Fitness Business School – A Different Way to Look at Selling

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I wanna talk with you about a different way to think about selling. Let’s get started.

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.

So the other day I was writing up a document for some clients in our sprint program, and it was just a way that I wanted them to appreciate putting new offers in front of the people in their lives. And for the entire time that I’ve been coaching business owners, I’ve been very much an advocate of inviting
people in your network or connecting with people in your network and seeing them as a vehicle to build a great business.

And I think a lot of people are very apprehensive. They don’t wanna be quote unquote salesy. And it’s funny, I saw a post on social media where some guy said, if you don’t like being salesy, then you probably like being poor. And it was just some snarky comment for just one of those guys that just love to
attract attention by controversy or being polarizing. But I mean, I get it, right? Like the, I don’t get these invites quite as much as I used to or, or these outreaches quite as much as I used to. I get plenty of outreach about people wanting to sell me their high ticket coaching expertise or something like that. But
for many years, it seemed like the network marketing world was really proactive in reaching out. And invariably there would be people that I went to high school with or went to college with that would reach out and there would be some sort of scripted, preliminary, single sentence or two, and then some pitch as
to why my life was unfulfilled because I wasn’t selling some supplement.

And if you politely decline, they would keep pushing and try to suggest that you’re foolish for not wanting this wonderful thing. And I think a lot of that is what drives a lot of the stigma where people are like, I don’t wanna be salesy. That’s not salesy, that’s just being a jerk. And that’s completely
different in my mind, right? But I think about this from a different perspective. Let’s say that I opened a restaurant in town and I was so proud of the restaurant and knew that we served the best food in town and created a wonderful atmosphere and knew that people sharing a meal together was a great social
opportunity for them, and a way to make stronger connections and create memories and all that. Then I would say, man, I want to invite all the people in my life to come experience this thing because I knew how I would know how powerful it would be.

And so I started to think about this, and man, we invite people, we care about to do things or to go places or to experience stuff. We don’t sell them on doing it. Now if they don’t want to do it, that’s okay, but we invite them because we care about them. And I’ve thought about this forever because I’ve
told people over and over, I mean, I remember going and doing a site visit for a gym in Texas, and the guy’s business was just floundering. And it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I was in the facility, he did good work, he was personable. And then when we were out to lunch or when we ran to the
store for something he seemed to know everybody. He was like the mayor in the town, and he had never invited much of anybody into his gym.

And I’m like, man, do you believe you’re like the best at what you do in this town? And he was like, yeah, for sure. He was like, then you’re being a jerk to your friends. You’re saying, go, if you wanna go work out, you should go this other place because I’ve known you all this time and I’ve never invited you into
mine. I’d rather you go have an inferior solution. And, and it just, it didn’t register for me because if you actually care about somebody and you can help, then you should probably help. And I think that if you extend an invitation, they can decline. I mean, you can ask somebody to go to lunch, they can say, no, you
can ask somebody to go get coffee. They can say no. You can ask somebody to come in and experience what you do. They can say no.

You can invite them to your email newsletter. They can say, no, this isn’t creating antagonistic environments for anybody because this isn’t, it’s an invitation. People decline invitations all the time. It’s not a pitch with a follow up of overcoming objections and hard selling or whatever else. And I think
that if you reframe this in your mind that, Hey, I wanna help. I want to help the people in my life, I am going to invite them and help. And if they decide they want to do something more with us, they can, but worst case scenario, they can go become an advocate for us because I helped, and I’ve improved their life
because I’ve helped. There’s just such an opportunity there. And if you were to pull out your phone, there would likely be dozens, hundreds, maybe even a thousand contacts depending on how you set up your phone.

If you open up your social media, there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of contacts. There are people that you can invite to experience what you do, whether it’s to read your weekly newsletter and get some tips and actually get some advice that they can trust instead of having to sift through the abundance
of kind of sketchy information online if it’s coming into your facility so they can just gain a little bit of momentum if it’s joining a program for a little bit of time, like invite people in to experience what you do or invite people in to actually be helpful to them, and you’re gonna grow your business from the inside
out. Some of those people are gonna want to be paying clients. Some of those people are going to take your advice and it’s gonna change their life. And all of those people can go out and become advocates for you.

They can open doors for you. They can introduce you to other people. They can share the things that you post on social media. There’s so many ways that they can go out and be a connector to the other people in their world that you have yet to connect with, but it starts with you inviting them in. So if you’ve been
apprehensive to sell people who are preexisting relationships or connections, this is a different way to look at it. And frankly, I think it’s a better way to look at it because at no point in time, like you get to decide how you navigate those conversations. At no point in time are you ever forced to be awkward
and pushy about anything? You’re just inviting somebody because that’s what we do for the people that we care about that are important to us. We invite them, we help them, we share with them. And if you do that, you’re gonna find yourself building a much stronger business and probably a business you enjoy owning a whole lot more.

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

Before you go, I have a quick announcement:

One of of the things that we’ve been doing with our current clients is taking them through this Ideal Business diagnostic and really what it is, this checklist that allows you to pinpoint exactly what your business needs next so you can keep improving, keep growing, and build a business that you love to own, one that pays you well, one that allows you to have the impact you wanna have and one that allows you to have a lifestyle that you truly enjoy.

In this diagnostic, we walk through everything and we do an evaluation and can instantly pinpoint what you need to do next to build that business that you want. I’m going to extend this opportunity to get on with either me or my team and take you through this evaluation and fix your business’s most vital needs fast.

So if we take you through this, you’re gonna be able to make those vital changes that you need to finally have what I call your Ideal Business. If you’d be interested in going through this entirely free, risk-free diagnostic with us and learn what you already have in place, what you’re doing well and where are your greatest opportunities for rapid improvement are just shoot me an email with diagnostic in the subject line to [email protected].

Again, an email to [email protected] with diagnostic in the subject line will get you scheduled and take you through this evaluation to help you build the business you want.