Benjamin Tosado: Hey everyone, welcome to Clear for Takeoff. Today’s episode is a little different. Instead of talking to an operator or a technology leader, we’re sitting down with someone who spends all day helping aviation companies grow. Omi Diaz-Cooper is CEO of Level 350 Advertising, a platinum-certified HubSpot partner with over 21 years experience of working specifically with B2B aviation and transportation companies.

She’s helped companies like Silver Airways, Amerijet, and our joint customer, Unical Aviation, rethink how they go to market. And she’s using more and more AI to do it, which is why I think this is a really cool person to bring on the podcast. So Omi, thank you for joining.

Omi: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s gonna be exciting to have this conversation with you, especially since we’re both on two sides of kind of the same type of work. So yeah, excited to join.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, that’s why I thought it’d be really cool too, right? We’re very focused on the tech and ops side, and you’re working on the RevOps and the marketing and biz dev side with these folks. So let’s jump into it. So Omi, tell us a little bit about yourself. Your background’s in anthropology, right? So how did you get from there to running a B2B marketing company focused on aviation?

Omi: Yeah, it’s really funny. I did come up in cultural anthropology, and so really my training was to observe how people behave, the things they say, what they actually do, and where there’s a disconnect between those two things, right? I also had a background in design and marketing. So kind of where those two meet is, instead of inventing clever campaigns out of the blue, in a vacuum, we want to show how buyers in aviation make decisions, what pressures they’re under, how they want to justify a spend, right? What risk feels like when you have an AOG, or when you’re trying to find that part and you can’t get to it. So I think it taught me to treat a CRM pipeline like a living culture.

There’s norms and incentives and unspoken rules, and if you don’t understand those, neither the technology nor the sales and marketing efforts will perform well.

Benjamin Tosado: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it’s a very different industry, and I’m excited to jump into that in a few minutes, how marketing’s a little different there. But before we do that, how did you pick aviation as an industry? You talked about your background in anthropology and marketing and design. That all makes sense. Why aviation?

Omi: Yeah, I think over time as our agency grew, we didn’t want to be a generalist. We really kept coming back to high stakes B2B environments where the sales cycle is longer, or it’s very relationship driven. And for me, aviation was the perfect fit. There’s also a little bit of a personal passion. I have a blog on my website about my first solo flight as an eight year old.

I traveled from Puerto Rico to Miami on my own, and when that pilot called me brave and pinned my little wings on, I was hooked. So we’ve always been in travel and transportation and logistics, and aviation was just a wonderful fit in that environment.

Benjamin Tosado: That’s cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, no, that’s really cool. And that’s a really cool personal story. So what is marketing like in aviation now? How is it different than other B2B industries?

Omi: Well, it’s very different in many ways. The first way is that it’s very relationship driven, right? I would tell you that nine out of ten deals are done on a handshake, because somebody knew somebody or they’ve had a long standing relationship with them. It’s also different because as the technology on the fulfillment side matures, it’s putting a lot of pressure on the commercial side.

Benjamin Tosado: Yep, yep.

Omi: What I mean by that is buyers are really used to quick, accurate responses, or that’s what they want. A lot of times it’s the fastest RFQ that wins, not necessarily the one with the best pricing. So it is different. And it’s also different in that almost no one is doing traditional Google searches and things like that.

They’re meeting at trade shows, they’re meeting at events, they’re reigniting those personal relationships. A lot of companies have both inside sales and outside sales teams, so a lot of these people are actually doing legwork and visiting clients. It’s a little bit more complex. And then you couple that with the complexity of the actual services they’re offering, the regulations, the compliance, and it’s just definitely unique.

Benjamin Tosado: Right, right. Yeah, we’re seeing a lot of the same things. It’s really hand to hand, right? People have long standing relationships. They meet in person a lot, I think more so than a lot of other industries. They travel to meet each other a lot, which makes a lot of sense. It’s very much a relationship industry. So how do you think marketing for aviation companies has changed in, say, the last three to five years?

