The Fitness Business School – 6 Ways to Differentiate Your Business

Full Transcript

Pat Rigsby here, and in this episode I want to talk with you about ways that you can differentiate yourself from the competition. I’m going to cover six different techniques or strategies that you can use to differentiate yourself and really stand out from everybody else in your market. So let’s get to it.

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So in this episode, let’s talk about it. Differentiation. I think we all want to be unique. We all want to stand out and separate ourselves from everybody else that we’re competing against, whether it be franchises entering the marketplace businesses that might try to solve the same type of problem people in our local geographic area, we all want to stand out. We want to be different. So let me give you six different things that you can employ that I think will help you really stand out. And you can use these as a standalone, you can use them in combination with one another, but these techniques or strategies are definitely things that, that work to your favor.

So the first one is having your own unique approach to serving clients. Now, let’s say that you’re in a marketplace where people are seeking fat loss. That’s, that’s the thing that you do for people is you help them lose body fat. And let’s say there are a number of other people in the marketplace that are trying to do the same thing for their clients. Well, one of the ways that you might be able to approach this is by delivering your service in a different format, you could offer it through one-on-one training or semi-private training. If everybody else is group based, you could offer it in home. You could offer a hybrid approach that blends offline and online. So having your own unique kind of approach to serving your clientele, that provides you a very unique way to, to position yourself in the market relative to what everybody else is doing. I know in my own case, you know, when I think about my own unique approach us offering through, through our coaching programs offering typically between eight and 10 live coaching sessions a week plus you know, plus one on one coaching calls with clients is very different in the marketplace. And that’s one of the ways that we differentiate ourselves by really facilitating a more live coaching environment. So that’s number one.

Number two is simply becoming a trusted brand, taking a leadership position in your marketplace. And, you know, sometimes that just means going out there and being willing to do the things to be known. And that may seem very cliche. It may seem kind of obvious, but that may mean going out public speaking going on and maybe even doing, you know, having a podcast may be writing articles for local blogs or your community newspaper, but being a brand leader being seen in the marketplace is somebody who’s in authority. Somebody who’s approaching the way they do business and the way they’re being noticed differently than everybody else being in the media. I mean, I tend to think of this as being magnetic, having a book out you know, having your own type of media, like a podcast or a newsletter, or doing a lot of work on Facebook, live that sort of thing, making sure that people know who you are so that when they really try to you know, try to try to differentiate and decide how they’re going to reach their goals. You’re the first person that comes to mind. Again, that may seem simple, but it takes work and it takes consistency and it takes being willing to do what most people in your market won’t do, but it pays off. I know for me, you know, writing or co-authoring at this point over, I believe 16 books now having a podcast, writing a daily newsletter for 15 years, speaking at you know, big industry events like the perform better summits, those sorts of things have helped me immensely in positioning in the market. And so it, you can do that on a local level. I know back when I had facilities, we did everything from radio shows and TV segments to sending out press releases for anything that we could and getting intention in the media playing a prominent role in the chamber of commerce, just trying to be more visible in every way possible so that when somebody was looking for a trainer or trying to join a fitness facility were the first person that came to mind. All right, so that’s two.

Number three, having a guarantee. Now, now I think that a lot of people in the fitness industry are hesitant to offer a guarantee. They say, well, you know, some of these with me for, you know, two, three, four hours a week, I can’t guarantee their results because I don’t have control over what they’re doing outside of the time. They’re with me. But I would tell you that that’s really not the correct way to look at it. That’s not, not the way that we should be thinking about this at all, because there are plenty of people who offer guarantees that aren’t supervising every moment of the usage of whatever they’re guaranteeing. So what could we do? Well, we could have a guarantee for our end of the services. We could say, Hey, this is our partnership guarantee. We guarantee that you will get results if you do A, B, C, and D, and have people sign off on that. So there’s a full money back guarantee. If they follow the plan, then you know, and they don’t get results, we give them their money back. So that’s one way to approach it. The second way to approach it is embracing more professional responsibility and saying, okay, I may not be able to control everything that somebody does, but what can I do to facilitate better compliance? What can I do to facilitate better results and really become more of a problem solver? So, you know, I, I know that in our training business, with over 1200 personal training clients, we offered a money back guarantee and only ever had to refund one person based on the guarantee. Sure. We refunded some people who were paid in fulls that moved away or that sort of thing, but only one person ever sought out a refund based on the guarantee. But I can’t tell you how many dozens, if not hundreds of people joined because of that reduced risk in their mind, that that belief that they could trust us, that we were going to help them go from where they were to where they wanted to be.

