Business Class or Coach

If your business has people flying international the question of business class or coach comes up quickly. The issue is that for many young companies, the additional costs as hard to quantify, so they end up forcing all their staff into coach seats.

I was a longterm road warrior for companies I faced the dilemma of coach vs. business class a ton. For years my staff would use the argument of sleep quality and room to perform work to try and get me to sign off on the additional costs. Sometimes it would work, but most of the time, their requests we rejected.

That was till I had a salesperson I met on a flight offer me the best advice about why he always goes Business Class. The gentleman's name was Nick, and we met on a trip from San Diego to Atlanta. On the plane, Nick and I talked about the crazy air miles we both put in each year and how we deal with it. Knowing he matched my travel schedule and responsibility for team travel, I posed my coach vs. business class question, and the answer I got changed my view of business class from that day on.

Nick told me that for years, he was in the same boat as me that the ROI of a business class seat did not make sense. That was till the day one of his sales guys got a free upgrade and ended up sitting to what would later become their single largest client at their company. With that occurrence, Nick approved his young sales guy to buy business class exclusively, moving forward as a "Thank You" for a great deal. What happened next is why all his sales guys now solely travel business class.

Over the next six months, Nick's young sales guy built a sales pipeline that was close to 20x every one else on his team. The crazy part was that when Nick dived into the data, he discovered that a large number of the deals had contact met on flights. When Nick spoke to his sales guy, he found out that since being approved to fly business class, his young sales guy made it a point to network and handed out and collect a minimum of 6-8 business cards per flight. These connections ended up being some of the best in the young salesman's career.

Upon discovery of this, Nick set a KPI for flight connections for his entire sales team with the promise of first-class domestic and business for all international flights in return. The ROI from that investment ended up being nearly 30x according to the data Nick shared with me.

Now let me caption some of this. Nick's company sold SaaS software that was targeted to support marketing teams with data insight. The average deal size for Nick's team was $500k - $2.5mm /year of revenue. Revenue at this level made one deal well worth the extra costs.

So back to the question. Is business class worth it? I am a believer in allowing my team to go business class internationally with agreed upon KPI, but domestic I tell them to earn it with being loyal to an airline. LOL!

What are your thoughts on the matter? Is this an expense every company should eat as the ROI can be so high? Or is the risk too great as you believe most staff will sleep and talk to no one?

I am very excited to hear your thoughts!

To Your Success & Prosperity,

Michael McMillan