How To Qualify Prospective Student Pilots

Imagine that your flight school has gone from sourcing 50 leads per month to 200 leads. What an improvement! Unfortunately, just getting the leads is only half the battle. Now its time your flight school businesses should qualify Students leads. This is important because it helps your team optimize their time by prioritizing which leads to focus on. By the end of this post you will have a rock solid understanding of what it will take to create and implement this qualifying framework. We will show you how to qualify prospective student pilots.

In order to qualify a prospective flight student, you as the flight school representative need to understand two factors in order to properly assess the fit. Firstly, you should look at the demographic characteristics of the person. How old are they? Where are they from? Are they local or international? Can they afford the cost of a private pilot certificate and beyond? Are they even the decision maker? I doubt any 15 year old who makes their way into your flight school is footing the bill.

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The second factor is more psychographic but is anchored in the prospective students interest in learning how to fly. A good way to gauge this is firstly, how active have they been with your digital assets and other outreach or top of the funnel activities? From there, once the student makes their way down to your school you an get an even better sense of their interest simply by their demeanor. Are they engaged and asking questions? What is their general attitude towards flying and the culture you are introducing them into? Did they absolutely love the discovery flight? These observations are generally excellent indicators of a prospective students willingness to continue their journey towards earning their wings.

Related Article: How Flight Schools are Attracting Students Using Inbound Marketing

Having this framework allows for your school to segment which prospects get time and energy invested. Your prospects can fall into a handful of buckets as outlined below. The best folks are obviously your current students, these people are your north star. Good prospects are ones that are a great fit but have limited interest for one reason or another.

These are the students that need to be nurtured, educated and excited about flying! Then we have the possible students who have bad fits but show incredible interest. These prospects can be tricky in that they seem like good fits because of their interest but they may have no financial means to move forward. Think a 15 year old who loves planes but in reality, the parents are the decision makers. And the last segment of prospects are the ones with low interest and low fit. As such, no time should be spent pursuing these folks.

With this framework in mind you as a flight school owner will be equipped to scale your business. The sky is never the limit, because we have foot prints on the moon!

This post was originally published on cfibuddy.com by Joseph Muccio