Fitness Business School – Improve Your Follow-Up

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode I want to talk with you about how to improve your follow up. 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 end 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.

For as long as I can remember. In my adult life, I studied some sales stuff and I understood almost instantly in my first career as a college baseball coach that, you know, the, the foundation to having a successful team was to go out and recruit good players. The the old adage, if you’re in this part of the
world is you can’t win the Kentucky Derby with a mule. So you know, I, so I knew that, you know, hey, I had to get better at selling.

I was not particularly well equipped to do that. Definitely was not the type of person that loved to get up in front of a crowd and wasn’t. I mean, it just, there, there were things about it from a confidence standpoint, everything else that I wasn’t particularly strong in. But what I recognized very quickly when I
learned about selling was there was a lot of talk about how most people stopped following up really early in most sales processes. And you know, there really weren’t like books at the time that I was finding, at least on how to become a better college coach, like a better recruiter in coaching. But there
were plenty of books on how to become a better salesperson. And I saw the overlap. So it was like, okay, how do I get better at follow up? This is what they’re saying people are bad at.

And the the first step was, man, you just have to keep following up over and over and over because, you know, most people quit very early on. And, you know, the more I learned about things like radio advertising is, you know, for example, you know, they talk a lot about like, reach and frequency.
Frequency mattered a lot more than reach. Reaching a bunch of people one time wasn’t particularly productive, but reaching one person many times over seemed to have a pretty profound impact. So, you know, that’s carried over forever. So when I think about the, how my follow up has worked over the
years and why it’s worked to grow a bunch of different businesses you know, over 30 of my own and thousands of client businesses, the first thing I’d tell you is you need to think like a college recruiter. And you need to think in terms of following up essentially forever as a business model.

And forever is probably an ambiguous feeling term, but if you have a lead is still, you know, as long as they’re still in the market, then we should be following up. And even if they’ve made one purchase and it’s the wrong purchase, we should be following up. I mean, plenty of people, like, I’m recording this in
January, plenty of people have gone and joined a low cost health club to kind of pursue their goals a as kind of part of their New Year’s resolution or their New Year’s plan to get in shape. And often a lot of those people figure out that, you know what? I need external support, I need direction, I need
coaching, I need accountability. So this may not be the best path for me. And so even if they started down that road, they figured out the right road or that isn’t the right road for them.

So if you are taking this kind of follow up forever mentality, when they’re back in the market, you show up. I used to do that a lot as a college coach. There’d be kids who I would wanna recruit outta high school and they would choose a different direction. And because I built a strong relationship with them,
and there was still that contact you know, if they decided they wanted to go transfer somewhere else, then, you know, my program and our university became a viable option. So that’s, you know, kind of the root of this. And what’s great is if you can play that long game, man, it pays off. Most of the
clients that I get when I ask them if, you know, if I didn’t meet them at an industry event or through a referral, almost everybody that that has arrived, like originally through my email list, they, they were on that email list for over 12 months.

Now, you know, that may sound like too long, right? A really, really long sales cycle. But I mean, there are ways to accelerate that by moving conversations along more quickly, generating conversations more quickly. But in general, if the average is over 12 months, totally fine. I mean, if you keep the
pipeline full, there are people that enter that pipeline 12 months ago that are becoming clients today. There are things that I can do today to go connect with people and get them to be clients earlier in the journey, but to have that pipeline full and know that I’ve been educating, motivating and demonstrating
some sort of expertise and ability to help them, that, you know, I mean, it’s kind of this golden goose, right? Like, it just produces over and over and over. But that’s probably the next piece of this is when I follow up, I don’t think in terms of, oh, I need to create content.

I think about, okay, how can I educate the person that I wanna serve on things that would be relevant to them things that would be useful to them, things they would be interested in. How can I motivate them to move forward and get them to believe that there is a path to something better that they can solve
their problems and achieve their goals? And then how can I demonstrate that, you know, I can help? How can I give them something valuable that says, you know what, I have confidence and belief that Pat and his team are the right people to help me. And, and I try to do it in a personal way. I mean, the
way that I’m talking on this podcast is pretty much the exact same thing. If you’d get, if we were on a coaching call, same thing you’d get if we’re sitting in my office together doing you know, a strategic planning session or something.

