Fitness Business School – What’s Wrong About Selling

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about something that most people are wrong about when it comes to selling. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to the Fitness Business School podcast, the show for fitness business owners who want to grow their income, increase their impact and improve their lifestyle. Be sure to listen to the end of this episode because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

For as long as I can remember in the fitness industry, I listened to people who were consultants, coaches, experts, whatever you’d like to call them, suggest that offering anything up for free was It’s a surefire way to quote unquote, devalue your services.

And the reality is it just never landed with me, right? Because I think it is entirely untrue. I think that value is most easily demonstrated by somebody actually experiencing something and being able to, Enjoy the benefit of the service or the product or the resource. And I remember people telling me that there were a couple of guys who were prominent Coaches or consultants in the industry.

I wouldn’t, I don’t think I would call them coaches. I would say more consultants. I don’t ever recall them doing like interactive coaching, but it was more like you could attend their seminars or workshops or that sort of thing. And in conversations with them, I remember vividly how wrong they would repeatedly tell me I was about everything that I was doing.

And. I don’t know if it was just them being argumentative or trying to keep me from moving into the business coaching space or something like that. But the way that I had always thought about stuff was pretty simple. And I’ve talked repeatedly on this podcast about how so many of my experiences in my time as a college baseball coach, Were the impetus for my decisions and my thought process when it came to business.

And one of those was how we would be bringing kids on campus, whether it was when I was a coach or also when I had a second position working in admissions or even thinking back to my own time is aspiring college student. One of the things that we always wanted to do was to get people on campus and Getting people on campus We always felt was the best way to demonstrate the value we had to offer the fit for the student and I don’t think at any point in time did anybody ever say And i’ve never heard this and i’m sure that this would hold true for ivy league schools all the way down to open admissions community colleges nobody would say if you let those people come on campus for free, you’re devaluing our education.

And it just seemed silly at the time. The whole idea was, okay, these folks have all these options available to them. Anybody that it is looking at a college or university, they are exploring a host of options. Almost always. They are thinking about a number of colleges. There are thousands of colleges just in the United States.

And if we can be somebody that they actually invest enough of their time and attention and energy and travel to us and explore this more deeply, then there’s a higher probability that we’re going that they’re going to choose us. But beyond that we get to both kind of experience whether or not it’s a fit when I would bring kids on campus and their parents is perspective players on our team, perspective people that might be invited for either a spot on the team or even a scholarship, there, there had to be this mutual fit.

It was, Hey, let’s move this relationship forward and see if this is a fit for both parties. And I think that’s an underappreciated part of this is if you let somebody come in and experience what you do, Both sides find out if it’s a, if it’s a fit and frankly, that’s who I want in my business. I want people who are going to be a good fit for the culture, a good fit for what we do there.

There are people who believe in what we do. I don’t want them to buy and then immediately have remorse about their decision. I want them to come in and say, man, this is exactly what I’m looking for. And in, in a university setting, getting somebody’s time and attention and the hoops, they had to jump through to get there.

Parents might have to take off work. Kids step out of school. I’m sure they didn’t hate that, but yeah. And then they’d travel to campus. And you get to show and demonstrate and let them actually experience it and say, wait a minute, maybe this is where I belong. This is what I, this is where I fit. And at no point in time does somebody say this devalues what we do.

In fact, it’s almost always perceived as, Hey, this is something that’s building value in what we do because there’s no way to articulate how awesome some of this stuff is. And just a few pictures and a brochure that we send over or on a website. And I think that’s true in so many things. I think that, you can have video tours of homes, but people still want to walk through the home.

And I know all these things that I’m sharing, whether it’s joining a college baseball team or going and sending your child off to a university where they’re going to spend that kind of critical part of their life moving from adolescent to adulthood or buying a home. All these things are big decisions and big commitments.

But I think that’s the idea. If it’s not diminishing the value in that, it certainly isn’t diminishing the value in what we’re asking, which is still, A meaningful commitment, a meaningful decision, maybe not of the magnitude of those, but it’s still important. And when people say, Hey this devalues your service.

I would argue the complete opposite. There’s probably if you’re actually good at what you do and maybe the people who provide this advice aren’t. And in fact, I would probably argue that point is that if people can peek behind the curtain and experience the services these folks provide or the impact that they have, the people that say, Hey, this devalues your service.

Usually. sizzled and steak and they’re better at selling than they are at serving. But if you are actually good at serving and you’re good at what you do, there’s probably nothing that you can put on your website. There’s probably nothing you can send out in a sales message or even do during a webinar video or whatever else that’s going to Completely and thoroughly demonstrate how good your service is, how smart your programming is, how strong your culture is.

Saying, Hey, we have this wonderful culture where you have a sense of belonging. Anybody can say that, but if people can actually feel it and experience it, that’s totally different. So if you’re confident in what you do and believe it is unique and really valuable. Letting people experience it in some way, shape or form is only going to enhance the value far more than anything that you could put in a 500 word description online or something like that.

And that’s the part that I don’t think people appreciate enough is that if we’re really talking about creating value or diminishing value in something, There, there’s probably no better way to make something feel more valuable than for somebody to experience it and see how different it is. I’m sure every restaurant under the sun would tell you how wonderful Their food and their service and their atmosphere is, but until you experience it, it’s just words, right?

It’s just pictures that were staged to be presented in a way that people probably are untrusting of now because everybody stages stuff. Everybody shows highlight reels, but it’s harder to stage. The actual coming in and experiencing something, people get to peek behind the curtain and actually see how things go.

So if you’ve been hesitant to integrate some sort of free experience in what you do, I would tell you to look at that through a different lens. I would tell you to think about that in a different way. And that doesn’t mean that you’ve got some sort of unlimited capacity to do free forever. If you have a very full schedule or if there’s really high demand in what you do, maybe you don’t need much free, maybe much free offering in the way of stuff.

But I think that having that is a way to create more interest and create more demand is a wonderful tool to have in your toolbox. And in reality, you can use it in small doses too. You could let clients bring guests for free. Even if you don’t let just People walking by or finding out about you online experience things for free.

If you’ve got a limited ability to do it, but no matter what, I would make sure that free is part of the toolbox because it doesn’t diminish the value in what you do. It’s only going to increase it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School.

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