your questions on Facebook in the middle of the day, if you run into a problem, in a private group…