Marketing, or at least targeted, effective marketing, is pretty much the foundation of your boot camp’s growth. But you don’t live on the foundation of your home, right? A foundation is simply the stable base on which to build something.  The stuff that sustains you is the stuff you build onto a great foundation. Boot camp marketing is the foundation, but boot camp selling is the house itself. It’s the whole point of laying a foundation in the first place, but a lot of people never get to the actual building.

A lot of new fitness entrepreneurs spend a ton of time and energy on marketing and yet their revenue just creeps along, with the occasional dropout and the occasional new client cancelling each other out. They look around at the explosive growth of other boot camps and think that more and better boot camp marketing is the answer. Usually, it’s not. Usually, they need to spend 90% less time on marketing and 90% more time on selling what they market.

There are several reasons why many new business owners market like crazy and then hope that hordes of people will walk in the door and ask to sign a contract on the spot.

Some trainers actually think this is what’s supposed to happen; that great email marketing or press releases or Facebook posts will bring in all the new clients they need to be successful. But that’s just not the case. Many hope that this is the way it will work, because they either hate or are afraid of actually trying to sell these people anything.

First of all, a lot of the boot camp marketing personal trainers are doing is probably for great low-barrier offers that last for perhaps six or ten weeks. Those are great marketing tools, but if that’s all you’re doing, then you have to run these kinds of offers every month or so and you have a revolving door of temporary clients. The problem is that this just isn’t sustainable and it certainly isn’t going to get you the growth that means serious income, multiple locations and a great lifestyle. It will condemn you to working like crazy to replenish one group of deal-takers with the next and doing it for a very unsatisfying income.

Boot camp marketing is not a sales tool…..it’s a tool for finding people to sell to. Selling by means of marketing is like hunting with a shotgun without actually seeing anything. If you keep shooting up the woods, you’ll eventually hit a few things, just maybe not enough to make a meal. When you count on low-barrier offer deals for all of your income, you’re shooting scattershot everywhere and grateful for the few people that come in each month for your offer.

On the other hand, boot camp selling is like target shooting; you aim carefully, you use the right ammunition and you only shoot at a specific target.

So how do you move forward from boot camp marketing to boot camp selling? I have a few tips to help you.

Understand that people who come in on one of your Groupon deals or other low-barrier offers are already interested in getting fit and changing their lives. Don’t be afraid to show them how you can help them achieve those goals. Give them an awesome workout and then sit down with each person and let them know how you can help them lose fat, build muscle, reverse Type 2 diabetes, get their speed back or whatever it is they want to get from working out. Don’t think of it as selling them a product, think of it as offering them their goals.

If you don’t know HOW to sell, then learn. Few people are born great salespeople. There are a ton of really awesome sales tools that can help you be more confident and more successful when you sit down at the table with a prospect. Don’t try to learn on your own – get some help from people who have already done the trial and error.

Understand that it’s not selling unless you ask for the sale, which is one step away from closing the deal. When you simply say, “So we have this and this and this,” you are offering, not selling. That’s pretty much like putting a display in a store window, which is……you guessed it – marketing, not selling.

If you’re not sure how to do that, then work with a really good sales script and practice with everyone who will sit still. When you don’t have to think about what to say, you’re much more focused on what the prospect is saying and that’s the key to closing more sales.

Learn to upsell as well. When someone makes a decision to buy, they’re primed to buy more. They’re excited about their decision, so use that excitement to upsell the client. Offer them nutritional counseling and meal planning for another $20 a month. Show them the value of choosing the one-year plan over the six-month, the 18-month over the one-year.

Selling your boot camp may not come naturally to you, but leadership, motivation and entrepreneurship apparently do and those are all traits that can help you learn to be an expert at selling your services. Then your boot camp marketing will give you a foundation to really build something on.

This entry was posted on July 10, 2014 at 9:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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