I know you love it. I know you’re good at it. I know you live it, BUT, it ain’t always easy SELLING it. I am talking about fitness.
I mean, it’s easy to sell a pill that promises fat loss, or a simple easy to follow DVD that guarantees the viewer will get ripped just by watching the thing every day for 6 weeks, BUT… selling a program that (while it really works) requires getting some serious commitment from the client and that can be a tough thing indeed. I mean, we ALL have tons of things in our life that we see as priorities… kids, groceries, the mortgage, and certainly all of those are important, but one that ranks up there at ALL times is our health, and a quality fitness program can be the key factor that keeps us healthy and living longer. (And better able to earn money for all those other necessities that exist in life as well!)
So, how can you take someone from a somewhat interested prospect into a contract signing (and PAYING) client? Here’s some simple but EXTREMELY important tips to follow that will show you how to sell fitness so you can begin selling more programs today:
Ask questions, don’t just TALK
I would say hands down the number 1 mistake most sales professionals make is talking too much. The key to selling ANYTHING is to ask questions then SHUT UP. Let the prospect do the talking and they will tell you EVERYTHING you need to know. Here are some key questions you can ask while you are trying to sell fitness programs:
- What exactly are your fat loss/fitness goals?
- How do you feel about your current body condition?
- What are the things you love most about working out?
- What do you love least about working out?
- What is the main obstacle standing between you and committing to a fitness program?
Look at the questions above closely… notice anything? Not ONE of them is a YES or NO question. If you ask YES or NO questions, then, once the answer, the conversation is over. You have to get them talking, expanding on what you asked and then talking some more. The more they talk, the more you can repeat back to them what they said, develop an understanding, and use the info they gave you to create a program that meets their needs exactly.
Ask questions where YES is the only answer
HEY, DIDN’T YOU JUST SAY NOT TO ASK YES OR NO QUESTIONS!?
I did, but follow me here. You see, the more YES responses you can get from a client, the more likely it is that they will say YES to your fitness program. BUT, you don’t want to ask questions that could result in a no. Here are a few examples where YES will be the only answer:
- Getting into better shape so you have more energy and feel great would really add to your quality of life, wouldn’t you agree?
- So, getting into those skinny jeans that haven’t fit in years is one of your goals, is that fair to say? (this one would come after a conversation about their fitting into smaller jeans or something similar)
- If I can create a plan that will help you reach your fat loss and fitness goals while having fun that is within your budget, that would be something you are interested in, correct?
As you can see, the possibilities here are endless. These types of questions are good to pepper throughout your meeting with the prospect as well as adding a few back to back just before you ask for the sale.
When you DO talk, only talk about benefits
Along with talking too much comes with it the mistake of saying the wrong thing. When selling fitness better than any competitor, you need to only talk about what the client will get out of the fitness program (benefits) not just some aspects OF the program (features.) This can be a tricky area to navigate so to make it a little more simple, here are some examples to help you tailor your language as you meet with prospects:
Features (No-No’s!)
- We have XXX certifications!
- We have been in business for X number of years!
- Our studio is newly painted! (Who gives a crap!)
The examples above, while nice, don’t tell the prospect anything about what THEY will get out of working with you, they only tell some aspects about the business. They use the words We or I instead of focusing the energy on the client. Here are some examples of BENEFITS that will go a long way in helping you land some clients:
You will have access to certified trainers 7 days per week via phone or email support- You will receive a personalized workout program that is customized to help you reach your goal
- You will have access to multiple eating plans that will help you make better food decisions and speed your fat loss
- Our in house trainers will monitor your progress weekly so you know exactly how much fat and inches you have lost
These examples are the kind that make prospects mouths water and they speak to EXACTLY what they are trying to achieve. The key is to use the language they used prior when you were in your questioning phase and repeat those things while telling them what they will receive by purchasing your fitness program. The bottom line is, people don’t eat cake because of the kind of sugar, flour, or eggs it was made with…they eat it because it tastes GOOD! Make your fitness program taste good to the prospect by letting them know it will help them get where they want to go.
Finally, ASK FOR THE SALE!
No matter how good your listening skills are, no matter how awesome your benefits conversation is, if at the end of the meeting you say something like “Well, let me know if we can ever help you!” then you won’t likely make much money. You have to be direct, you have to ASK for the sale! Whether it is selling cars or selling fitness, asking for the sale is the moment that you turn a prospect into a client. Be firm, be direct, reiterate your benefits, tell them the price, and ask them to commit. You see, prospects need our help in making buying decisions. If we leave it to them, they will often find a reason to say no or simply not commit, but if we ask them to go ahead and sign on the dotted line, oftentimes they will.
Selling fitness takes a little skill and a lot of patience. Listen to your prospects and provide them what they are looking for and you will do well. Practice your listening and selling skills whenever you get the chance. No matter how great of a trainer you are, without any clients, you are just a broke person with lots of skills…GOOD LUCK!
