Fitness Business School – Being Able to Convert in 2021

Full Transcript

Hey Pat Rigsby here and we are up to episode number four in this five-part series about setting yourself up to succeed for the rest of 2021 and beyond. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to the fitness business school with Pat Rigsby, the podcast for fitness entrepreneurs who want to make more income, have greater impact, and enjoy more freedom in their ideal business. If you’d like an accelerated route to these goals, email me at [email protected] and put BGA in the subject line and I’ll get you all the details about our business growth accelerator program.

All right, We’re up to episode number four. And in reality, I mean, none of this is going to come as a shock to you, but I mean, in this episode, I want to talk with you about building a systematic approach to converting prospects, right? We need to be able to convert prospects to clients in a consistent way, because so much of building a successful sustainable business is about, you know, just mitigating your own stress and being able to, to focus on working with the right people and delivering the results you want. And if you don’t have a predictable way to take the prospects that you have and, and turn you know, a handful of them each and every month into clients, you’re going to struggle, right? I mean, because no matter what you do, nobody has a consistent 100% retention rate.

Even if you were doing things that are really high level retaining 95, 96% of clients month over month is really good. And that means we have to be able to outpace that even that low level of attrition, if we want to earn a meaningful income for the work that we’re putting in the impact that we’re making. And I think that we, we understand inherently this idea of, Hey, I’m going to have a program design system. And, you know, we, we may have a specific way that we do warm ups or mobility work. We may have a specific way that we do strength or power conditioning. We may have a specific way that we, we kind of coach people to eat or recover, but when it comes to, you know, moving people from prospect to client, we, we kind of fly by the seat of their pants, our, of our pants, a lot of the time, right? Like we don’t have a consistent process. And so much of what we do is built around, moving somebody from interested, ready, because let’s face it.

What we do is a commitment. What we ask of clients is not only a commitment of money is commitment of time and energy and getting out of their comfort zone and probably getting over some internal demons, if you will, right. Feel feelings of failure at different points. Maybe they’ve tried things and they didn’t work in the past, or they’re not happy with the way that they look and feel now. And that’s disappointing to them. And we’ve got to ask people to, to move past that. And that’s not disk this impulsive, you know, instantaneous decision, Oh, Hey, I saw this ad for a gym. I think I’m going to go sign up. I mean, usually there’s a bit of a process that people go through. So we need to have a really rock, solid plan to follow up with people along this journey. Because you know, if somebody shows an interest in the type of things that we offer, not even specifically with our business there’s plenty of of data out there that that says, if somebody shows an interest, 80% of them, you know, are, are going to buy at some point, 50% of them are probably going to buy between that six month and two year Mark. Right? But very few, you have them by, within that first 90 days. So when we think about this, I mean, the numbers probably aren’t that relevant. As far as the timeline, what you need to know is when somebody starts to show an interest in something, this meaningful, it’s usually not an impulsive thing where they start, they get going. They’ve been thinking about it for a while, right? They think about it for a couple months, three months. Then they pull the trigger and make a decision. Sometime after that, depending on how bad the desire is, how big the problem feels, or maybe not how their schedule kind of lines up. I mean, it could be as simple as, Hey, I’m not going to start a fitness program during the summer. I’m going to wait till my kids get back in school or, you know, it might be, Hey, wait a minute. This deadline of me going and having to wear this dress, this wedding, or go to the class reunion or whatever else is coming up, or I have a vacation. And so I need to get on the ball. So you never know what’s going to trigger somebody, but if you’re not in a place where you convert prospects to clients, your fault, you’re not following up with them. You’re always going to feel like, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re struggling, you’re working from a deficit. You’re going to see people walk out the door and have this desperation, Oh, I have to go replace them. I have to get new clients because you don’t have this kind of pipeline. That’s always full and feeding you new business month after month. So what do we need to do to make that happen? Well, the first thing that we have to do is know who our person is, right? Like we have to know that the person that we’re best served or best suited to help is who we’re connecting with. And, you know, it can be as simple as thinking of it this way.

If you were only going to get paid for the results you were delivering, Who would you help? Right. Who do you, You have the most confidence to that you can go help the, that you would enjoy helping that you can really, you know, be, be the ideal mentor too. And then we need to, you know, once we come in contact with that person, we want to really follow up with them on a consistent basis. I mean, you know, the three time, a week stuff that we always talk about, we want to follow up with them with emails three times a week, but that’s, that’s one layer of this, right? I mean, we can use podcasts, we can use text messages. We can make phone calls. We can send direct mail pieces. We can put people in a free Facebook group, but we want to create the, these kind of lines of communication, these, these kind of bonds of connection, where we help them get to know us like us and trust us. And those three things, a lot of times kind of get bundled together. But my, my friend and marketing expert, Dean Jackson likes to talk about, Hey, this is no period, like period trust period. And you know, they, they get, they may be aware of the lead magnet you put out, but they may not know anything about you and your business. I mean, it’s amazing how many businesses in each of our respective communities, we’re just really unfamiliar with. I mean, there are businesses that, you know, are in my two mile radius that, you know, probably every, every week or two, I, I notice another one just, okay, I drove down this road or I was looking for this thing on my phone and this other thing popped up and that’s just normal, right? Like, because people don’t notice you until they’re looking for you a lot of the time. So they need to know you, they need to know who you’re for what you’re about. So we have to put that in front of them. We have to make sure that in what we’re sending out and what we’re making available to the public people can kind of start to get a feel for the fact that we might be the right fit for them. We might be the best solution of all the options available for that person. And then ideally, if we’re going to follow up with people in a conversational way, that makes them feel important that validates them, that gives them things of value, information, and education. Then hopefully they’re going to get to like us. They’re going to like what they hear, because they feel like it’s for them. Right? And people tend to gravitate to people that make them feel important, make them feel appreciated. So we want to send a followup that’s about them, not necessarily about us. And then finally, the way that people trust us. A lot of times in the world that we live in today, a lot of it’s about social proof wants to tell you they’re an expert. Everybody wants to tell you they’re the best at what they do. But if you’ve got case studies, if you’ve got you know, testimonials from people like the people that you’re marketing to now, if you’ve got things that, that you can put in front of people that may, you know, I mean, say, Hey, I helped this person in your neighborhood. I helped this person. You might know, maybe you go to the same church. Maybe your kids go to the same school. If you’ve got reviews on, on Google, on Facebook, that that suggests that, Hey, I can trust you. You know what you are, who you say you are. That’s a big, big step in the process. And then we have to make offers very regularly. We have to keep offers in front of people, whether it be the little super signatures, the, the, we always do engagement offers or deadline-driven offers.