Omi: Well, I think one of the biggest things that’s changed, I do see a lot more digital coming into play, a little more emphasis on websites that are more than just an outdated brochure. Websites that have capabilities, that have calls to action for people to meet with people.

Benjamin Tosado: Digital, I guess like what kind of digital?

Omi: A lot more use of modern tools, like meeting links and things like that. But I think what really needs to change is a lot of companies aren’t doing a great job of differentiating themselves. A lot of them are saying the same things, which they think sound different, but they’re not. If you’re saying your values are excellence and quality, that should be table stakes in this industry. You really need to differentiate yourself on your turnaround times, your actual capabilities, your reliability. If you’re an engine repair shop, how quickly can you get that engine out the door and over to the testing cell? So all of that.

Benjamin Tosado: Right.

Omi: It needs to be surfaced more in the marketing and sales messages, versus people just assuming that because I have a good relationship with so and so, they’re gonna keep giving me the work.

Benjamin Tosado: So I know part of what you’re doing is strategy, helping these folks with marketing strategy. Do you work with them to identify those things and then integrate it with their strategy and their messaging?

Omi: Yeah, absolutely. It’s really important to understand what a qualified buyer is, because even if someone’s buying the same part, a lessor will think about it differently than an actual operator.

Benjamin Tosado: Right.

Omi: You can’t use generic language. You have to really understand what the most important pain points are, and then communicate those and give your buyer the confidence that you’re a reliable, safe choice that can respond fast.

Benjamin Tosado: Right, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think these companies getting smarter about how they market themselves is going to become more and more important. So if you look at the work we’re doing, we’re automating a lot of these procurement processes. We’ve got a customer we had on one of the last sessions here on Cleared for Takeoff, and they serve big operators, the big three airlines and all the major freight operators. What we’re helping them do is automate the process of sending out an RFQ, getting quotes back, and automating the process of selecting one, and even doing the purchase sometimes. So I think firms like yours helping these folks figure out how they go to market in this new, AI driven digital age is really important for them to continue to succeed, right?

Omi: Yeah, no, absolutely. It really means tying all those things together, not just coming up with solutions in a silo, but really understanding the customer journey and how technology or automation can help with that, versus everyone doing their own endpoint solutions and it becomes a crazy mess.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a cool overview of aviation and how it’s different. Let’s talk about your experience with AI in the marketing stack. I know you’re a HubSpot platinum partner, we’re a HubSpot customer, and we’ve started to leverage some of the AI capability inside HubSpot. I’ll tell you, we’re just at the very beginning of our journey. So why don’t you tell us a little about what you’ve seen in terms of AI in marketing, AI in HubSpot specifically as a platform. What makes sense to leverage right now for these aviation companies? What maybe doesn’t?

Omi: Yeah, absolutely. So for me, the most tangible and practical examples of using AI are in what I call the grunt work. Those manual things that used to take up entire days can be accelerated tremendously by using a tool like HubSpot and the AI tools within it. For example, AI tools can be used to summarize long email threads into a few key bullets inside the contact record, so a sales rep can get up to speed on an account in seconds instead of manually digging through thirty emails in an inbox. We use AI to generate first draft follow-ups tailored specifically to the role and recent activity as seen in the CRM, so the reps are editing instead of writing from scratch.

On the more marketing side, we’re using AI for lead scoring and intent signals. Those are two really powerful uses of AI. Instead of a marketer manually guessing what behaviors matter, HubSpot can look at patterns, not just across deals, but what web pages people visited, which emails they reacted to, what sequence actually closed the deal, and use that to determine what leads or opportunities deserve the most immediate, focused attention. That’s a really big upgrade from someone manually updating spreadsheets.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, that’s awesome. So that’s kind of like the whole research aspect of it, some of the communications aspect too. We’ve started playing around with, I can’t even remember what they call it, but I think it’s like a prospecting agent or something. Is that what you’re talking about? Are you familiar with that part of it?