A Fitness Marketing Guest Blog Post By Bedros Keuilian
Want to know a way to make your fitness marketing strategies more effective?
You need a marketing funnel to help you do just that.
What’s a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a system that collects prospects and potential clients in one spot and then determines if those leads are ready to be turned from lookers into buyers. It is vitally important to your fitness business, but is often overlooked due most people not knowing how to go about developing one that actually works.
Your marketing funnel needs to be able to effectively bring in new leads and prospects on a consistent basis, teach your prospects about the products and services that you offer, and demonstrate how they’ll make your client’s life better so that those individuals will turn into customers who are more than happy to pay for your services.
A lot of the time, fitness trainers don’t really have a complete marketing funnel… they tend to have some parts there, but it’s not thought out well enough to pull in big enough profits. There’s just too many potential clients that fall into the cracks because their funnel isn't set up like it should be.
So, why do you need a marketing funnel? Because if you have any interest in growing your personal training business, then you're going to need a solid system that generates leads over the long term, which will help you to increase your profits.
Here's how your fitness marketing funnel should look:
1) Referrals should be your "go to" source of new clients when you're building your fitness marketing machine. However, unless you have enough clients to start with, it's kinda hard to build your business on referrals only.
2) Online traffic matters. Marketing on Facebook and sending traffic to a site that converts (opt in or low barrier offer) is one of the most reliable funnels right now.
Next is Google local, Yelp, and YouTube All three of these sites rank super high for local search results and can drive you a ton of FREE traffic in the form of very qualified leads and prospects.
3) Deal of the Day promotions are still one of the top fitness marketing tactics you can use to get new clients - IF and ONLY if you make the right offer and have a systematized processes for converting deal buyers into long term paying clients.
4) Offline advertising still performs. Networking with local "feeder" businesses is easy and reliable. Folks still get and read their mail. Direct mail letters and postcards to targeted homes, making the right offer is still performing really well.
In fact, just three weeks ago one of my coaching clients sent out a four page direct mail marketing piece for her fitness business. She out the letters to 500 homes within three miles of her studio.
The entire campaign cost her $1800 which included the addresses, postage, printing, and having each envelope hand addressed. So far shes' gotten $23,600 in new training clients.
Good' ol direct mail still works.
5) List building and email marketing keep clients on tap. Create an email promotion, mail it out to your list, and get clients.
It's easy, low cost, and if you have a good relationship with your list then your results will be awesome each time you mail out.
You can get all of my best client getting and business building resources for up to 50% off, but only for this weekend.
Talk soon,
Bedros
What are your reasons for wanting to open your own fitness studio? The first answer will probably be to make more money, but if you know the ins and outs of leasing a property, paying staff, taxes, insurance etc., you may be wondering if you could actually make more money. Would it be worth the effort?
The second reason may be so you could do what you want to do - maybe by appealing to a specific market that you enjoy working with. Well, here are nine very good reasons why you should open your own fitness center. The two reasons mentioned above are in there too of course.
You Can Get Other People to do the Work
There’s an old saying – people are too busy working to make any money. Employing a dozen staff, each making you, say, $10 clear profit every hour they work beats the hell out of trying to make $120 an hour all on your own. If you set up your personal training studio right, that’s exactly what you could be doing – even while you’re relaxing with your family on a tropical beach!
But does the thought of dealing with a dozen staff give you a massive headache? Then look at starting your own fitness boot camps! One-on-one training is ridiculously inefficient. You can set up boot camps, have trained members of staff run them for you, and add group training sessions – all with just a few staff – and still reap big financial rewards
You’re the Boss
By offering large group sessions and boot camps you won’t be a slave to your business. You won’t have to supervise everything that goes on either. With someone else running them you’ll be able to do it from the comfort of your home, or from a smart phone anywhere in the world.
Work the Hours you Want
If you want to get involved you can – training only the people you choose to train – and charging them accordingly. No more getting up at dawn and watching the sun go down in someone else’s studio. Do what you want – and reap the rewards!
You Run Your Business
One of the biggest problems with running your own business is that you can end up with that business running you. That’s not the reason why you wanted to start your own fitness studio is it? If you run indoor boot camps, you’ll only need a fraction of the expensive equipment needed to stock a 24 hour gym. Make each square foot of your personal training studio works for you by offering many boot camp sessions each day. Have someone else run them for you and you’ll be in no danger of being overwhelmed by your business. (more…)
As a fitness business owner - even if you’re just starting out and you’re a one-man operation – you’re essentially a manager. Look up the word manager in the dictionary and you’ll find a definition something like this: somebody who is responsible for directing and controlling the work and staff of a business, or of a department within it.
Enter Fitness Business Time Management
If you’ve ever worked outside of the fitness industry, say in an office or retail, managers spend a lot of time in meetings discussing ways of improving business, and time management is a major concern. The cost of labor is the largest expenditure for many companies and managing the time that staff spend doing certain tasks can mean the difference between profit and loss.
