Fitness Business School – What If Things Aren’t Selling?

Full Transcript

Hey, Pat Rigsby be here and in this episode, I wanna talk with you about what you should do when things aren’t selling. 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.

One of the interesting things that you get to observe when you’re around an industry for an extended period of time, is you get to see trends, you get to see patterns and you know, know for, for, for a good bit of time. It seemed like everything was focused on how do I run Facebook ads. And then, you know, at certain points in time, there have been things like, how do I take advantage of deal of the day sites or how do I build a big fan page or you know, I mean, there, you know, the six week challenges there, there have just been all these trends over time that have kind of popped up and then regressed to either becoming irrelevant that it was just kind of a seasonal thing, or just kind of settled into the actual role it should play in people’s kind of professional journey. Well, as of late, the, the stuff that gets talked about the most is this idea of high ticket sales. And you know, and, and, and that’s fine. Like, obviously I’ve talked at length about the, the mindset of high ticket selling and how I think it really doesn’t align with the mindset of most coaches.

Most coaches, I believe are service focused. They care about the people they serve. And I think that that is a disconnect with most people who talk about high ticket selling. Now I will throw in a, a little disclaimer traditionally sales, this is not new for sales people. Most of the time sales people have been people who their job was to create a transaction. And then they would hand off the customer to somebody else, or they were just delivering a product or whatever else. And they weren’t the person producing the product. They were the person in charge of selling the product. And so, you know, the fact that a salesperson focused entirely on getting the sale is not something that is new. It’s not something that is necessarily a bad thing. I mean, that’s how they were compensated. They weren’t compensated to deliver customer service. They weren’t compensated to create a, a retail product or something. Now, is that something that I personally agree with? No it’s not, you know, that’s, that’s out why I became a coach. And, and in all honesty, I’m guessing that’s probably not why you became a coach either.

So when somebody coaches typically their you know, their interests are more aligned with the success of the client. But I think most of the people in the, the coaching industry kind of drift from that, they get kind of pulled in different directions and they say, well, I’m going to just deliver what I want to deliver and sell what I wanna sell. But if you are not having the success selling, then maybe we need to look at some of the stuff that’s wrapped or around that, because that moment of transaction is truly just a moment where either we’ve created enough perceived value in the eyes of the prospect, or we haven’t, and that can come in a variety of different ways. It could be the fact that we don’t have confidence to share as much value as we should. We don’t have confidence in reducing the risk for the prospect. A and we can talk about that here in a moment, or we just, aren’t good at conveying what the, the benefits are, what the, you know, what, what’s in it for the person we wanna serve, we can’t make our offer irresistible. And so when, when I think of why people don’t sell, you know, I’m very fond of saying, Hey, coach people until you pay, you know, until they pay you to coach them. And what that largely kind of comes back to is I want somebody to feel comfortable saying yes, when I ask for a sale, I want somebody to feel confident that they’re in the right place.

You know, if you you’ve ever watched the, the movie Talladega Nights, you’ve heard the phrase if you’re not first, your last well, what’s interesting is I think I’d rather be last than first in this case. And probably only in this case. And what I mean by that is I don’t really care if I’m the first business coach somebody hires. My goal is to be the last business coach they hire. My goal is to be the one that they stay with because they finally land in the right place. And you know, this is not a new thing for me. I, I remember when I was coaching college baseball, coaching college baseball is really where I learned my philosophy on marketing and selling, because it was so rooted in follow up in, you know, recruiting a college athlete. You know, you are, you’re asking them to make a decision that, you know, they’ve been convinced for many years, that is the, the decision that’s going to really shape the rest of their life. Hey, where you go to college is gonna shape so much of your future and whether or not that’s true, you know, I, I’m not here to decide as much as I know, that’s what they believe, because I’ve heard it literally thousands of times from prospects that I talk to. And, you know, so in that, in that case, you don’t meet somebody the first time and introduce them to your school. And all of a sudden they commit on the spot. No, there’s, there’s a follow up process where you are building and what you have to offer. You’re, you’re learning about them. You’re, you’re trying to determine whether or not it’s a good fit. And then, you know, for me, it would be invite them to campus. And then if I felt like they were a good fit, I would make them an offer to join our program. Some people said, yes, some people said no, in all honesty, most people who got to can up and said, yes, but that was part of the process. It, it was kind of this same thing. As most people who get inside your gym probably say, yes, right? Like it’s getting them inside your four walls to experience it. So my strategy was really simple. I wanted to behave is if I was their coach already, I wanted to, you know, talk about their goals and talk about how they were going to develop as a player and as a person and go from where they were to where they wanted to be. I was going to answer questions for them. I was going to treat them as somebody who was invested in their success. And even if I didn’t get them up front, maybe somebody offered them something that they perceived as better. Maybe they were, you know, their parents wanted to steer them a different direction. Maybe. there was a bigger school, which was kind of the, you know, in that, in that era for us, that was kind of the shiny object. If you could go to one of these big, higher profile schools, then a lot of times people just take that, right. Well, what happens a lot of times with, with, with 18 year olds or 19 year olds is they go somewhere. That seems like a great fit. And then they decide, well, maybe that’s not the best place for me. And so for me, what I saw was a lot of kids coming back and saying, Hey, you know what? I’m not happy. I’d like to revisit this conversation about coming to your school. And in many cases that ended up being a better player for us, a better fit for us because now they were more informed. Now they were you know, they had context. It wasn’t just somebody who I was trying to talk into something. It was somebody who understood what they were looking for and maybe the shiny object stuff, wasn’t it. And so they came to play for us. But the trick is, if you wanna keep those people who come to play for you, then you have to be able to deliver on everything that you promise during those initial recruiting conversations. And so how does this tie back to us? Well, that’s kind of the way that I’ve always thought about it with the prospective client that I talked to. When I coach, when I say, Hey, I wanna coach people to, until they pay me to coach them, well, I want them to feel completely confident that I’m the person who can help them, but then I can even make more aggressive offers than other people like reducing the risk you know, offering $1 trials, offering free test drives of things offering guarantees, you know, doing all sorts of creative, things like that, because I know that I can deliver.