Omi: That’s right, prospecting agent. So there’s several agents, plus Breeze. I’ll break it down real quick. There’s customer agent, and customer agent can help with things like answering FAQs, surfacing capabilities, making it clear if somebody has a part in stock. Those are all things customer agent can help with, as long as the data is in the CRM, or the CRM is connected properly to the ERP.

Benjamin Tosado: Got it.

Omi: Prospecting agent helps with some of the things I talked about, sending out and drafting responses based on the information in the contact record. It can use intent data and then suggest accounts you might want to follow up with. So yeah, those are all really powerful, and they’re built right into HubSpot, so it’s not like a bolted on tool.

Benjamin Tosado: Got it, okay. So it can actually take inbound requests from customers and respond based on the data in the CRM. It can do outbound outreach too. And then what’s Breeze? You mentioned Breeze.

Omi: Yeah, so Breeze is kind of like the underlying AI functionality that can help you with different things. If you just want to ask a quick question, like the other day I spoke to somebody about redoing their pipeline, and I could say, find me all the contacts where I used the word pipeline. So it’s kind of like your built in assistant in HubSpot. HubSpot was really the first CRM that came out with AI first features and that has an MCP.

Benjamin Tosado: And tie in.

Omi: So what’s exciting for what you do is you can also connect and tie it all together through the MCP, so it’s cleaner and it utilizes the CRM functions better, while honoring the AI tools the client may already have.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, so like we’re a big Claude shop, and we implement Claude at a bunch of customers, so we could use the MCP to connect Claude to HubSpot. You can start asking Claude questions about what’s in HubSpot, and it can use all the native tools they’re interested in with the HubSpot data. That’s really cool. So let me ask you about another AI marketing topic that gets a lot of mixed opinions out there. Content generation. I’m very happy to say I use AI to help me generate content for a variety of things, this podcast, LinkedIn posts, we’re using it as a company to generate content. But I think our opinion is you need a combination of AI augmentation and human generation. A lot of people don’t like AI generated content, they post about how nobody’s got authentic content anymore. What’s your take, as a professional in marketing, on this whole content debate with AI?

Omi: Yeah, I think you touched on it a second ago. I think for me, the first mistake is treating AI as a shortcut instead of a force multiplier. If you’re just gonna use a generic prompt and paste whatever comes out onto your website or your content, you’re gonna end up with bland or inaccurate content that sounds like everybody else. And what that does is it erodes trust.

And this is a safety critical, regulation heavy industry. That’s dangerous. So, like you said, AI does need constraints, expertise, and human review. The other big mistake I see is trying to use AI on top of dirty or disconnected data. We’ll talk about that a little more later probably, but if you’re not feeding AI accurate information, and you don’t have the right data, you’re gonna end up with chaos. So it’s really important that you use AI as a force multiplier. For example, let’s say we take this podcast and repurpose it into some social media content, some clips, maybe even a blog post. Repurposing good expert content is a great use of AI, and HubSpot has a wonderful tool called content remix that’s fantastic at this. But again, you have to start with one good piece, not a generic prompt.

Benjamin Tosado: Right, right. Yeah, I think force multiplier is a great way to put it. It’s been a huge force multiplier for us and a bunch of our customers, but I don’t think there’s anything that can replace the human touch, at least not yet.

Omi: At least not yet.

Benjamin Tosado: I’m very interested in the dirty data problem, and I want to get to that in a minute. But before we do, is there any one thing you’d say is a mistake companies are making leveraging AI in marketing that you work with?

Omi: Yeah. Definitely, like I said, the first big mistake is trying to use it as a replacement for human content. And the second one is thinking AI is some sort of magic bullet, that you can AI your way out of not having processes, that you can AI your way out of having terrible data with different people doing different things in different ways. You can’t.