But how does that apply to your little fitness business? Well let me put it like this, why are you doing tasks you shouldn’t be doing – and yes that may mean cleaning your studio – when you could hire someone else to do it for a measly few bucks an hour?
If the answer is “I can’t afford to hire someone” my response is you can’t afford NOT to hire someone! How is vacuuming your studio moving your business forward? All that’s doing is wearing you out, prolonging the hours you work, and diluting the income you get from doing more lucrative things – the reason you started your own business!
This is where the 5% rule comes in.
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No we’re not talking about bloating and water retention here – we’re talking about how to keep the clients you’ve already spent a lot of time and money recruiting - Fitness clients retention that is. And that’s the key. Marketing is time-consuming and expensive and if you hate the closing process it only makes sense to do everything you can to keep the clients you already have coming back.
There’s always going to be a certain amount of natural attrition, if a member moves out of the area for example, but if people turn up irregularly and then disappear completely, you’re going to have to find out why.
Fitness Business Retention
Relationships with Clients
From the start of your fitness boot camp business you should always be building solid relationships with clients. By getting to know them and showing an interest they are more likely to be honest with you, instead of sliding away and refusing to answer your phone calls. If you’re getting a large percentage of clients who don’t renew, then something’s up and you need to know the reason.
Send a friendly email containing a well constructed but short questionnaire, that also offers a limited time coupon with a deep discount if they do renew. Leave a space for comments and take careful note of all the responses and take action. You’re boot camp sessions are too strenuous, some haven’t seen results they were hoping for, they’d rather do Pilates – whatever – these are all things that you can address – especially if you see a common thread.
Do whatever it takes to get those clients back into the fold. Offer Pilates sessions; offer a free personal consultation with the client so she will achieve the results she wants. Those few minutes can ultimately save you a lot more time and money required to market and recruit new clients. (more…)
One of the most important aspects of starting a fitness business is marketing.
If nobody knows you exist, you’ll be closing the doors in no time at all.
In the beginning you probably won’t have many clients. Some fitness professionals manage to create a following while working for someone else and those clients will follow if he opens his own facility but it’s rarely an adequate number to pay the bills and make a profit.
A monthly budget should be set aside for marketing for at least your first year of business and factored into your startup costs. You should also concentrate on targeting your advertising towards the market you wish to attract, so it’s going to take some research to discover where you will get the most bang for your advertising buck.
It’s also expedient to monitor the responses you get from all your marketing campaigns. If you’re using newspapers or magazines including a coupon from which you can monitor the source will be very helpful. Groupons and coupons that can be used with smart phones are gaining rapidly in popularity.
Of course you will probably start a FaceBook page and a blog for your fitness business and you can also code any coupons and special offers accordingly. The best way to get attract new members initially will be by offering freebies and coupons.
Now, let’s say you’re a few months down the road and you have a growing clientele, how can you use your new clients to generate business for you and why should you?
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Building a website for your fitness business can be a daunting task if you’ve never done it before. Its actually a lot easier and cheaper today than it used to be before WordPress came along, but there are still so many things to remember and rules that must be followed to keep the search engines happy, especially Big Brother Google.
Domain Name
Finding a good domain name these days is difficult but if you’re starting your own fitness business and you’re using your own name that can be a lot easier. Make sure your domain name is relevant and easy to remember, .com is still the extension to go for.
Choosing a Host
You’ll need a host with great customer service 24/7 and one with a good reputation with secure servers, backup and minimal downtime. (more…)
This is a guest post by Fit Body Boot Camp co-founder Bedros Keuilian.
Enter Bedros...
I’ve been coaching and offering consultation to fitness professionals for well over a decade and I wanted to share an abbreviated version of an email I recently sent out to my subscribers titled the Official Annual State of the Industry Report which could also be called a Fit Body Boot Camp Franchise Review.
I didn’t expect the enormous response I got but it was good to know so many people in this industry are eager to understand which way the business is headed. My Report is all based on careful research and facts, and anybody who knows me personally will tell you I put my best efforts into everything I do.
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1. Not Finding your Niche
If you look at the number of potential clients that live within your area, you may be overwhelmed. You might be asking - How do I market to everyone? How can I appeal to the overweight teenager, the mom that’s just had a kid, seniors that need very specialized help and athletes that need intensive sport-specific fitness training?
The answer is that as a fitness trainer you can’t be all things to all people. You should specialize in and concentrate on developing a fitness business doing what you love doing. If you hate noisy, overweight, soda-guzzling, fast-food eating teenagers, let someone else deal with them.
Conduct extensive market research before you decide on your niche. Look at local demographics, and then see how many other local fitness trainers are offering the same services as you’re hoping to offer. Can you offer a superior service or fill a niche that has yet to be exploited?
Find out what extra certification you might need, sign up for the classes and focus.
Marketing will also be considerably easier if you choose a specific niche. Then you can concentrate all your efforts on becoming the go-to person in your particular field.
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