Fitness Business School – Selling More in Your Facility

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby here and in today’s episode, I want to talk with you about how to sell more inside your facility. 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.

Most of the time when people think about generating more revenue, they, they focus on the external stuff, right? They focus on going out, how do I run ads? How do I, you know, get more people into a challenge? How do I get this funnel to convert? They, they think in that way, but from my perspective usually, I don’t wanna say it’s a, you know, a completely untapped opportunity, but it’s an underappreciated opportunity that we have to do more inside our facility. And frankly, that was probably when, when I first started my initial couple, of training businesses, that was an area of strength. I really kind of thought, a lot about what happened inside our four walls, because I thought that was kind of the low hanging fruit. I didn’t have to go spend a bunch of money on external advertising, you know, I had a, a little bit of a captive audience, if you will. So here’s some of the things that, that I thought about then and still think are applicable today, and I’ve used with clients ever since. And the first is thinking about every guest who walks through the door is if they are somebody that’s going to be with you for the next decade, I used to use a dollar amount and, you know, and I talked about like $1,800 and, and say, Hey, if they were gonna pay you $1,800, they’re gonna pay you $150 a month over the next year.

But because people, you know, have varied price points and are are in different markets, I thought about it in a more kind of uniform way and, and just saying, you know, I mean, if this person was gonna be that client that stays with you for a decade, how would you treat them differently? How would you,
engage them? How quickly would you make eye contact? How quickly would you, you know, greet them? What would that greeting be like? What would that conversation be like? How much interest would you show in them and I think if we have that mentality, with that every guest who walks through the door has that kind of potential impact on our business. That alone sets the tone for a lot of the rest of this. The, the second thing that, that I focused on very early on, was the mindset of treating every day. Like it’s retention day. And what I mean by that is, back when I was a college baseball coach, I learned very soon that the most important recruiting you could do was to recruit the people you already had. And, you know, chasing the new person, certainly has some benefits, but not as much benefit is retaining the current people. And we never know the, the total scope of what is going on in somebody’s life. So if, like, if they’re in our facility, we don’t know if, hey, today’s the day that they’re kind of deciding if they wanna stay or they’re looking at something else, or they’re kind of on the fence and they
weren’t sure if they wanted to show up today or whatever else. Or if we treat every day as if it’s retention day for each respective person, we are going to, to keep so many more of our clients.

Now, those are kind of philosophical ideas. Now, a a few other, like one other philosophical thing before I get into tactical things that you can put into action is never assume that somebody wouldn’t be interested in doing more, whether that’s in investing in supplements or nutrition coaching or training with more frequency or training in a format that provides more personal attention. I mean, we are the ones who kind of set the parameters on what they signed up for. We set the parameters of what is included in each program. And there, there’s no, no rule. And in fact, it’s probably unlikely that that was a program that encompassed everything that they might be interested in because it was designed for us to be able to kind of rinse and repeat with it. So, you know, I mean, if we think about it from the, the perspective of the client, you know, maybe they’re in a group training program, but maybe in the back of their mind they’d be like, man, I would just love to come meet with my coach for, you know, one day a month and get better at some of this stuff and feel like I can, you know, just kind of
get a leg up on some of these movements we’re gonna do. So every workout feels better, and every workout I know I’m getting the most out of, or, you know,
the workouts are going great, but I need to, to tighten up my nutrition. I mean, it could be any number of things. Integrating accountability. Maybe they’re going and buying their supplements at Costco and you feel like you could provide some, you know, some solutions that might be of higher
quality. And, you know, don’t put a cap on this. Don’t have that assumption. I think the better assumption is to think in terms of, okay, here are all the things that we can do that are within the scope of our business that we can do for a client. And yes, a client may be kind of on one specific track. They
may be in one specific program, but we need to make sure that they are just hyper aware of everything else that we have available so that they can self-select whenever the timing is right for them.

Now, I’m not interested in forcing things down people’s throat and saying, Hey, you have to do this, or whatever else. And, and, and I’m also not ever interested in saying, well, the program you’re in just isn’t that good, so maybe you need to upgrade. No, I, I mean, I want somebody to have such a good
experience in whatever they’re doing that they want more. So with that in mind, some things to consider would be first and foremost, find as many low risk or even free opportunities for people to experience anything that you can provide. Now, obviously this is a, a capacity thing and a margin thing,
so you’re not gonna be able to do free samples of everything. And some of it doesn’t make sense to do free samples of you’re, you know, giving somebody you know a couple tablets or capsules of a supplement doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

But if you’re selling a protein powder, making somebody a shake or a smoothie, we could probably do sampling with that, right? We could probably, do opportunities to sample any of our other services, is provided we’ve got the capacity to do it. So think about that. Like I, I had a conversation with a client yesterday who has, just a really great pipeline to bring in group training, like large group training people into his business, but he wants to make small group training. A bigger part of what doing, and the simplest thing to do is just the minute somebody walks in and they’re signing up for large group training, we, we give them some sample of small group training. So, you know, after they’ve experienced both, they can select which is the best option for them. And I’m quite certain that 20 or so percent of the people will take the small group route just based on that experiential kind of sample.

