Finding And Keeping Charter Customers

The very best way to find and keep customers is to have a conversation. That’s because you learn by listening. You can identify needs, suggest solutions, ask about concerns, and provide information.

Who’s Making Telephone Calls For Your Business?

§  Who’s calling your former customers to ask what caused them to stop flying with you, and to invite them to return?

§  Who’s calling the quotes that didn’t turn into trips to ask the reason they didn’t fly with you…and to see if you can get their future business?

§  Who’s calling companies in your market to explain the benefits of business charter and inviting them to learn more?

Most People Don’t Like To Make Sales Calls

If no one on your staff is making these calls, it’s probably because most people don’t like to make sales calls. Rather than force yourself to do something you dislike, why not hire AirPSG (or even one of our competitors) to make the calls on your behalf?

Will Making Calls Get You More Trips?

Yes, but not right away. A charter flight is not an impulse purchase. Except by pure random chance, we’re not going to get a prospect on the phone the very day they were planning to book a trip with someone.

The way you get more trips is by having that conversation. We identify needs, propose solutions, inquire about concerns, and handle common objections. We ask for their future business and we get permission to stay in touch each month.

We’ll get quote requests, but they will tend to be along the lines of “what if.” That’s good! We want to help customers think through practical business scenarios where flying with you gives them a tangible benefit.

You Get More Trips By Staying In Touch

The telephone call is the icebreaker. The conversation plants the seed for using charter as an effective business tool. Staying in touch every month, by email, social media, or direct mail, is how you water the seed, cultivate the idea, and pull the weeds. Then in a few weeks, or more likely a few months, the person we call today will have an actual business need and will call you for a quote on a charter trip.

To learn more about using the telephone to get and keep customers, give me a call at 800.769.6082. Thanks. 

Getting and Keeping Customers

It takes cash to pay salaries and all the other bills that are part of staying in business. Cash comes from customers. They give us their cash because we gave them something of equal or greater value.

Selling is all about explaining the value of our products and services. If we can clearly explain the value, and the customer has enough information to assess the value, we're done selling.

Of course, we still don't have the cash. That's because there are two more steps after we're done selling. The first of the remaining steps belongs to the customer. That step is called deciding. Sometimes customers make prompt decisions. That's especially evident when the decision is to NOT buy your product or service. Sometimes, the customer takes a while to decide. You really can't speed that up. It's a matter of temperament and personality.

Some folks, once thy have all the necessary facts, make prompt decisions. And some people simply never make prompt decisions...but they do follow a consistent decision making process, whether or not they are aware of it.

But there's a third category of folks who can't make decisions. And I think these are the folks you're thinking about when you have negative thoughts about the nature of selling. That's because you think selling is all about convincing this group of folks to buy your product or service. It's true you can apply various techniques to "get" these folks to buy...but here's the problem...you can't keep them. There's a delay, but eventually they figure out that you talked them into something and even if they were deliriously happy with the service, they will resent the way you got them to buy it and will never return.

There are some appropriate, moral, and ethical things you can and should do to assist customers with the "deciding" step. But more about that in the next post. And then we'll talk about the final step, which is actually getting paid.

Five Marketing Items For Your Yearly Tune-Up

Unless you exceeded your sales goals last year, you should take 3 minutes to look at a service we're offering this month. It's a sales and marketing annual review. We check five essential areas that can easily get out of alignment if you don't check and calibrate them at least once a year.

Three of the areas are pretty focused on marketing; one is about sales; and the last one covers both subjects. If we find anything that needs adjustment, we give you the tools and training so you can fix it yourself...and keep it on track. And for the items that are working fine, you'll have peace of mind.

Following My Own Advice

Over the past few weeks, we've put together a Sales and Marketing Annual Review for our clients. One of the steps in the Annual is to audit a client's website for content, stale material, and recent updates. I asked one of our folks to use the AirPSG website for training. Boy, was I embarrassed when my staff pointed out to me that I hadn't posted anything new to my blog since 2010!

How could that be?

As it turns out, before they hit me with the bad news, they asked me when was the last time I remembered posting anything. I thought it was early last year…admittedly, still an embarrassment but nothing as bad as finding out it was in 2010.

I know how this happened. While it's true I write a lot of posts for the clients, and have even published some industry articles, I haven't been diligent, rigorous, or structured in keeping Mike's Blog current. My friend Dee Reinhardt at Time2mrkt.com tells me the secret is putting a recurring appointment on my calendar so I get a reminder once a week that it's time to update the blog. "Or," she says, "take it down."

It's now on the calendar. Let's see if I can keep this current in 2014!