Cabel

Developing effective relationships will do more than improve your business.

Guest post by: Mr. X

In a job situation, most people think the easy answer is “the money”.  When you think about your work, I guarantee that your pay check is not the first image that pops into your mind.  If you are in a positive work situation, it is the people that jump to mind.  If it is a negative situation, it is usually the people as well.   You spend most of your life surrounded by people.  Have you taken an account of those relationships that are most important to you and do you invest the time required to grow those relationships?

So the first step to building a great relationship is time.  You build great relationships over time. Who are your 3 best friends?  How much time do you spend with them in a month?  How do you stay in contact with those best friends?  Is it only by email?  Do you get together for coffee?  Do you get your families together regularly?  Different means of contact and the amount of time invested makes the relationship stronger and more memorable.

Do opposites really attract?  There are many people who believe that opposites attract.  I would want to look closer at the attraction because you usually see a quality in someone that you have as well or that you want to develop.  If you read many self improvement books, you will know there are 4 main personality traits.  We have all seen the successful marriage of the loud obnoxious person with the shy quiet one.   You point to this as proof that opposites attract.  If you dig a little deeper though, you will find the core values of those two people are similar.

Have you heard about the story of the horse pull competition?  The two top horses each pulled 2000lbs, individually.  The farmers decided to see if they hooked them together, how much could they pull?  Bets were places between 4000 and 6000lbs but everyone was surprised when together the team of 2 pulled 11,000lbs.   We will naturally cultivate relationships with people going in the same direction and  have similar core values.  This will add to your life and your energy.  We enjoy investing time with people who are like us.  When you are with people you want to enjoy a deeper, more profitable relationship with reinforce your similarities when you invest time together.  It might be hobbies, family, culture, interests, or career.   The core principle of building relationships is we like those who make us feel good about ourselves.   Great relationships take time, effort and consistency.

Use this small thought experiment to see how important relationships are:

What if because you took the time to read this article, I would build your dream home for you and pay for it.  Imagine your dream home.  What would it look like?  Where would it be?  Imagine the parties you could throw with your friends.  However, the only catch is that you are the only one allowed through the front door.  Do you still want the dream home?  I know I wouldn’t but why not have it all.  To be honest, the people in my life, the mentors I have chosen, have built solid relationships with people in life where they want to be.  They have the fruit on the tree.  I would trade everything I have materially for more time with these people because when you have those relationships, it will not be long before your dreams come true.  I encourage you to develop a vision for the most important relationships in your life starting in these 3 areas: spiritual, family and business.

Some of the best fitness marketing campaigns come from simply re-packaging or re-organizing your existing services creating a completely unique program with incredible perceived value. A good example, last week we re-packaged our ongoing group exercise program (FIT Camp) into a fitness marketing strategy called the 21 Day Rapid Fat Loss Bootcamp. In 72 hours we signed up over 40 new participants into our bootcamp with two carefully crafted emails. Do you think if you had 40 new clients starting today, for 3 weeks, that you could impress them enough to stay with you for more training after? If you can’t you better re-read every post on this blog immediately, but I am sure all of you can and would; you are an elite group of success minded personal trainers committed to being the upper 5%.

Re-packaging can be an amazing fitness marketing strategy for the rapid growth of your business. Let’s lay out the guidelines in 6 tips for re-packaging success.

1)      Use sparingly, it has to be something you only do once in a while, about 3-4 times a year or it loses its appeal. The has to be an attention getter as it should provide a completely new, unusual, unique way of accessing your services. Ultimately this will create high differentiation between you and your competitors.

2)      Timing and relating is everything. What I mean by this is relate your pitch to common thinking. For instance right now is an excellent time for re-packaging as it’s the transition to spring here in Alberta and everyone is excited to enjoy the sun, warmer weather and is thinking about how much better they would like to look for summer. Our pitch referenced the “winter spare tire” which created a huge image/emotional connection to the program.

3)      Scarcity is important. Make sure you create a limited number of spots based on availability or some other major limiting factor. This can be real or perceived. This is critical to drive people to take immediate action. Early bird gets the worm; wait too long and you are going to miss the boat.

