How COVID-19 is changing selling in the aerospace industry.

The aerospace industry has long held on to the old fashioned way of selling. A team of sales professionals – often face to face – is required to facilitate new business, initiate transactions and contracts and maintain relationships with their customers. An industry standard that built business over decades. A why-fix-it-if-it-isn’t broken mentality. A mutual, unspoken agreement to keep the bar right where it is.

The cracks in this sales strategy started to appear in the last few years with more video conferencing, less need for face time visits and a customer who increasingly put the value of convenience over that of a smiling face and hearty handshake. Today, amidst a global health crisis, face-to-face selling is an impossibility (even down to the handshake). Covid-19 has changed everything.

Business will resume, sales transactions will transpire, but they are about to leap to hyperspace in the speed of transformation. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized. We did it with mail, we will do it with everything else. Luckily, we have been given a road map from the transformation of the retail and B2C industry since the turn of the century.

Long story short, if you don’t have e-commerce, get it, and quickly or the dust of others will block out your sun. If you spend hours tracing, sending and wasting precious time managing paperwork, stop.

Business came to a screeching halt as if it were the subway at 10:39 PM. First the end of motion, then the lights go out, then the groan, then the awkward shuffling and growing vocalized frustration and the unintelligible announcements. Then magically, the lights come on, the train lurched forward, and we head towards our destination. Except the destination has changed, and we need to change with it.

Today it’s imperative to figure out how to relay your value message to your customers without contact. To find ways to differentiate your product without having to have a conversation. To accommodate the needs of buyers adjusting to their new normal. Your competitors are reacting to the same situation.

It is time to innovate. To digitize your strategies for sales and marketing and bring value, speed and convenience to your customers without shaking their hands. The industry standards are rapidly changing – from creating an online marketplace to getting more efficient in your systems and processes. And while you may have made plans for all of this in the coming decade, our new reality is here. The sooner you adjust, the better chance you have in maintaining everything you logged countless miles and steak dinners for.

Today brings a clear focus on innovation, new sales strategies and business growth. Aramid Technologies has translated decades of experience in aerospace sales, supply chain management and digital marketing solutions to deliver an eCommerce platform and smart cert management tools that will effectively transition your business to what is being requested of and required of you today and going forward.