5 Surefire Steps For Profitable Fitness Business Growth
You know that when you work out consistently, you make strength and stamina gains.
When you stop working out, your muscles quickly begin to atrophy and your stamina regresses – the gains stop and, in fact, the process reverses itself.
Well, it’s the same with your marketing. While you’re proactively marketing, you get results. But if you stop marketing – your results stop – and you can actually see your business atrophy.
Some fitness professionals I talk to tell me they don’t need to proactively market their businesses because they have the number of clients they need to generate a solid income, and they get the occasional referral.
To me, this sounds very much like a “job” – not a business!
It’s like they’re content just collecting a paycheque and have no ambition beyond that. In my mind, the purpose of having a business is to challenge yourself. To make your business the vehicle for creating the life of your dreams.
And when you become complacent about marketing or content with the status quo, you are essentially giving up those dreams. To me, without a challenge, business becomes boring, monotonous and repetitive.
I know that everyone is different. I know that my goals are not the same as everyone else. And I’m not trying to project my goals onto you. So you’ve got to ask yourself:
“What are my goals? How much do I want to earn? What is the vision I have for my business and for my life? Is my life supporting my business, or is my business supporting my life?
If your vision, like mine, is to challenge yourself in business the same way you challenge yourself in the gym, then I want to help you do that.
Because it’s been my experience that you are either proactively growing, or you’re atrophying. There is no middle ground. If you abdicate your marketing responsibility, you place yourself and your business in a tenuous situation.
What if three of your clients suddenly quit? Do you have a way to replace them quickly? If not, you could find yourself in a depleted cash-flow situation that is a harbinger of business failure.
Marketing Is Like Investing – Diversification Is Essential
A good analogy is to consider the stock market. Is it wise to invest your life savings in one stock? If that stock goes south, you could lose everything you’ve worked to build.
If you are counting on your existing clients to continue training with you indefinitely, your position is incredibly insecure. Diversification in the stock market is analogous to having marketing systems in place to bring you new business. If one stock under-performs, you know you have others which will make up for the loss, or at the very least, protect you from disaster. If you have proven marketing systems in place, the sudden loss of a few clients will not result in business failure.
In order to protect and grow your business, you’ve got to be proactive to keep new prospects coming and your sales growing. But not all action is effective action. It’s important that you know ‘what’ to do before you start doing it. Just like you teach your clients the correct ways to exercise in order to get results – I want to show you the correct way to market to get results.
Here are five proactive steps you can take to get business-building results.
1. SET WEEKLY AND MONTHLY SALES GOALS
Before you can get somewhere you need to determine what your destination is. I know, you’ve probably heard this before, but it’s very true. If you don’t have any idea of how much money you want to earn each month from your business, it will be very difficult to actually earn it because you’re lacking focus.
Do you want to generate monthly sales of $4,000? $12,000? $20,000?
Whatever it is, it’s important that you set it as your goal. Once you know how much you want to make each month, then you can figure out how much you need to make each week. Want $7,000 a month? You’ll need to generate sales of $1,750 each week.
Set your goals, and then compare your actual weekly and monthly results with them. Don’t worry if you don’t reach your goals right away. As long as you are proactive, each week and month you will get closer and closer until you meet and exceed them.
2. SET WEEKLY AND MONTHLY PROSPECT GOALS
In order to achieve your monthly sales goals, you’re going to also have to meet monthly prospecting goals. The more prospects you attract to your business, the more new clients you will get. One of the great features of a personal training business is that you generally have built-in repeat sales. But this feature can lead to marketing complacency and put you in a precarious situation should a handful of your clients stop working with you.
There’s no getting around it, you can never stop attracting prospects to your business. If you stop prospecting, your sales volume will decline when clients inevitably leave you.
Obviously, not all prospects will become paying clients, so you need systems in place which consistently generate a certain number of new leads. Only a percentage of prospects will convert to clients. If you convert 20% of your prospects into paying clients, then you need five prospects to generate one new client.
You’ll have to determine how many new clients you want to generate each month, and then determine how many prospects you’ll need to attract to generate that number of clients. That will be your monthly prospect goal.