So that’s one thing that I think is critical, making sure that we let let people experience as many things as possible so they feel like they’re choosing the right path for them, not it’s just us convincing them of it. I think we have scripts for everything. I think that you need to have scripts that your team and you follow when it comes to multiple ways of asking for referrals, from point of sale referral stuff where maybe you’re, you know, creating a scenario where a new client can invite a guest for a week or two to come train with them. Or you’re asking people for bring a friend stuff. And when we have a script, we have a prompt, we tell people when to use that script because that gives us the highest probability of it being followed, of it being used. Cuz if you just leave it to happen organically, it’s gonna
happen, you know, a fraction of the time. But if you use specific prompts like, hey, at the, you know, when, when people are starting their cool down or wrapping something up at the, the end of a session, this is when we do the bring a friend script and here it is you know, same thing. We have scripts for retail where we are presenting these benefits of a specific product or this kind of discount or bundle offer or something like that. And this is the time that we do it. Same thing for upgrades. There has to be a prompt if, if you want your team to go out there and sell on your behalf, it, it’s kind of like the same stuff we would do if we were gonna have somebody coaching somebody to do a rear foot elevated split squat. We would have cues and teach them the setup we wanted them to have and tell them how to coach that exercise.

We need to do the same thing for this. If we want that kind of uniform outcome and the, the impact on our business that we’d like. And I think that there should be some sort of script for some sort of internal promotion, whether it is referrals or retail sales or upgrades or Google reviews or whatever else. There
should be something happening with regularity throughout. Now you may think, well, hey, is that too much? I mean, it amounts to the client hearing it for maybe one minute during the course of the week, even if we feel like it’s this really prominent thing because we are talking about it a lot. So don’t, don’t
forget that part of it. We are not saturating their life with this. It’s just we’re trying to create kind of this blanket over the whole facility that everybody is aware of what’s going on, and if we’re asking something of them, then they’re clear about what it is and then they get to decide whether that’s for
them or not.

I think there needs to be displays for everything the simplest and not necessarily, perfect analogy for this that I could give you is if I was running for mayor of my little town, I would certainly use more than one mechanism, one more than one marketing channel to get the word out. I wouldn’t just run an ad on Facebook, I wouldn’t just have yard signs. I wouldn’t just try to buy spots on radio or tv. I wouldn’t just go door to door or do direct mail. I would try to do as many of those things as I could to get the saturation that I wanted. So same things here. We don’t want to just rely on scripts or sending out an email or doing a Facebook post. We also want to have signage in the facility from the front desk to the restrooms. We want things displayed so that people, it think of it kind of like a, a billboard or something where you, where it’s there and you don’t necessarily have to be looking for it to see it. So displays for everything, free samples for as many things as we can and cross sell whenever you have the opportunity you know, you don’t necessarily have to always sell somebody something that like more of the same. We can always sell complimentary things like we used to sell for a while. We had massage, like massage as an offering in our business you know, the cross sell of nutrition. Don’t just think, well, hey, the only thing that I can sell is training. Whether that’s finding a contractor or a strategic alliance partner. There
are other opportunities for you to solve problems for your clients. And then, you know, two other things that I think about internally for, for sure, and one is, yeah, there are other ways to, to derive value other than just asking for referrals and selling things. Like we can get testimonials, we can get reviews, right? We can, we can do things like our hundred cups approach or ask for advice approach where we have this structured networking opportunity to get
introductions to people that often lead to things like corporate deals or public speaking or opening doors to organizations or groups or that sort of thing so that’s a big one. We can certainly raise rates for current clients eventually. Now obviously you don’t have to raise them in this linear fashion where, you know, typically I would even tell you it’s easier to raise rates for new people first.

So anybody who’s gonna gonna join, we’ve raised the front facing rates and then kind of backfill that and bring current people up after, you know, a little bit of a lag. So they, they kind of get the sense that they’ve saved over what the normal current rates are and even things like parents night out, you know, I’m recording this as we kind of get into the holidays, having a, you know, a parents night out on a Friday or Saturday. If you’ve got available space and you’ve got a staff member who wants to pick up a little bit of extra money, it, it’s the easiest thing going because you know, there, if you’ve got open floor space, you have a couple activities, what’s great about this is, you know, you can probably get 35 to $50 for, you know, for a few hours of having kids in watching some movies. If you do have open floor space and you can play dodge ball with like the gator ball type type balls that, that are soft and aren’t gonna damage anything, you know, other,
other active games. And then, you know, you, you pick some pizza up for kids and next thing you know, you know, you’ve picked up an extra thousand bucks for the evening, but you’ve also created opportunities where the parents feel more connected to you because now you’ve, you know, provided
something else for them. You’ve also let parents introduce their friends, other parents to your gym in this way, and then when they walk in, you get guest passes out the door or that sort of thing. So just another way, and I’m not saying that that’s a monetization tactic that everybody’s gonna use, but there are other creative ways that we can do things. I mean, we used to, you know, take, a room in our facility and let people hold meetings there periodically if it was unused space in the middle of the afternoon, different things to get people to walk through the door and drive benefit from what was often, you know, unused floor space.

And then finally, I think having the mentality that the, the total number of clients that you have every client on average. So if you have a hundred clients, they should be a source of one new connection annually. And whether that’s somebody opting in for the email list, walking through the door as a guest, a
strategic alliance partner, something like that. Now that doesn’t mean that everybody individually will be a source, because some people may be a source of three or four and some will be a source of zero, but on average we should expect that. But that should also be a standard that we have to facilitate achieving. So we have to have offers, we have to have varied opportunities to let people connect us with the other people in their lives. So just a few, few things that you can do to create more connection, to create more opportunity to create more revenue in your facility. Then honestly, even if you’re, you’re doing some of these at a solid level, there’s almost always upside for all of us in, in making this a little bit better. And it, you know, when you do it, you’re gonna see your revenue climb, but without, you know, all the added costs of client acquisition that, that we face. So just an opportunity to make some more money.

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