Cabel

Running a successful business requires having a sound sales funnel. A sales funnel describes how you get, keep and grow the lifetime value of your customers. It is a great way to describe the way that people move through your personal training business and the strategies that you can use to increase the lifetime value of each customer.

If you are able to sign a customer up for a six-month block of training sessions, then they are far more valuable then someone trying a one-time teaser session. This occurs due to the difference in the approach that you create as part of your marketing strategy. The smart personal trainers know how to sell their services and promote themselves. They also know how to make it very easy for people to get into their sales funnel.

As an example, they can do this by offering a very simple way to get started in the sales funnel. This could be signing up to the free newsletter, or buying a low priced report. Whatever the first step in your sales funnel is, you need to have it laid out so that you can measure how effective it is.

From here, you then offer your prospects the chance to move further down the sales funnel. This could be an interview, or a free introductory session. In the case of a personal trainer, you need to have contact with the prospect and convince them into a buying decision. It is a good idea to have a number of different options for the prospect to choose from.

You could have a starter training pack, consisting of 4 sessions. This could be used for first time clients as a way to give them a measureable result in one month. You can also have a 3 and 6-month training program designed with specific results in mind. You can then match the prospects desires to the programs you offer. There are many variations that personal trainers can offer, so you can be flexible in the approach.

You need to be confident in your sales approach and explain exactly why prospects should sign up for a long duration of training sessions with you. You also need to explain the results clients can gain and set achievable goals that will motivate the prospects. If you can show them these things, then you will be much more likely to increase your sales rate.

Remember that having a clearly defined sales funnel is very important as it makes your marketing strategy much more scientific and measurable. You can then change parts of the offer and see which generates the best response.

Remember that you need to have different price points in your sales funnel. Never assume that everyone is conditioned by price. That is not the case. There are many people who only want to buy the very best. As such, you should have a high-end program that caters to these people. You will find that a small percentage of people will take this option, and this will bring in a substantial source of income.

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.