3. CREATE AN EFFECTIVE PROSPECTING SYSTEM
In order to attract prospects to your business, you’ll need to give them an offer they can’t refuse. You’ll have to create an enticing prospect generator, also called a lead generator. I teach my Members to offer free “insider” information reports, or low-cost front-end loss leaders.
Each prospect responding to your lead generation offer should then be plugged into your database for multi-step, sequenced contacts with a free newsletter, postcards, personal phone calls, article reprints, testimonial letters, etc. As you bring more prospects into your marketing “funnel” – each contact you make with them can result in sales or referrals.
You need to attract new prospects with an enticing lead generator and then follow-up with those prospects to convert a percentage of them into paying clients. It could take up to seven or more contacts before you convert a prospect into an appointment or sale. If you only follow-up once, you’re missing out on 90% of your potential sales.
Compile a set of pre-written follow-up letters ready to be personalised and printed off your computer. With your prospect generator and follow-up letters, you now have an effective prospecting system.
4. GENERATE MORE NEW CLIENTS
Once you have established a consistently reliable prospect generator, you need to follow-up with those prospects over and over again to convert them into clients.
Your prospects will buy from you only when they are ready to buy — not when you want them to buy. Some of them may be ready to buy now or within a week. But many more will not be ready to buy for a month, or six months or perhaps a year.
If you are not uppermost in your prospects’ minds when they are ready to buy, they will most likely buy from one of your competitors rather than from you.
Studies show that 70% of prospects inquiring about a certain product or service DO NOT buy from the first company they inquire with. Not because the first company has an inferior product or service and not because of price. They don’t buy from the first company because the first company failed to follow-up.
As you can see, I put a lot of emphasis on follow-up. Frankly, the lack of follow-up with qualified prospects is the single biggest marketing mistake fitness professionals make.
Selling Is About Relationship Building
In the personal fitness training business, relationship building is more crucial than in most other businesses because of the comparatively high cost and intensely personal nature of fitness training. In order to get a prospect to commit to pay you $1,300 or more for a 12-week program when there are so many other options available to them – including doing nothing at all – you must develop a relationship (or be a supremely talented “closer”). The prospect must get to know you, like you and trust you. And that comes from consistent follow-up demonstrating your credibility, reliability, and commitment to the prospect.
There are many ways to follow-up with your prospects. But you want to make sure that you follow-up as a welcome guest, not an unwelcome pest. If you follow-up with an annoying approach like, ‘Are you ready to buy yet? Are you ready to buy yet?’ you will convert very, very few of your prospects into clients.
The newsletter I talked about in my previous article is only one of the ways you can follow-up with your prospects. Your newsletter offers valuable tips to your prospects. Along with your tips, you will include information about your services and special offers.
Always provide your prospects with useful information that is related to your products and services, and you will be welcome and not avoided.
You can follow-up periodically in-person, by phone, by fax, by postcard, by letter, by e-mail, etc. With enough prospects on your follow-up list and solid offers, you will convert a certain percentage of your prospects into clients each and every month.
5. GENERATE MORE SALES AND REFERRALS FROM YOUR CURRENT CLIENTS
Your golden list is your list of clients. These are the people who know you, like you and trust you. They are the easiest people to sell to again and again. And they are the most likely to provide you with referrals.
Make sure that you have back-end products or services that you can sell to your clients. Find more ways that you can help them achieve their goals with better products and services.
Provide your clients with special offers that they can’t resist. And consistently “program” your clients for referrals.
If you want your clients to buy from you again and again, and to give you referrals, treat them right. People want to feel special and important, and they like to do business with people who make them feel that way. Treat your clients like gold, and they will reward you with their business and their referrals.
Another big mistake Fitness Professionals make is believing that the sales process ends once a client signs an agreement to work with you and pays her money. That’s wrong. Just like you follow-up with prospects to convert them to clients, you must follow-up with clients to convert them to higher levels of profitability and, most importantly, to champions of your business. A champion is the single most important asset you have – it’s the client who refers to you (champions your cause).
I’ll say it again, just so we’re clear: people do business with people they know, like and trust. Give people an opportunity to get to know you, like you and trust you and they will spend their money with you. Don’t chase clients, build relationships.