In The Business Of Business ... AND Aviation | Aero-News Network
Aero-News Network
RSS icon RSS feed
podcast icon MP3 podcast
Subscribe Aero-News e-mail Newsletter Subscribe

Airborne Unlimited -- Most Recent Daily Episodes

Episode Date

Airborne-Monday

Airborne-Tuesday

Airborne-Wednesday Airborne-Thursday

Airborne-Friday

Airborne On YouTube

Airborne-Unlimited-10.06.25

AirborneNextGen-
10.07.25

Airborne-Unlimited-10.08.25

Airborne-FlightTraining-10.09.25

AirborneUnlimited-10.10.25

Fri, Aug 12, 2011

In The Business Of Business ... AND Aviation

LSA Company Makes Changes Following ANN Article

Sometimes, it's just good to know that perhaps you've done some good. We received this e-mail earlier this week from a company who had read David Juwel's ANN piece about being in the business of aviation, but not in the business of business.

The e-mail is from Pipistrel, which offers a line of LSA motorgliders. It's reproduced here in its entirety.

I wanted to provide you with some feedback on something that really troubled me and hit home when you reported the following feature on February 15, 2011

This article really did highlight the fact that many of the LSA distributors in the USA were not doing things correctly/professionally and highlighted the fact that the professionalism in the industry and the lack of triple digit sales each year was because the customers perceived our end of the industry to be nothing more than the equivalent of questionable used car salesman hawking our wares.

Your secret shopper really did highlight our need to not only be more professional with our customers but also to provide outstanding follow-up after the event to not only give our customers more information after the show but also to reinforce we are in the business of being in business!

Our motivation was solely kicked off by your story which highlighted deficiencies in the way we were doing business.

Getting smarter about this we implemented some plans for this year's Sun N Fun event. We made sure all of our dealers were backing up customers enquiries by registering their interest, writing down their name and e-mail address for follow-up. We thought this system would be great but when the information was assembled a few days after the event it was discovered that at least 60% of the e-mail addresses we had collected were wrong and 60% of our customer contacts bounced making it impossible to follow up these customers!.... consider this to be time wasted when you immediately invalidate 60% of your customers contact details

A couple of months of searching went by looking for a better solution when I finally made contact with some software developers working in the App Store.
With their cooperation we developed a very simple program which captured the customer's name, their e-mail address, the aircraft they were interested in, their location and local dealer for follow-up as well as any other comments about the customer and his requirements.

With a couple of iPad's running this program we went out and collected more than 200 serious contacts during this year's Oshkosh event. Utilising the new technology our bounce rate came down to less than 5%, when we went through and cleaned up some questionable e-mails we were then able to deliver all but about 3% of our enquiries back to the customers.  I am very pleased with this lower bounce rate which is much better than no follow-up contact at all....  e.g. Sebring and previous events and much better than a 60% failure rate at Sun N Fun..... already we have proven that our efforts are working by the number of order forms we are swapping between ourselves and our customers, hopefully deposits will be forthcoming in the next months will be extremely busy!

I wanted to write and thank you personally for the work that you do in the aviation industry and in particular this particular article which prompted me to take a different look at the way we were doing business and make some very serious improvements which not only benefit our sales but also our customer service and our professionalism within the industry. This would not have happened had it not been for your article in February which I am very grateful.

With regards, Michael Coates
Pipistrel USA

FMI: www.pipistrel.si



Advertisement

More News

ANN's Daily Aero-Term (10.14.25): Severe Icing

Severe Icing The rate of ice accumulation is such that ice protection systems fail to remove the accumulation of ice and ice accumulates in locations not normally prone to icing, s>[...]

Aero-News: Quote of the Day (10.14.25)

“...The Airmen that work on the flight line can turn around to the shelf, grab the part, put it in the airplane, and now it’s going to perhaps be several more days befo>[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (10.14.25)

Aero Linx: Alaskan Aviation Safety Foundation (AASF) Welcome to the Alaskan Aviation Safety Foundation. The foundation was created to improve aviation safety in Alaska through educ>[...]

Classic Aero-TV: Curtiss Jenny Build Wows AirVenture Crowds

From 2022 (YouTube Edition): Jenny, I’ve Got Your Number... Among the magnificent antique aircraft on display at EAA’s AirVenture 2022 was a 1918 Curtiss Jenny painstak>[...]

True Blue Power and Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics Power NBAA25 Coverage

Mid-Continent Instruments and Avionics and True Blue Power ANN's NBAA 2025 Coverage... Visit Them At Booth #3436 101 Aviation Nears STC Approval for Lithium Battery Upgrade on Gulf>[...]

blog comments powered by Disqus



Advertisement

Advertisement

Podcasts

Advertisement

© 2007 - 2025 Web Development & Design by Pauli Systems, LC