4)      High perceived value. This is also mission critical. Provide an attractive price point or find ways to add perceived value to your service with low to no cost. Like a free meal plan/guideline, a report on effective ways to strengthen your core and why that leads to a pain free life. Connect with a complimentary professional service and see if they will offer a free trial to your new clients. Whatever it is really crank up the value of the program to promote high conversion without adding additional overhead costs.

5)      Make it easy to sign up for. Complete an email form with name, phone, email. Call them back and register them. Even better if you can accept credit cards use a service like www.1shoppingcart.com and setup an online order form. You will double your conversion with online registration over just having a phone number alone.

6)      Contact twice. This is the last point but the synergist of the whole mix. Your initial contact should convey how great it is, how limited it is, and why you need to take immediate action. 72 hours later you need to contact them again to let them know you’ve almost reached the limit but if they hurry they can still get in. This time give them a few more bullets of info about what the program will do for them. On the initial contact you will attract the people that see something new, exciting and valuable, they won’t ask questions they are ready to buy. The second contact will appeal to those who need to analyze and evaluate, they need more information, now they are afraid to miss out, they are now also ready to buy. It is important to keep these distinctly separate (if you have ever heard Fred Sarkari speak you will understand why) each group of people will require different information to make the final decision. Mixing all the information into one contact will cause you to lose both groups and drastically lower conversion.

Following these steps with strong compelling sales copy will produce massive results and right now is perfect timing. Give it a try with your list. If you really struggle to write sales/marketing copy this is a skill I urge you to practice and get some help with, this is a major focal point of the Profitable Personal Trainer coaching program.

Right now I am in Tanzania, Africa. My trip here began with a two day safari to Lake Maynara and Ngorongoro Crater with our expert guide Hubert from Multi-Choice tours. It was amazing, seeing groups of 10, 20, and a 100 or more of many of the animals, until now, I had only seen in zoos. What an amazing experience to see giraffe, elephants, hippos, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, lions and even a rare Serval Cat. All were within plain sight and often just a few metres from our Land Cruiser. An experience I will not soon forget, if you would like to see pictures many will be posted on my Facebook profile once I am back in Canada.

The next leg of this trip was an adventure of a lifetime, a six day trek up the world’s largest free standing mountain Kilimanjaro. What an amazing experience to reach the roof of Africa at 19,341ft all in the name of a good cause. I urge you to check out www.thewaterschool.org and www.kili2010.com to learn more. My whole story of this adventure and many photos will be posted on my Facebook profile and websites upon my return to Canada.

Anyways, the business of personal training.

This week’s topic goes hand in hand somewhat with my adventure here in Africa. As a means of growing your business and generating stable, secure ongoing income you need to develop a system of finding prospects, warming them up to your services and ultimately closing the deal to create paying customers.

Up until now we have talked a lot about ways to close sales and turnover those that are ready or more likely to buy today. This week’s focus is to discuss how to attract a lot more prospects and producing more sales from those not ready to buy today. A key component of the contact to sales process is a means of repeat contact or relationship building with purpose.

 Many businesses fail at contact management and the reason they fail is because it is often time consuming, sometimes costly, and has to be done in a very predictable and regular pattern.In the past many companies did this with addressed and direct mail, a very costly and time consuming process. Once again thank you to technology email mailing has become both accepted and popular, after all you are all reading this each week.

Now email newsletters are brilliant for personal trainers, simply because most don’t know how or don’t take the time to offer them and when they do it’s usually nothing but a series of sales pitches, here is where you can gain an edge and be different. If you read my report than you already know what I mean, content is key. What happens when you send a group of prospects a lot of content on a regular basis is you are creating a platform of trust. At first it’s as simple as they may actually be surprised you keep sending stuff. Sooner or later they begin to read at least some items, or are just reminded of you again. Or when you share you adventures, like the one I am currently on, they get to gain a part of that experience for themselves which as emotional creatures this is one of the ways we enrich our own life. When they read your stuff the best part is they begin to forward it and refer others producing new leads. Soon they are used to your information, come to trust it and at that point with the right nudge or small offer it’s human nature to move to buy.

The importance of this statistically is significant. For instance for every 10 people that contact you in some manner only about half may ever see you for information. If you are really good at sales you will close 70-80% of those that show up. So now to generate 10 paying clients you need approximately 25 prospects, but why just give up on the 15 you didn’t close today? Over time it’s far easier to gain your next 10 clients by continuing to market to the warm prospects who already contacted you at one point than continually finding brand new prospects.