All right, so next up social proof, which kind of ties in to the guarantee, right? Like we can tell people how good we are and how credentialed or experienced we may be, but nothing beats having social proof where somebody can look at a case study or a testimonial and see it before and after and see themselves, or someone liked themselves in that before and see that it was possible to use your program, to go from where they are, to where they aspire to be. I think there, there is so much value in that, whether it be before and afters, that you are using you know, on social media that you’re using on your own, that you’re using inside your facility or those reviews that are independent reviews, that people are going to go fine and use to assess how effective you are. And we all do it, right? Like if we’re going to stay at a hotel or go to a restaurant, we want to see what the reviews are. And the same thing holds true with our business. So the more social proof, the better, I know that in my first training business, one of the best sales tools that we had was what we called our wall of fame. And we would put up client after client. It, you know, it probably its peak. We had 50 or 60 clients on the wall with a before and after not only showing their, their journey, but saying, okay, this is the program they were involved in. Whether or not they did took part in our nutrition coaching program, whether or not like what supplements they were even taking, because we had a retail segment of the business too. So we said, basically, Hey, this person did it. You see where they started, you see where they are now, here is exactly what they did. And so we would have people coming to us saying, I want to take these supplements. I want to do two times a week training. I want to go through your nutrition coaching program because they basically just wanted to follow the same blueprint that they found. Somebody like themselves had followed from that wall of fame. So you could do the same thing as well.

And then another way to differentiate yourself is the way that you structure your pricing. Now, there are all sorts of ways to approach this. I know that, you know, we often look at things being more expensive as being more valuable. I mean, if somebody offered you a $7 steak or a $70 steak, you would assume that the $70 steak was better. We do this with cars, we do this with homes. We always kind of default to perceiving something, being more expensive as being more valuable. So there’s that way to look at it. Or we can structure our pricing in a way that is more client-friendly or more flexible. We can go lower price than do more volume. We can create scenarios where maybe we’re doing you know, financing plans or those sorts of things. I know that in my first training business, everybody in that region of the country and to my knowledge, most everybody in the country selling personal training, selling training in packages, you know, six packs, 12 packs, 24 packs, where somebody would pay in full or they were selling them in a series where you would just prepay for your next session. Well, my approach was to sell things on a subscription. It was, it was very simple. We would do a subscription and treat it just like the health clubs had their subscription. And I automatically defaulted to selling 12 month training programs. And it was at the time kind of revolutionary cause we’re talking about, you know, 2004, it was not a common thing. And when I presented this to a couple of the people who were kind of well known industry leaders at the time they told me I was crazy, but within 18 months we had over 400 clients in that business because it was so much more easy for them to fit this into their monthly budget, because this is what they did with their mortgage or their rent. This is what they did with their car payment. This is what they did with their health insurance. So this was just another monthly payment instead of some massive onetime purchase. So we took that approach. Other things that we had done, we had done no payments in December and let people basically pre-enroll and train up until January or up until January and payments would start in January to kind of adapt to what was going on during the holidays, you know, other kind of unique fee structures, you know, I’ve done escalating fees over time for, for clients to let them get more training for a lower per session rate early to, to accelerate their results. You know, we’ve done programs where somebody could have no payments until you know, if they commit to a certain term kind of like the, the December, like no payment for December, but even doing a delayed payment of a couple months or three months, depending on the commitment I’m met people who were finishing up memberships at other facilities. If they brought in a cancellation notice where they weren’t going to renew at that facility and signed up with us, they could train with no payments at the moment until that other payment had expired and they started their payments with us. So being creative with your pricing structure to make it more client favorable or structuring your fees to attract the type of person you want, the premium buyer, the discount buyer, we have those options at hand as well.

And then finally, I’m really trying to separate yourself by offering a service that can’t be compared head to head. So if you offer a service that includes nutrition coaching with fitness, and that includes on demand training that people can do in between sessions and include some sort of maybe lifestyle design coaching, or problem solving and offer some accountability. And the, the competitor only offers workouts. Now you’re not compared head to head. You’re able to say, well, we do all these things. And these other things are really the difference between somebody getting results and not it. And you can sell that other 165 hours during the week that that really makes the difference. So hopefully you’ve got a few, a few thoughts here, a few may maybe light bulb moments or aha moments where one of the six can help you separate yourself from the competition, or maybe a combination of these six are things that you can integrate into what you do to really position yourself as more of a market leader is more of a you know, likely choice for your ideal clients. So there are some tips for differentiating yourself, excited to see what you do with it. Be sure to drop me a line and let me know Once you implement.

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.