And when you see somebody ask you to pay entire in advance, you’re saying, you know, that person saying to you, I want you to assume all the risk first. I want you to assume all the obligation in this relationship first, and then I’ll start holding up my end of the bargain for me. I just, you know, I said, well, you know what? I, I feel very confident in my ability to do what I do. And, you know, I’m, I’m biased. I think when it comes to helping somebody build their ideal fitness business, I am 100% certain. I am the best person on the planet doing that specific thing. Now, am I the best person that teaching somebody to run Facebook at or helping somebody run a high ticket offer? Not at all, not even close. So if you get really good at the thing that you are trying to offer, then you feel confident. Hey, I can tell somebody, no, I will take, you know, a lot of this risk, if not all of it upfront to prove to you that I can help. And I’m gonna be really clear about what you can expect. So when we talk about making really clear offers, like achieving a very specific result in some desired timeframe or letting a program sell itself and saying, Hey, try this for six weeks. And if it’s not everything, I promise it to be, you know, you don’t have to pay I, I can do that. If I know that for my right person, it’s going to be successful more often than not now. Is it always gonna be a win for somebody?

Well, no, sometimes it, there is a, are not the right person or it’s not the right time for them, but you know, it works really, really well. So you may be thinking, well, Hey, the people that I work with, you know, they may do great when they’re in the gym with me, but they’re not, you know, they’re not compliant when they’re at home or whatever else. It may come as a little bit of tough love, but guess what? Your job’s to make it easier for them to be compliant when they’re at home or your jobs to come up with a better plan for them, if they’re hiring you for a result, and if you’re promising a result, then it’s your job to facilitate that result. And it’s your job to deeply care about that person achieving that result. And so you should be driven to be able to do it, but here’s how selling gets easier when you know, you can do it. And when you focus on getting somebody a result, it becomes much easier to use that as your marketing, it becomes much easier to showcase plenty of successes and say, Hey, you know what? Here’s, here’s proof that this works, you know, there, like for example you know, I, I’ve talked about out free trials and guarantees and everything else, but if you look at it from the other end of the spectrum, Cressy Sports Performance has created so many programs for people that have helped them get to the major leagues. You know, they work with primarily baseball players and, you know, they’ve helped people reach their goal of getting to the major leagues or help people achieve success in baseball at whatever level they’re playing.

Well, if they’re sharing those wins because they, they focus so much on being good at what they do well, those wins are, are the same thing. As a guarantee, they’re the same thing is discounting a price or something else they’re saying, there’s evidence saying, look, what we do really, really works. Here’s proof. It’s not just me telling you it’s gonna work. It’s not me bullying you into paying me to, you know, because I’m trying to convince you that it’ll work. No here’s proof, plenty of different people from, you know, all parts of the country and probably even the globe, plenty of people that are, you know, left-handed or right handed or taller or shorter or whatever else have achieved success with us. And so there’s a high probability that if you come work with us, you can too. So, you know, when you are better at what you’re doing, and when you are more confident in putting things out there that somebody can actually latch onto and know that it’s a good fit, then more of them are going to land with you. Now, yes, sometimes you can reduce the risk for them up front, by make a guarantee, by offering a trial, a discount, a shorter term commitment for a program, you can do all of these things. But the whole idea is when you are not getting sales, how do you make your offer more appealing to that person? And usually it’s it, it’s just tied to focusing on what that person wants and giving them great confidence that you can help them get their, reducing the risk that they’re of their per perception, that they’re gonna fail. That they’re going to lose out in this transaction, because they’re gonna pay you a bunch and not get much in return. So when you’re thinking about how can I sell more the answer, isn’t some magic, high ticket script. The answer is delivering what people want and reducing their perceived risk of actually achieving it.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Fitness Business School. Before you go, I have a quick announcement. When I first connect with a fitness business owners, they almost always asked me, how can I get more clients or make more money? Well, I have an exclusive offer for you, and it’s gonna help you do just that. As a listener of this show, you can test drive our business growth accelerator coaching program for FREE.

BGA is a one of a kind program where you get done-for-you marketing tools and a level of coaching that is unmatched in our industry to help you attract more qualified prospects and convert them into paying clients, ultimately making you more revenue and personal income.

Imagine having every tool template ads, script you need all proven to convert in, ready to use. Plus you have access to over 10 weekly live video coaching sessions to help you with everything from dialing in your ads, to mastering your mindset. You get all of this and more when you joined BGA and to help you succeed, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before. I’m going to let you test drive BGA at zero cost.

If it delivers for you in the way that I expect – it more than it pays for itself, and you’ll probably want to stay. If not, you’re out nothing and have a library of proven tools and resources to keep.

To take advantage of this special offer. Just email me [email protected] and put test drive in the subject line, and I’ll get you all the details.