Be SMART, don’t be Dumb!

It’s peak season and what’s the one thing every great trainer is good at doing when it comes to helping clients establish the value of what we offer? Ok I know half of you are thinking results, but even results don’t mean a lot if we don’t have a goal in the first place.

Even the most basic personal training certification generally teaches you the SMART acronym for setting goals; do you actively do this with your clients? More importantly do you actively do this for your business? If I walked up to you right now and asked would you know what your business growth/sales goals are for 2013? Do you know what your revenue or profit goals are? It’s easy to pick a number but if you’re following SMART you’d also know how to measure it.

Here are some of the things I use to set goals in my business:

Sales Goals

Each month has a defined sales target, each quarter has it’s own target as a sum of the months. Within that quarterly goal we have percentage targets for each of our primary services (One-on-one, semi-private and boot camp.) This information is used to plan marketing campaigns to ensure our lead generation and client attraction is congruent with our end goal.

Retention/Referral Goals

Attracting clients is one thing, keeping them is another. If you’re small you might easily be able to keep a quick tally of the number of sessions, weeks or months each client stays with you to determine an average for a month, quarter or year. As we’ve grown larger we just began considering the number of cancellations each month versus the service we were providing to consider a rough average of the amount of service provided before cancellation. Our training core has direct goals to minimize cancellation with a correlation to offsetting cancellation by generating referrals. By having access to this information we’re able to set goals and focus our efforts by developing tools and resources that make generating referrals or repairing failing relationships easier and more consistent.

Revenue Targets

If you have projections for sales and track actual sales you’ll know your average sale amount. Combine this with retention and you know the average value of your customer. Consider this information and you can either set realistic revenue targets based on the above or choose a revenue target and work backwards to know how many sales you must generate, how many clients or even ultimately how many leads you must attract to reach your goal.

This information is super powerful it quickly provides a clear picture that can define the simple tasks to do on a daily basis to ensure your business is travelling the path you want it to.