Now there are many great options out there for generating your own newsletter, but I suspect most of you would be like I was, start with the best of intentions and then fall out of the habit or miss mailings because it’s so time consuming to be finding new content all the time and preparing the newsletter from scratch. Today I am going to go out on a limb and I am going to recommend a specific product to you and flat out tell you that I pretty much promise it will be one of the best investments you make for your business. What I am talking about is a product called FitPro Newsletter. This particular newsletter software is made specifically for the fitness industry and the beauty is it’s done for you. On the 1^st and 15^th of each month a newsletter will be sent to your list automatically with two new articles, tips and a recipe. So even if you never touch it your prospect list is always going to be getting new, good content from you. Additionally you can configure, edit and modify any aspect of the newsletter from appearance to the content, which is great as I mentioned before when you go on adventures like the one I am on right now.

So for this week know that an email newsletter is a very key component of what will become your lead generation to conversion sales and marketing system. Do yourself a favour and use a product that is done for you and guarantee the right result, that product is FitPro Newsletter trust me.

Ok I have to get packed and set to begin my 29 hour journey home I’ll be thinking of my wife and family first, but I am sure by the time I get off the plane in Calgary I will have another great idea for you for growing your business. For now check out FitPro Newsletter and I’ll get back on schedule in the coming week.

If you haven’t already read last week’s post you should do so before reading this one.

In this week’s post we’re going to pick up where we left off. Now that you understand your client’s needs, previous experiences, expectations and have made them a little emotional about the whole situation; how do you move them to a buying mode? How do you make them feel confident that your services are the right decision for them?

In my opinion there are two things you must accomplish in this portion of the sales meeting. The first is you must demonstrate higher value, the second is differentiation. By higher value I mean more than your competition and more than their expectations. Differentiation will be the subtle differences in your services or the way you provide your services that makes you stand out.

I’ve always created value and differentiation with paper. Let me explain.

Begin by understanding that the prospect of weight loss, fitness, and greater health are all promises of an intangible product. We’ve all been lied to before, we’ve all tried to get in shape and failed, we’ve all bought something that didn’t deliver. Why is your service going to succeed where others did not?

For as long as I can remember I have always used paper materials as part of my presentation. I used to show clients sample workout sheets, exercise descriptions, warm up outlines and sample nutritional menus. These days this has evolved to professional looking color slides with testimonials and explanations of the various forms and aspects of the service that One-to-1 Fitness provides. But ten years ago when many personal trainers were just leading people from machine to machine I was showing my clients that my service included instruction as well as a take home education. ß(Higher value and differentiation)

Likely less than 10% of my clients ever read any of those materials, they relied on me to educate them. The point is about two dollars worth of materials created a tangible product for my service that closed many deals because I had generated higher value than the other trainers around me.

As for differentiation the materials that I had generated also gave me a very unique approach to meeting with a client. Today it’s still unique within our facility, potential clients come in to see what we’re about and we introduce them to a process they have never seen or come to expect from a personal trainer. Now when it comes to differentiation the materials are only one aspect of it. I have always made it a habit to offer my services in a different way than the other trainers around me. Perhaps a unique form of assessment, a non-typical session length, some extra type of service or for instance I used to charge less per session but I was the only trainer that had an ‘initial assessment fee.’ This initial assessment made me more expensive than all the other trainers but it also created higher value and differentiation as it made me appear to be the only trainer that offered an initial process that gave the client the perception of likely better results. (And in my opinion it did, so don’t think I am suggesting you develop creative ways to rip people off, just unique ways to create a different service.)

Now many coaches I have used insist that just have a blank piece of paper that you scribble on and draw out important charts and points for the client can be just as effective for an initial presentation. I wouldn’t disagree with this in that you can then emphasize the most important things for each particular client. However I have always liked to project prestige and quality with nicely printed materials so what I have done is generated different materials for different situations to try to limit information overload. The negative to this is the cost and time generating all the materials, the positive is it has given me a defined system I can both teach to employees and maintain an emphasis on quality control of the presentation and information provided.

Though a plain piece of paper will work just fine for a skilled presenter, the final point in either case is it’s critical you have a defined way of presenting that you follow for each and every client, improving each time until it becomes systematic. Loosely scripted is fine but never totally scripted as you need to always emphasize sincerity.