There’s something about a challenge that just gets people fired up. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for a lot of people, a challenge can be irresistible. They want to know if they can beat it, they want others to know they can beat it, and at the very least, they want to try.

That’s why we run our challenges, because of the visceral reaction they elicit.

But there are right ways and wrong ways to put out these special offers. And if you get it wrong, it can be devastating for your boot camp.

Think about it, to keep your Boot Camp growing and keep your client base increasing, you have to keep filling your sales funnel, right? We’ve talked a lot about these in the past, they are what we call the series of steps our prospects move through as they go from being interested individuals to paying clients.

And we’ve explored many passive ways to keep that sales funnel full, because that’s how you operate an effective business. It’s not sustainable to be working like crazy to keep filling your funnel from nothing all the time. We teach you to put systems into place (like human billboards or email marketing) that keep filling the funnel overtime, all the time.

But occasionally, your funnel starts to run dry or you lose a lot of clients all at once, and you need to dumb a huge number of prospects into that funnel to keep things moving upward. And that’s where the challenge comes in.

But that’s also what makes the challenge so crucial. You rely on the power of the challenge to boost your client numbers when things start to slow down. If something goes wrong, your boot camp is going to be in trouble.

To make sure that never happens, I’ve put together the following dos and don’ts for Fit Body Boot Camp Challenges.

1) Make a Big Fat Claim.

If you want people to have a big reaction to your offer, it needs to stir things up a bit. If you want attention and you want reaction, you’ve got to stick your neck out there. While I strongly advise against promising anything you can’t deliver, I do encourage you to make a big fat claim about your program and the results you can bring people. If you want to get someone fired up, tell them exactly how you can change their lives or their bodies.

Make an impressive promise.

The catch, though, is that you sure as hell had better deliver on that promise.

Read the rest of 3 Success Secrets Your Challenges Could be Missing

Making the sale is, for many owners and trainers, the hardest part of operating a boot camp. They don’t have a problem with the training, they can handle the numerous challenges that come with operating a successful fitness boot camp business, but they are deathly afraid of making the sale and closing the client.

And this fear bleeds into their marketing efforts. They can’t write powerful, engaging copy because they aren’t comfortable making a sale. And whatever marketing campaigns they create don’t seem to have the ‘umph’ required to make people take action.

So when I coach these owners and try to show them how they can get the confidence and the tools they need to become effective salespeople, I usually find their consistent failure  stems from the same recurring problem: they are selling the wrong thing.

Think for a minute about what exactly you are buying when you purchase a membership to a big box gym.

You’re getting access to a massive, state of the art facility packed full of the most powerful fitness and weight loss tools available. Dozens of machines of all different types and purposes, everything from treadmills to stairclimbers, ellipticals and bikes— whatever you can think of, it’s there. Hundreds of free weights, bench presses, and anything else you need to get ripped. There’s even racquetball courts, yoga studios, Olympic sized swimming pools, saunas, hot tubs, showers, lockers, bathrooms. It’s all there.

And what does your boot camp offer? Well, virtually none of these things. It’s a fraction of the size and has little more than squishy mats and giant ropes hanging off the walls.

So how do you make a sales pitch that can compete with everything the big gyms have to offer? Hopefully it’s obvious by now that you shouldn’t be selling any physical thing that your boot camp offers. Clients can access whatever you’ve got and ten times more at their local gym, so that strategy isn't going to work for you.

So what should you sell, then? How can you compete with these seemingly overwhelming odds?

Actually, it’s easy.

Read the rest of Why Your Fit Body Boot Camp is Better than Anything Your Competitors Can Offer