Fitness Business School – Sell More Training

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here. And in this episode, I want to talk with you about a few tips that can help you sell more training. So 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.

So the other day I was jotting down some notes on how you can sell more. How it, really, I was jotting down some notes for a group call I was doing with some clients on things that they should be thinking about. If they want to sell more, how, how to make things a little bit more effective outside of just sales consultations and, and tracking their numbers to make sure they have enough appointments with people to talk to about selling. You know, I mean, because we talk a lot about generating more leads, moving them to becoming prospects, sitting down with people, doing success sessions or getting people in trials. And those are all kind of the mechanical pieces of this. But I wanted to think about some things that would help them sell more that are kind of more like the, the underlying foundation or even some being maybe a little bit more of the intangible. So I listed out you know, really five, five thoughts, five concepts, and I thought that’d be great to share with you do an episode of the podcast. So here we go.

The first is making sure that you’re focusing on benefits. Like if you’re writing ads or you’re putting information out about your program, you have to be really cognizant of the fact that the, the process stuff is interesting to us. It’s probably not all that interesting to the prospect that we want to serve. And maybe over time as they kind of get behind the curtain, they’ll get excited about the process. They’ll feel like they’re in the know and they’ll be more interested, but ultimately they want benefits, right? They want you to make their life better, make their life easier, solve their problems, help them reach their goals. And so when you’re selling anything, you want to make sure that the prospect understands the benefits. I mean, you can go back and read a bunch of old marketing and advertising stuff. And they’ll say, you know what? People don’t buy drills. They’re buying holes. They want holes. And the drill is just what they need to get that hole. So that’s kind of where we’re at, right? Like people want weight loss. They want to feel better. They want improved health. They want more longevity. They want to vibrant and alive and turn back the clock. Those are the things they’re looking for. Maybe they want increased performance and you know, the things that we’re doing to help them achieve that. They’re cool. And hopefully they’re going to fall in love with the process, but ultimately what attracts them to the process in the first place is the benefit they’re going to achieve. So focusing on benefits I think is critical. So put everything that you’re doing. If you’re putting any sort of marketing material out there, if you’re having a conversation with prospects, anything that you’re doing, make sure that people understand the benefits. And so if you talk about a feature or a process always think about, and this is important because, and if you do that, it’ll lead you to the benefit that, that particular segment of the process or that feature provides.

Number two you gotta know your person, right? You gotta know who you serve. I think it, this alone has probably helped me as much as anything. I feel like I’m in really close touch, proximity, whatever you’d like to call it to the people that I serve. I’ve coached my entire adult life in some way, shape or form coaching, college baseball, being a strength, coach, coaching clients, and training businesses, coaching clients through my, my business, coaching practice, still coaching, baseball, all that stuff. Right. And so I think I understand coaches pretty well. I talk to clients each and every day and you know, a lot of people in our industry, at least in my side of the industry, they try to move past coaching clients and they just want to be in the owner role. Whereas I, I like coaching clients. And so I think it helps me. I think it, it helps me understand the person, the problems they’re facing, the things they want, what their day-to-day feels like, all of that. And I know it’s been a huge advantage for me. And I think it’s a big advantage for you if you’re aware, if you’re kind of dribbling with your head up, so to speak in paying attention to the frustrations that the people that you serve have to, to their fears, to their concerns, to their wants, if you know that it becomes so much easier to, to put a message out to the world consistently, that is interesting. That’s attractive that it’s engaging for those people, so know who you want to serve.

And then the third kind of fits right in with that. And it’s just demonstrating that you can help if you know who you serve and you know, what their problems are, you know, what that kind of bridge from where they are to where they want to be. Looks like you can start demonstrating expertise that that helps them. Now, before they’ve ever paid you for anything, you can show results from clients that you have that build confidence and give them some, some faith and belief that you can help them. You can really deliver results in advance of them becoming a client and use that as a vehicle to motivate them, to become a client. So demonstrating that you can help is huge. I think, and it’s not the way that most people think about marketing. Most people think about marketing is way to persuade people without providing value. I think using something valuable as your tool to persuade is much, much better. So if you want to demonstrate how you can help somebody, how you can serve them, coach them before they pay you to coach them is kind of the way that I think about it. You’re going to move more people towards wanting to do business with you.

And then, you know, along that kind of knowing who you serve again, the fourth thing is speaking their language. Sure. You know what? I think that we have a lot of people in our industry who liked to use a lot of industry lingo and they want to you know, in some cases improve that they’re not the typical trainer. So they want to sound more intelligent or what happens a lot is people get so excited about the pursuit of knowledge in what we do, that they just talk about it in a way that doesn’t connect it, doesn’t land with the prospect. So understand that the person that you aspire to serve, the person that you currently serve, we need to talk about what we do in the language they use. Right? We don’t need to talk about it in our heads industry speak. We don’t need them to talk about it in a different way, meet people where they are and connect with them in a very personal and probably more informal way than we tend to gravitate to. That’s why I don’t use a lot of scripts. I use frameworks for the way that I take somebody through a sales process, but I don’t use a script because I want it to feel like a conversation. It should be a conversation where we’re discussing partnering together to work together, to achieve their goals. So speak somebody’s language, think about things in a far more conversational way. You’ll get much better results.

And then finally, if you want to sell more, don’t lose sight of the fact that this is all about the prospect. This is all about the client. If we make things about the client or about the prospect and not about the process or about cool or about you know, our credentials or anything like that, they’re going to be more interested if you want to gain somebody’s attention and really hold their interest. I mean, of all the wonderful books and podcasts and resources that are out there, the one I’d probably steer you towards first and foremost would be how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. Because you know, that book really shines a spotlight on making it about the person you’re talking to. And if you do that, everything becomes easier because now we’ve really kind of we’ve showcased them, them and their interests. We made them feel important. We made them feel special and appreciated. And if you do that, that it’s going to be much, much easier to, to learn about them, to get them to open up, to, to, to show them that we are in fact, the best solution to help them achieve their goals. And frankly, that’s part of the whole thing they want in the first place, right? When somebody says, I want to lose, wait, that’s usually woven in with them not feeling good about themselves. They’re not feeling important. Them not feeling appreciated. You know, their, their self-esteem is probably that tampered down I’m a bit. And just by luck leading this kind of conversation with them from day one and, and lifting them up and making them feel important and appreciated, you’ve already started to deliver some of the results that they were coming to you in the first place. And so it stands to reason that they’re going to want more of that. They’re going to want to feel more of that. They’re going to want to be around more of that. So just doing that, it’s not good salesmanship. It’s actually delivering some of that result in demonstrating that you can help.

So there are five things that you can do to sell more that you can make kind of really the things that can be woven into everything that you’re doing from the marketing that you’re putting out and where you’re putting it out to the sales conversations, you’re having to even referral generation. If you’re making it all about them, you’re speaking their language, you know, for the clients that you currently serve, they’re going to be more inclined to invite more people in to talk more about you and what you do. So if you’re looking for ways to sell more, surely we need to do all the tactical. We needed generate enough leads. We need to know our numbers. We need to practice our sales process, but don’t overlook these five ideas. These five concepts. I know they’ve helped me a ton, and they’re going to help you too.

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.