5 Critical Factors for Fitness Sales

When it comes to fitness sales there are a number of things that can help you achieve success. Below I listed the five concepts that are critical if you’re going to make the most of your efforts:

1. Sell To People Predisposed To Doing Business With You

One of the biggest mistakes fitness pros make is assuming everyone is a prospect. You can avoid this by doing several things:

● Give Something Away for Free – Offer a book, infographic, free report or something similar on your site and in your advertising to get people to ‘raise their hands’ and let you know they have an interest in what you have to offer.

● Find Your Niche – Having a niche allows you to target a specific market and position yourself as the fitness resource for their specific wants and needs.

● Focus on Referrals – Referrals are already pre-sold on what you have to offer.

● Sell More to Your Existing Clients – If someone has already said yes once, they are more likely to say yes again provided you haven’t given them a reason not to.

2. Become an Expert

Position yourself as an expert by doing more public speaking, writing more articles, or even a book and doing more publicity work.

I really doubt Eric Cressey, Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman or Tyler English would get a lot of resistance from a prospect – regardless of their fees.

3. Use Testimonials

If you ever had a doubt about the value of testimonials, the success of things like P90X and Nutri Systems should have eliminated it.

Every piece of marketing material should use them. Create a ‘wall of fame’ at your office or studio and have testimonials on your website.
Taking before and after pictures should be a condition of doing business with you.

Why try and beat yourself up trying to convince someone that you can get them where they want to go when you have a ton of clients that can do it for you?

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

This is a lesson that will make fitness sales much easier.

4. Building Value

You need understand how value is measured and what constitutes good and poor value in the eyes of the potential client.

Value is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the actual price.

If the anticipated price in the potential client’s mind is higher than the price of the service or product, the customer perceives it to be a good value: “I would have thought it more expensive!”

If the asking price is higher than the anticipated price, the potential client perceives the value to be poor: “This is highway robbery!”

The secret is to control the anticipated price by increasing perceived value.

5. Eliminating The Risk

The thought of “giving away” or discounting your services to get people in the door may drive many of you crazy. I hear it all the time: “It will de-value what I offer.”

Let’s look at this a little closer…

If you’ve embraced the concept of 6 or 12 month programs, you are asking the prospect to commit to you for up to an entire year’s worth of training (and payments). That’s a significant purchase.

When you go to purchase a car, you test drive it. When you go to Barnes & Noble, you flip through the book before you buy…and that’s usually only a $15-20 investment.

Offering a low way risk to test drive what you offer has several benefits:
● It eliminates risk for the prospect.
● It attracts a larger number of potential clients.
● It gives you time to build rapport.
● It gives you opportunity to build value.

I can appreciate the people who believe that a free or discounted offer may de-value your service, but remember, roughly 80% of Americans do not belong to a health club.

It should be pretty clear that if only 20% of Americans belong to a health club, then even fewer of them hire coaches.

It is your job to build value in what you do.

With so few people having experienced the value of your services, you can’t assume that everyone knows what you can truly offer. Your job is to change that.

Reversing the risk is the easiest way to do that and a surefire path to more fitness sales.

Put these 5 critical factors for fitness sales into play and see what a difference it make in your business.

By Pat Rigsby