The Fitness Business School – How To Sell More During COVID-19

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat, here – in this episode, I want to talk with you about how to sell more training right now under the circumstances that we’re facing. So I’ve got a few thoughts for you. Let’s get into it.

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All right, so let’s talk about how to sell more training. Now. I know that’s not been a focal point for a lot of people over the past couple months, because they’ve spent so much time on trying to retain the clients they have, or they spent a lot of time on just trying to plan to get back into their facility. But the bottom line is as a business owner, if you don’t sell, you’re really slowly dying as a business, so we have to be selling. So I’ve got three different things that I think you need to do to focus and drive sales, improve your sales. And if you’re doing all three of these, there’s almost no chance that you’re not going to see your sales numbers increase.

So number one, we’ve got to set weekly targets and track. Okay, we’ve got to track our numbers. We got to set weekly targets. So for me, I would be setting a number of weekly appointments that I’m going to actually have in a one-on-one sales consultation or success session. A number of those appointments that actually show up a number of sales made and some sort of either revenue or recurring revenue growth number that I’m trying to achieve. Those four numbers are going to be my driver throughout the week. And so if I’m not hitting those numbers, I know I’m going to have to be doing more outreach. I know that I’m going to be happening, having to make more offers. I know that maybe I’m getting enough calls scheduled or people aren’t showing up. I know I’m going to have to do better in confirming and building value. If I’m not getting enough sales, maybe I need to figure out a way to re-engineer my sales presentation build more value in my offerings, or maybe reduce some of the risks to play with nor like the circumstances that we’re with now and help people become more comfortable. But if you’re not tracking, you don’t have the, that kind of motivation that comes with seeing those numbers and being competitive. I know for me, having a scoreboard is just a power powerful, powerful tool to help drive me in moving towards my goals. And it also gives me feedback. It tells me what I need to improve on.

So number one, we need to be tracking our numbers and setting goals, have a scoreboard. Number two – more one-on-one sales consultations. It becomes very easy for somebody to say, Hey, I want to automate things. I want to send out offers by email. I want to put out offers on sales pages and promote them on social media. I want to do everything in a group or everything in a leveraged way, but look, I’ve been selling for a long time. I’ve sold literally millions of dollars worth of things through sales pages and even more than that through one-on-one calls. And no matter how effective a sales page is no matter how effective an offer without a one-on-one interaction is it’s not going to be even 10% as strong as you being able to connect with somebody in a one on one call, whether it be over the phone over a FaceTime or video conferencing, Zoom, whatever you wanna use, one-on-one allows you to customize the conversation. It allows you to talk about somebody’s unique goals, their unique circumstances, the challenges that they are really facing the challenges they perceive that they’re facing and build value. According to everything that they’re giving you, it allows you to have a true conversation instead of just providing information. So if you’re not doing one-on-one calls as your sales mechanism, and if you’re not going back to that number one topic that we talked about, setting goals for the number of calls that you’re having, those two combined will immediately bump your results significantly.

And then the third sales driver I would call it, it’s kind of unique to the circumstances we’re facing right now. And it’s basically employing at least one what I would call a risk mitigator. And really there, there are a few that we can use. One would be going month to month, no matter what you’ve been doing in the past, no matter if you’ve always been a reliant on three, six, 12 month contracts or some variation, that’s similar to those where you’re asking somebody for a longer commitment being conscious of and sensitive to the circumstances people are now. And knowing that they’ve got some uncertainty right now, and they knowing that maybe they’re not only unsure of where things are going with the pandemic where things are going with the economy, but that maybe they’re uncertain of how they’re going to feel about experiencing training in the ways that are available to them currently. So short term offers or month to month offers, that would be one option. Number two would be some sort of guarantee money back guarantee. Hey, if this isn’t a fit for you, we’ll give you your money back. So again, risk reversal in that case, nobody’s taking on any risk there. They can experience it without fear of loss. Number three would be doing some sort of trial experience, a free trial, a very low cost trial, where somebody can try before they buy, because let’s face it. The training that they’re experiencing now may not be what they’re used to. If they’ve trained in the past. The next one would be a little bit more of an aggressive move, a delay of payment. See, we see that a lot in, in a variety of fields, right? Like we’ve seen that with car manufacturers as of late where they’ll say, Hey, no payments until X. And if you’re in a strong cash flow position, you could easily invite somebody into train with you with no payments until August or something like that. So, you know, they can come in train under, you know, maybe limited, you know, a limited circumstance where capacity isn’t, what it normally is in your facility. Maybe they’re going to be restricted to training more online. Maybe they don’t know how much they’re going to want to train during the summer because they’ve been stuck at home and they’re looking forward to getting out and doing some different things. But now there’s no risk on their part. They can do this when it’s convenient for them and not make a full fledged commitment until the fall, which, you know, if, if you’ve ever done sales where you’ve delayed, a payment, people are far more comfortable spending tomorrow’s money than today’s money. So, you know, the delay of payment would be a really, really strong offer, but, you know, that’s something that we should be making probably only if we’re in a strong cashflow position.

And then finally I’m doing a founders rate for new offerings. If you are going to offer a new program that you know, maybe blends a hybrid type of offering a new program, that’s going to be primarily or even entirely online having a founders rate, treating an, almost like a grand opening for that specific program allows you to do something that has a deadline attached to it. There’s an incentive to buy now. So we got all these things that lower the risk on the client’s part that, that make it more appealing for them to get involved. Now, even if there is some uncertainty in their world. So if we combine that with one-on-one sales calls and having a scoreboard, so we’re goal oriented and we can kind of see where the bottlenecks are in our sales process, combine those three things. And you’re going to see your scale, your sales skyrocket over the next several weeks.

Thanks for listening. I’m giving away a bundle of my bestselling books, the ideal business formula, the fitness entrepreneur handbook in the path. All you have to do is go to patrigsby.com/podgift to get it. Also, make sure to subscribe to The Fitness Business School with Pat Rigsby so you don’t miss an episode and you get yourself on the fast track to creating your ideal business.