We have to keep offers in front of people because everybody’s on their own clock. Everybody’s on their own timeline. So we have to make sure that we’ve got this kind of pipeline in place that kind of intersperses education and motivation with offers. And if we’re doing that, odds are, we’re going to kind of have that know like, and trust factor really fulfilled in the way that we need to. And if we’re making this customized and personalized to the target market, we want to reach, then we’re going to be in pretty good shape. And then finally, we’ve got to be okay with selling. We’ve got to be okay with asking for what we’re asking for in exchange for what we provide. And so many people in our world are not right. Like so many people in our industry are afraid to ask for money because maybe they got money, hang ups. They don’t have money. They, you know, they, they question their value. They don’t like rejection. You know, all those things are valid too, to a point. But you know, I mean, you know that if you pick the person, the right person to market, to the right person to serve, you can change somebody’s life. The impact that you can have on their life is profound. And, you know, as are, that’s probably worth a lot more than you’re charging. So you need to be okay with asking. And, you know, I have a process in place that makes it such that you can consistently ask people, Hey, where do you want to go? What do you feel like is holding you back? And once they’ve told you, okay, I can be prescriptive. I can say, here’s how we can work together to help you get past those challenges and get to the place that you want to be here. Here’s what you’re going to have to do. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Would you like to do this together? And if we do this, if we’ve got this follow up process in place like clockwork, if we’re making consistent offers, if we’re refining the offer to a point that it speaks to the person we want to reach, they feel like, Hey, this is something that’s valuable for me. It’s a good deal. It’s going to help me get to where I want to go. It’s probably different than some of the things I tried in the past. And then we’ve got a, a sales process that, that is client centric. It’s not all about us. It’s not bullying somebody into buying something. It’s basically helping somebody decide and us being the partner in that journey.

If we have that in place, then, then selling’s not really that big a problem. And if we’re getting the right people in, we are getting them results, right. And if we’re getting them results, we can probably keep them longer. We probably retain people better. And we can build a referral system, a simple referral system where we’re asking for introductions to new people, or we’re providing invitations for people to bring people with them. And if we’re doing those two things with people who already like us and are probably willing to speak on our behalf and be ambassadors for us, well, you know, we’re not going to have any problem growing the business and growing the business in a way that makes us happy. And it doesn’t really cause us a bunch of additional stress. So that’s the next piece of the puzzle. And yeah, so much of what we do is that, but I want you to see it for what it is and how it fits into the bigger picture. Because if you have this in place, it makes everything else easier. And it allows you to really take some of the pressure off because when you have a system in place, it becomes fine tuning. It becomes improvement or improvement. It becomes this thing that, okay, how do I make it better rather than, okay, I’m just going to try the next shiny object, throw it against the wall, hope something sticks instead, say, okay, this is the process that we’re going to use follow up. This is the stuff that we know we need to say and do to attract the type of people we want and help them make an informed decision that hopefully leads them to us. And then we’re going to do a sales consultation that allows them to really talk about where they want to go. And we can make sure to it’s a right fit on both sides. Because if somebody says, this is where I want to go, and it’s not something that you do, or maybe it’s unrealistic, or this is what’s holding me back. And man, I don’t help with that. Well, then we can say no as well. So having this system makes all the difference when it comes to really building a successful business. Plus in our cases, independent business owners with so many of the people that we compete against in the franchising world you know, they’re going to have bigger ad budgets. Most of the time, they’re going to have more visible real estate. We have to do something different to stay in front of people and to build relationships and stand out and kind of carve out our own path in this approach will allow us to do that. Allow us to put the clients first and we may spend less and get better results in the process. So that’s number four, we’ve got episode number five on how you’re going to stand out and succeed in 2020 And beyond of next.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. And before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owner, they almost always ask me, “How can I get more leads or how can I get more clients?” Well, I have an exclusive offer for you and it’s going to help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive Fitness Lead Academy for six full weeks for just a dollar. Fitness Lead Academy is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and coaching to attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients. Imagine having three marketing emails written for you each and every week for easy-to-deploy promotions provided to you that are proven to convert and they’re ready to use and proven ads and social media posts given to you each and every month as well. Plus you have access to three weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your brand to navigating things like building funnels and getting ads approved. You get all of this and more when you join Fitness Lead Academy. And to prove that FLA can serve you as your virtual marketing department and not only save you plenty of time, but also consistently bring you more leads and clients, you can get access to the entire coaching program for six full weeks. Again, for just $1. If it delivers for you in the way that I expect it will, you can continue on for just $199 a month. So basically, just one additional client each month and you’re ROI positive. And I’m sure that if you apply what we give you, you’re going to get more than just one additional client each month. And you’re going to likely save at least 10 hours a month to take advantage of this special offer. Just go to TestDriveFLA.com to try it out for six full weeks. If it’s not what you’re looking for, you can cancel it any time.

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