You have to do the unsexy work first, build up your data and your process foundations, and then you can apply AI. That applies to both sales and marketing. Because again, if you don’t have good capabilities information, if you don’t have something that really differentiates you, either from what type of customer you specialize in or what types of engines you specialize in, you end up with this generic-y language, like, you can rely on us, we put safety first, and everyone says that.

Benjamin Tosado: Right, right, right. At that point you’re just the same as everybody else, and then why would somebody bother? That makes a lot of sense. So you mentioned dirty data. That’s an obstacle for marketing and AI marketing in these aviation companies. I can tell you we deal with dirty data from an operations perspective all the time. Data is spread out all over the place, it’s inconsistent, it’s been put in manually for twenty years, it’s incorrect. So I’m very familiar with that as a problem in what we do. Tell me a little about how you guys run into it, and how it’s a problem for some of these aviation companies in their marketing efforts.

Omi: Yeah, so it’s a problem for both marketing and sales efforts. We see things like five records for the same contact, so you can’t run campaigns effectively. Maybe everyone has a different job title. Maybe you’ve got outdated emails, so your emails aren’t going through because a person moved on and you don’t have the latest information. Some of the most egregious ones are the same account named three different ways across the ERP, the CRM, and the fulfillment system. It could be as simple as a hyphen missing, or just those kinds of small inconsistencies that come from manual inputs or processes that aren’t rigorous for the intake of data. But there’s also things like critical fields missing, critical data that should be part of the marketing and sales process but isn’t. Fleet information, for example.

Benjamin Tosado: Right.

Omi: Which customer has what kind of fleet. That’s the kind of thing we architect inside the CRM, so you can understand who the decision makers are based on different types of products, and why you have RFQs with no closed outcomes. If you don’t tidy that up, not sexy stuff, you can’t even learn from your own history, because the history isn’t accurate.

Benjamin Tosado: Okay, sure. So you mentioned fleets, and I imagine understanding the type of fleet somebody’s operating or repairing lets you tailor product and service offerings that you’re marketing to them. Are you customizing HubSpot to give them fields and places to put that kind of aviation specific data? Is that how you’re doing it?

Omi: Yeah, that’s a hundred percent right. So our signature configuration, the Level 350 signature configuration, revolves around these types of things. Now, obviously there’s some commonalities among different aftermarket support firms, parts firms, and MROs, but you still have to understand their particular processes. So we start with that, but then we have things like our airplane object, that we’ve created specifically for aviation, and that’s what houses the fleet information, the specifics of the plane, whether you want to use the tail number as an identifier, for example. All of that isn’t out of the box, and it’s not something a generic onboarding is gonna help you with. It’s really what takes you from just moving along with the tool to actually using it to accelerate your sales and your marketing.

Benjamin Tosado: Sure, absolutely, no, it’s very specific for your market, that’s really cool. So we’ve got a joint customer, Unical Aviation. We’ve both been working with them for several years now, it’s been about three for us, about the same for you guys. They’ve gone on a long journey, both from a technology infrastructure perspective, which is what we’ve been working on, and also from a marketing perspective. Can you tell us a little about the journey you’ve helped them along over the last three years?

Omi: Yeah, absolutely. So without getting into anything confidential, I can say that their commercial effectiveness is downstream of technology decisions, and we saw that very clearly with Unical. They needed to get their data and systems matured. I know you helped them migrate their servers to the cloud, and that helped mature their use of their ERP, their document management, and integrations. That’s what helped our ability to build more reliable pipelines and get automated follow-ups in HubSpot. One of the big things was being able to run campaigns based on what inventory is available, and that requires that ERP integration. You need to stabilize that source of truth so sales and marketing can finally align on what numbers are right, and focus on improving their performance.