Obviously it’s a one-way conversation right now, but I don’t think anybody that meets me in person is gonna ever feel like, you know what, the path that I got via email or the pat that I got via the podcast or whatever else is very different than us connecting in person. And, and, and that’s by design.
Like we want, you know, I want people to find the right fit and hopefully for a lot of ’em, that’s me. And I think that for follow up, you can do the same. I think that you want to be I, I think you mark it by being you. And there’s, there’s a lot to be said for not trying to be a poor imitation of someone else, because I
think you going out there and being the front person for your business is gonna attract a lot of the right clients.

All right, so how else do, do you need to follow up or how else can you improve, follow up? Well, you pick one channel as like your flagship follow up channel. For me, that’s always been email. It’s not that email. It’s not that I love email. In fact, you know, I just recently did a workshop on me email and
detailed everything about how I approach email and, and it’s become something that I’m really comfortable with. Man writing was like just this really arduous task for me early on. It was just hard. I was not a good writer. I was not comfortable writing, but it was something that I felt like I could get
better at, and it was easy to, to scale. I could send one email and if I had 17 people receiving the initial one, it didn’t really change what I had to contribute if I ever got to 1700 or 17,000.

So writing that note to a client’s always been simple. But once you have one channel established, create other channels. I mean, that’s, that’s what I’m doing right now. We’re on a podcast and it is just one other way to connect with people because I think we want to connect with people in ways that are right
for them. And so, yeah, I started with the one that I felt like offered me the most opportunity at the time and made, made sense for a host of reasons, but then I’ve layered on other things a as I go, and as you get into follow up, don’t let you know you having to be the wearer of all hats. Be the bottleneck, you
be the subject matter expert and find other people to direct or produce the stuff that might be slowing you down.

You know, my friend Paul is the producer of this podcast, and frankly, it wouldn’t be happening if I didn’t have him to do it. That would’ve been the bottleneck, right? I could have talked about things that I care about to people that I care about, but as far as editing and distributing, that would not have
been, you know, great for me. And then keeping in mind, like follow up, it’s not what we share. It’s what people see or hear or read. Frequency matters. And if you think about follow up as what I’m doing to stay relevant and build a relationship with the person I’m serving and you’re looking at, at it through
their lens, which most people don’t you know, it shapes a lot of stuff. If you think about, like, I’ll use email as the, the easy and obvious example here, instead of thinking, well, I send a daily email.

If you think about, well, 20% of my emails get open. So, you know, that means, you know, people are reading about one and a half emails a week on average. That’s, that’s different. Instead of saying, man, I send a daily email, that’s a lot like one and a half emails a week being actually read or consumed is not a
lot. So how do we make sure that we’re staying relevant and hopefully building a relationship and moving it forward with somebody? So that’s how I approach follow up differently. The, the only other thing I’ll add to that is I make frequent and varied offers and follow up because I, I truly believe that
people buy when they’re ready, not when I’m ready for them to be ready. And they buy for their their own reasons. And I can certainly influence some things and, and maybe compel them a little bit, but, I’m not deciding for them.

And just because I run something with a deadline doesn’t mean that it makes sense for them and their life today. But I can certainly stay in front of them with offers. So when they are ready, hopefully they choose me. And then I vary the offers in part because, you know, we’re, we’re talking about a collection
of individuals, a community of individual people that are at different places on their journey. They have different goals respond to different things from a language standpoint. It’s just like your clients, you know, who may respond to different coaching cues, just man, what lands in somebody’s brain and what
that you know, what, how that speaks to them is different for all of us. So that’s how I would tell you, you can tighten up your follow up. Just some of those simple things that, you know, so many people missed.

They, think, oh, there’s some cut paste, cut and paste thing that solves every problem. No, you can use, like we give people done for you emails and coaching programs, but you know, great follow ups more than just pasting three, you know, three emails in a week. There’s, there, there’s a lot more
wrapped around it that I alluded to here. But if you take the, the kind of suggestions that I just provided and kind of make them your own, you’re gonna watch your business improve. You’re gonna watch your, you know, return on lead cost go up, you’re gonna see your conversion rates increase, you’re going to
see your business grow, and you’re probably gonna even see an uptick in the quality of clients if you are being you because, you know, instead of kind of just saying what everybody else says and showing up the way everybody else shows up, you’re gonna stand out and the people who who gravitate to that are
gonna be a much better fit for you and your business.

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