Fitness Business School – A Quicker Sales Cycle

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and I wanna show you how to have a quicker sales cycle. 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 til the end of this episode, because we have a brand new special offer exclusive for listeners. So stay tuned.

So if you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, if you’ve listened to, you know, even a handful of episodes or you’ve read my newsletter, you’ve probably either kind of understood or, or kind of seen it as implied that I, I adhere to this long game of doing business or, you know, you’ve caught something I’ve read or something that I’ve said that, you know, said it directly where, you know, I’m, I’m in this for the long haul. I’ve got clients who’ve been with me for over 50 15 years. I’ve sent a daily email newsletter for 17 years. I am big on building long term relationships and kind of feeding those over time, making sure that they don’t kind of die on the vine and, and this long term approach I think has served me incredibly well. And ultimately I think it’s what healthy sustainable businesses should be built on. But clearly biased, you know, that’s, that’s the stuff I like. I like building relationships and helping people I care about. And you know, but I also recognize that, you know, unless you’ve been doing this for a while and you’ve been filling your pipeline for an extended period of time you know, you don’t wanna wait for those, you know, those interactions, those relationships to mature, you don’t wanna wait to actually generate business.

So how do we create a quicker sales cycle to make sure that we’re generating business both now? Well, we’re maybe on a parallel track building this, this long term approach. Well, there, there in my mind are a couple things that we can do, probably three things that we can do to accelerate the sales cycle. The first of which is meet people who are closer to being ready. Now, most of what I see fitness business business owners do to generate leads is posting on Facebook, which in my mind is, is kind of just playing into the long game, right? It is essentially running a commercial people. Aren’t on Facebook, typically shopping to hire a personal trainer, to join a, to join a gym, to, to, to hire a coach, right? They’re on there for their own kind of social media interested is media, right? So they’re, they’re scrolling. They’re seeing what their friends are doing. They’re killing time. They’re, you know, they’re likely not saying, man, I hope that an offer for a personal training facility pops up in my feed. So we’re trying to connect with people there that haven’t ever expressed, any degree of readiness to do business. That’s why I tell most of my clients. In fact, I tell all of my clients this, the the idea on like, if you’re running ads on Facebook is to get somebody who has a general interest and, you know, offer a lead magnet or, or something.

So you can follow up with that person until they’re ready. So, you know, we need to catch people who are closer to ready. So where do we find them? Typically, I, if we’re trying to find them online, it’s gonna be Google, right? Like Google today is more like the yellow pages were when I would’ve been growing up. And when I would’ve started my first couple of businesses, if you needed a plumber, if you needed you know, a mechanic, if you needed any service provider, you would just go look in the yellow pages, right? That’s you would Google something. Now you would go to know you would go to Google and you would find the local listings you’d have a map that showed all the local providers, you’d be able to see reviews. You’d be able to, you know, the ads that would pop up in your feed would be, you know, targeted for people providing that type of solution. So I, I think the first thing that we can do for a quicker sales cycle is to be visible, to be credible, to be to be a solution when people are actually looking to buy.

And so making Google a priority, which probably has, has not been as big a, a priority for a lot of people in, in the, the fitness business landscape over the last few years, cuz they’ve shifted Facebook making Google a little bit more of a priority if you’re trying to catch people when they’re ready. So that’s number one, number two have more conversations, conversations lead to conversions. And we currently exist in this time where it’s almost like people don’t want to have conversations at all. They wanna put out content, content and conversations are very different. Content is a one way kind of distribution, right? You are putting out an email newsletter, you’re putting out a video, you’re putting out a podcast. I’d love it if we were having a conversation on this podcast. But right now it’s just me talking, which is not the quickest way to build a relationship with somebody. The quickest way build a relationship is to make it interactive. So have more conversations, facilitate more conversations. Now that could be prompting the people that you’re sending emails to, to talk with you. It could be creating situations on social media that, that engage people in conversations.

It could be going to the people that you already have a relationship with and just trying to get them in an interactive environment. So understand that conversations lead to conversions. I’m the guy who sends more emails per week than about anybody on the planet. And I would tell you that one 20 minute conversation can accelerate that relationship more than 12 months of emails. And if I had the capacity to have a conversation with everybody on my email list individually, I would love to, because I know that I could move further in that relationship with each of them so much faster, I could learn about them, learn about what’s important to them, learn about what’s holding them back, learn, learn about what their dreams are. And I could customize the way that I responded. I could make sure the things that I’m sharing are really, really valuable to that person. Instead of putting something out, that’s a little more general, a little more broad and you know, not being able to engage because if you are interested, instead of just trying to be interesting, they’re going to lean in, right? They’re going to be more likely to do business with you. You so if you’re not having more conversations, set a target, instead of just setting a lead generation, target, set a conversation, target each and every week, more conversations, more conversions. So that’s the second one.

The third thing that you can do to accelerate the sales cycle is just make better offers. If you have a stronger offer, whether that is a guaranteed results, offer a shorter term, offer a bigger benefit, offer some sort of discounted trial to get people in motion, do something to nudge people long. So that there’s a reason that they decide now. So that there’s a bigger incentive for them to take action today. Now that’s not gonna get somebody who’s just interested to be ready, but it, it may move those people who are getting close to being ready to actually taking action.

So those three things, that’s it. That’s all you need to do to shorten the sales cycle, Be where people are when they’re closer to making a decision when they’re in that kind of review stage, right? Like when we’re getting ready to buy something, we start to really dig in and investigate and go through this discovery process. We’re looking at reviews. We’re looking at for social proof. We’re, we’re, we’re vetting our options if you will. So be seen more there engage more conversations. When I say engage that doesn’t meet a way around for somebody else to start ’em it means you take responsibility for facilitating more conversations and then third make more high, high value kind of dream come true offers, do those three things. And you’re gonna see that sales cycle go quicker. You’re gonna see more people say yes faster. You’re gonna see your business grow more Rapidly.

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