What it really taught us is that digital transformation is a team sport. You can’t just relegate it to one department. You need to work with marketing on things like trade show automation, you need to work with sales on CRM adoption, you need to work with IT on constraints and business rules and security. And you need to align all of that with the broader business and data strategy, and their internal champions, so everybody can move forward together. Otherwise it doesn’t really work.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We definitely saw the infrastructure and operational data side of that, helping them mature it, clean it up. You mentioned connecting into ERP systems and ERP data. Is that something you’re doing with HubSpot, or with another system, so customers can use both data sets together to better service their end customers?

Omi: Yeah, absolutely. Right now we’re working with three different companies integrating their ERPs with HubSpot, and their quoting systems. Some of them already have a system like Rotable for accelerating their quoting process, and we’ll connect that as well, along with data feeds like ch-aviation and other industry data feeds. You can use HubSpot’s native enrichment, and it works great, but it doesn’t necessarily have the depth of information in aviation that a specific data source like ch-aviation provides. So it’s important to integrate that into your CRM, to keep your data accurate and updated with an industry specific data set.

Benjamin Tosado: That’s cool. So you’re actually setting up partnerships with some of these companies that manage this industry specific data, so you can bring it into HubSpot and help these companies leverage it for their go to market strategy.

Omi: Right, a hundred percent. If you have a powerful data set, and you only give access to one or two reps who have to log into somewhere and manually find things, that’s not nearly as powerful as bringing that data into the CRM, having the architecture in place so it can surface the right information at the right time, keep everything updated, and make it accessible to everyone, while still honoring the fact that certain leads belong to certain reps, and certain accounts belong to certain reps. So that’s the key, making sure you’re bringing in the right information and giving it to everyone, but that the right people are seeing the right information.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And that brings me to a partnership between what we do, which is really infrastructure, IT infrastructure, data, and AI, and the sales and marketing enablement that you guys do, and how those two things should work together in the best way, in your mind. What does that look like, and how is it better than them working in silos? The reason I ask is I see at Unical, our stakeholder there had a really great vision for how to bring that together, and I don’t see that at many other companies. I see one group of stakeholders focused on operational technology, information technology, operational data, and another set focused on sales and marketing. Listening to you in this podcast, it really makes sense for those two groups to be working together, but I just don’t see that often. Can you talk a little about that?

Omi: Yeah, I see the same thing. I see standalone IT projects that are in direct conflict with what the sales team is trying to do. There’s a lot of issues that arise when these teams work in silos. Because at the end of the day, the business exists to serve the customer and make money, bottom line. And revenue operations is that central line that goes through all of it, it goes through getting leads, acquiring customers, servicing the customer, and then retention and loyalty. So when all the teams are aligned, there’s a very powerful shift, where the question becomes, instead of can our system or our technology do this, it’s should we do this? What’s the impact? How’s this gonna affect the customer? How’s this gonna affect revenue? Technology teams bring the realistic constraints, the security issues, and some opportunities for using cool technology. But the commercial team brings customer and market insight. Together they can design processes that are both efficient and customer friendly, because at the end of the day you need to serve the customer and make money. The result when they work together is faster response times, fewer dropped balls, and a lot less finger pointing.

Otherwise you’re gonna have shadow systems everywhere, people building their own proprietary spreadsheets because they don’t trust the ERP, or IT rolls out a tool that nobody uses because the commercial team wasn’t involved in the requirements. Maybe marketing is launching campaigns that operations can’t support, I’ve seen that happen. So alignment means they’re working together from the same set of data, and the same definition of success.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And you brought up operations. I think about the role of operations in all this too, right, they’re the people deciding which parts to buy, deciding which parts to fix, and that just makes sense to be integrated with demand signals coming from sales and marketing. So last question before we get to our rapid round, Omi, what do you think the aviation company of the future looks like, from a sales and marketing perspective?

