Your Fitness Marketing Sales Methods

My coaching group has really grown and as it’s grown I’ve continually been exposed to more situations, entrepreneurs starting out, those with big teams, and a variety of types of organizational structure.

Through each situation I seem to always come back to two different types of sales situations.

1)   Primary sales person meets with every single prospect face-to-face and one-on-one.

This is certainly the least efficient method time wise but in truth if I were starting over it’s what I’d do, and is what I encourage most of my coaching clients to do until they are too busy to practically continue in this fashion.

By meeting with each prospect one-on-one you are in the best position to rapidly improve your language, your ability to identify hot buttons and to effectively fill the role of assistant buyer. In my opinion our version of sales is not really about selling but rather assisting the customer to gain the knowledge and trust they need to make it “really easy to try.”

Your end goal may be automation (which it should be) but for the fastest growth with the best conversion you will grow faster doing it this way.

Develop static components:

1. Emotional questions to help people identify why they’re here and why they should make a decision today.
2. Features and benefits that overcome their potential objections and increase their trust and comfort with what you offer.
3. Risk reversal through guarantee.
4. Continually ask for “yes’s” and affirmations throughout your conversation.
5. Don’t present too many options (no more than 3 ideally) before asking for the sale, it has to be easy and comfortable for them to make a decision.

I’d recommend this process in pretty much every sales situation until you are too busy to do otherwise, whether it’s a consult or a trial of any kind. If it can’t be done face-to-face you can do some on the phone but this will in turn reduce the effectiveness.

When it’s no longer reasonable to do this (which we still do many this way even after 6 years, a strong reason we have so much control and understanding on our lead generation and conversion) begin to automate through standardized conversion systems.

2)   Run aggressive short-term promotions with standardized upfront offers to immediately convert.

In this mechanism you can attain amazing results if you can fully dial in the language that’s used to explain, validate, justify and upsell leads coming in on a high interest trial. If  you try this early and can’t maintain 70+% conversion I strongly urge you to continue to do as many sales appointments face-to-face as possible to continue to dial in your system.

In this approach we’re simply focusing on consumer logic and behaviour. The primary challenge with upfront conversion is a lack of trust. The logical way to overcome this is strong risk reversal and upfront value.

In this approach each prospect is qualified by their interest in buying a short term program such as our recent 10 Class Pass. Upon inquiry the interest in purchasing is first solidified and validated, at that point they’re offered a logical upgrade to a full month of unlimited service for a marginal additional fee. This sets the stage of “exceeding expectations” with tremendous value and lends a little to overcoming the lack of trust since we don’t have a prior relationship.

The next step is to lay out the risk reversal, explaining that for the duration of the service there is a full money back guarantee so their investment, even discounted, is truly risk free.

Now we rely on win-win logic to ensure continuation. Upon acceptance of the risk reversal we inquire whether they’d like to save even more money, which of course we all want to save money. By providing a discount an immediate discount on the next month and a small token discount on all months of service and re-affirming the risk free guarantee we create a situation for the consumer where logic suggests they may as well take advantage because they can change their mind later with no penalty and minor inconvenience. This is the reason for the discount, that discount has to make the inconvenience of changing their mind seem small.

With the right language this all makes sense to the consumer. I may only want to try but if I like it, it makes sense to choose my continuation service now because the savings are big, the risk is small, and the inconvenience of changing my mind is acceptable. All that’s left is to do what you’re good at and over deliver on the training experience you provide.

By combining these two systems it opens the door for delegation to key employs. It creates opportunity to systemize lead generation and improve customer service through a consistent method of making it easy for each prospect to want to convert. When we stop continually creating the problems that arise are continually minimizes as there are not too many new problems when we’re always doing the same thing.