Omi: Well, I really believe, and again this might be my anthropology background, but I really believe the company of the future is gonna be so customer centric that from the buyer’s point of view it’s gonna seem like a very simple process. They’re gonna be what we call easy to do business with. So if you’re that buyer, you can get relevant information when you need it, how you want it. You’re gonna have very clear visibility into their capabilities, what quotes you have with them, what part of the process you’re in, clear visibility into work in progress, and you won’t have to repeat yourself every time you talk to a new person in a different department. So behind the scenes, that simplicity is gonna come from that alignment we talked about, between the commercial teams and technology and the fulfillment teams, so they all have that shared data foundation.

And the companies I think are gonna be lagging behind are the ones that stick with the old fashioned “we close deals because so and so knows everyone,” or “John’s gonna stay up late and work extra hard in the last week of the quarter to make the numbers.” That works great for a while, but it doesn’t scale, and it’s fragile. There’s a lot of people coming in with investments, a lot of stakeholders who want to see real numbers, not guesses anymore. So those future winners in aviation are gonna be the ones that take their relationships seriously enough to take their systems and data just as seriously.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, that almost sounds like a data driven customer experience, from end to end. That’s incredible, Omi, that’s awesome, that makes a lot of sense. All right, so we’re gonna jump into our rapid round here, I’ve got four quick questions to wrap us up. What’s the most overhyped thing in AI right now, for aviation marketing or AI in general?

Omi: Yeah, definitely generative content creation, the set it and forget it thing that floods the market with machine written content. That’s definitely overhyped, that’s not the way it should be done.

Benjamin Tosado: Got it, okay. What do you think’s the most underrated?

Omi: To me, underrated is the unsexy sounding little efficiencies. The instant call summaries, the automatic next step suggestions, the smarter routing of inquiries. It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make headlines necessarily, but it’s removing friction and manual delays from your team’s day, and that cumulative savings, that’s where the magic is.

Benjamin Tosado: The force multiplier. Yeah, a hundred percent. Okay, what should every marketing or commercial leader in aviation be reading or paying attention to right now?

Omi: I’m gonna say look outside of the industry, and see how your buyers are being trained by other industries. The expectations of transparency, speed, and self-service are being set by SaaS, logistics, even consumer brands, because at the end of the day your buyers are humans, and they’re exposed to all of this. That’s where those expectations are being set, not at the next air show. So you have to look outside of aviation, and see what those companies are doing, so you can see what’s going on with RevOps, with industrial B2B, and people who talk about process, data, and change management, and not just tools. That’s who I’d be listening to.

Benjamin Tosado: Yeah, I think that’s a really cool suggestion. Look at other industries that are already providing a better customer experience. That’s awesome. And last but not least, what does “Cleared for Takeoff” mean to you?

Omi: I love this, because the reason we renamed our company from Diaz-Cooper to Level 350 is exactly this. For me, cleared for takeoff is that moment where all that prep work pays off. When the checklists are done, when the data’s clean, when the teams are aligned and the path is clear. Now it’s about execution, now it’s about being able to take off. It’s when you finally have everything in place, you’ve gotten past all that friction and turbulence, if you will, and now you’re flying at optimal altitude and can get to your destination faster.

Benjamin Tosado: Awesome. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well Omi, this has been a fantastic conversation. You’ve given our listeners a completely different take on how AI is being applied to this industry. Where should people go to find out more about Level 350 and how to connect with you?

Omi: Yeah, absolutely. They can go to our website, Level350.com. Definitely wanna connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m at Omi Diaz-Cooper, it’s just my name. I write a lot about these kinds of tips and put out a lot of content there. So those are the two best places, the website Level350.com or LinkedIn.

Benjamin Tosado: Awesome, thanks so much for your time, Omi. If anything sparked your interest today, please find us at Cleared For Takeoff dot fm, or find Omi at Level350.com. In the coming episodes, we’ll have more operational leaders joining us from our customers to talk about how they’re applying AI in their businesses. Please come join us. Thanks so much, Omi.

Omi: Thank you, and see you at the next MRO show.

Benjamin Tosado: Yep, you got it. Thanks everyone.