The Power of a Coach and a Mastermind
This post is maybe a little different than my other posts but I feel it is as important to the topic of fitness marketing and selling personal training than any of the other content I’ve posted.
This last weekend marked the first mastermind meeting for my elite fitness marketing coaching clients. We all met at my facility in Red Deer in an unofficial sort of board of directors meeting. The power of many like minds in the same room (individuals with bigger businesses, smaller businesses, those just starting out or those rapidly growing) every single person had something valuable to share to each other as we all discussed the ‘next step’ or ‘major obstacles’ within our individual businesses. The best part is just when you thought you were a solo entrepreneur going it alone you realize you have an amazingly qualified team at your fingertips. Some of our group are even competitors within their respective markets but the power and synergism of forming relationship ensures that every individual reaches new heights, greater success, and further insulations from changing economic conditions. In this industry of fitness marketing and selling personal trainer I am sure every single person in that room would agree that what we can do together ensures the typical fears every solo entrepreneur faces are pretty much now absent from our respective businesses.
If all the great fitness marketing, ideas, tools and resources that were shared amongst the group weren’t enough North America’s top fitness marketer Bedros Keuilian (and the head of the 7-figure mastermind I’ve been a part of for some time) was also here in Red Deer. In addition to Bedros boot camp superstar and info marketer Shawna Kaminski (www.FemaleFatLossOver40.com) was also here to share some of the top fitness marketing strategies that have allowed her business to continually grow with break neck speed.
The moral of this story…
1) We sell personal training to people who want to look and feel better about themselves. They have a goal and we know we can provide value and can help them reach it easier and faster. Why would you think running a successful business (big or small) would be any different? Get a coach or support network!
2) You can guard your ideas with the fears of your competitors catching on or you can share and trade them with other quality people. Working together as a group it doesn’t take much to realize there is no way a competitor can ever keep up all they are left with is desperation to follow and copy rather than lead.
3) Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy; it’s damn hard and often feels like a pretty lonely road. Surrounding yourself with others provides the emotional fortitude that I am sure is found inside Fortune 500 board rooms.
On a closing note it would only make sense to add a shameless plug for my fitness marketing coaching program. I would like to expand it slightly with just a couple more key individuals. I’m not looking for just anyone but if you think you have what it takes (as in you are a serious action taker determined to reach 6 or even 7 figures in the next 1-2 years) submit your request for an application on the contact page.
Additionally I’m just nearing the end of Jim Collins book, Good to Great, I highly recommend you add it your reading list.
Personal Trainer Marketing Business Alliances
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67omfKuUH-g[/youtube]
Tips to Achieving a 90% Close Ratio
Let’s face it, most personal trainers are not great salespeople, and they don’t want to be. I understand that and I’ve been annoyed the same way you have by numerous pushy salespeople. But the truth is if you are meeting new prospective clients and 9 out of 10 are not signing up you’re working really hard but not nearly maximizing your profitability. Trust me one of your competitors may be doing a better job, but you don’t have to let that happen.
Anyone you have met with, are about to meet with or who is currently your customer is much more likely to purchase something else from you than a new person that you haven’t met or is brand new to your list. This is why it’s critical to not let them get away and to ensure you close as many deals as possible. By striving for that 90% consistent close ratio you don’t have to do any more sales than necessary to enjoy the best your business has to offer.
Now rather than write about how to sell I’m specifically going to focus on the situations at the end of the consult where a client either says no, they’re not interested, or they have purchased a much smaller package than you felt they needed or would have licked.
When a client says no…
What this really means is you haven’t earned their trust enough by listening to their fears and reflecting the necessary info to allow them to determine they can overcome their fears with your services. Try reinforcing them with sincere questions; if they don’t do this how will they overcome <insert> fear? If you can keep them connected within this conversation you may then earn the opportunity to present another offer.
The Secondary Pitch…
At some point a client will always say no, if you are able to continue to discuss with them you may get the chance to present a second offer. If not by email, phone or mail a few days later (is not as good as live but) can also be a great opportunity to provide them another offer. The reason this may work is if you have earned their trust they may still have said no because the offer didn’t appear or convince them it contained enough value. These secondary offers need to be quite aggressive and show lot’s of obvious value. Things like: 2 weeks of personal training for $2, 21 day free bootcamp, 1 month of semi-private training for $47, etc. Pour on the value; make it impossible for them to say no. The point is you know once they try your service and feel the difference they are going to say, so what are you willing to do to attract customers? (This is why it’s also important to raise your rates so you can factor in these kind of deep discounts at times, but that’s another post.)
The Add-on…
Another common situation is people come in with an idea in their head about how much your service should cost. You may go through the whole process smoothly to discover what you feel they need to reach your goals costs more than what they were committed to spending. If presented the right way to show the value you may be able to add-on extra items to the package for a few dollars more moving closer to the target you had hoped for. Even beyond the first appointment it’s good to make a few notes of what you feel would be best for the client to reach their goals and after a couple of sessions you may present a couple of package add-ons to them and find them more receptive. Trust and value are the two key limiting items when it comes to purchases. You up both of these and people will respond.
By using secondary offers and add-ons you can easily hit your 90% close ratio, the extra investment you make is easily worth it when you consider how costly and difficult it is to continually attract new fresh targeted leads.
How to Survive a Punch in the Face
As an entrepreneur you will get punched in the face, question is will you get up off the mat after?
Being an entrepreneur isn’t easy; a lot of days are not fun. Today seems to be one of those days. But that comes with an important message, if this was easy everyone would be doing it, you need to be prepared to take it some days square in the nose. It’s funny a while ago one of my mentors sent me this book by George Foreman (Knockout Entrepreneur), admittedly I never finished it. I tried and tried to read it but just didn’t care for it; it was pretty basic and referenced a lot of the expected clichés. Today however it kind of fits.
Here’s the thing about being an entrepreneur, it doesn’t come with a road map or an instruction manual, you really are an adventurer and explorer working to find your own way. When times are tough or you experience failures they can be really trying but you really have two choices give up or persevere.
To be honest once you “get it” you may never look forward to failures but you easily begin to recognize their importance. Each failure means you’ve been hit with or identified a major problem. We refer to these problems as “holes in the bucket.” As an entrepreneur your job is to generate a cash machine and figure out how to provide a great, sustainable, long term product that provides you and your team income to live the life that you want. Unfortunately as you will learn building a bucket with no leaks isn’t easy, how many buckets have you seen with dozens of moving parts?
So today I’ve taken 2 or 3 big consecutive square shots in the nose, my eyes are watering, my lip is puffy at present I don’t even have the answers but I can tell you one thing is for certain. I am getting up off the mat I am not out of this fight, are you?
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end-which you can never afford to lose-with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever that might be.” -Admiral Jim Stockdale
Whatever it is, however hard it gets, the days you feel like you “can’t” believe me when I say if you just get up off the mat you are closer than you would ever believe to your next big breakthrough to success. The risk is high but the freedom of being an entrepreneur will always be worth it.
Advertising vs Marketing, Which Do You Do?
When you first become a personal trainer it’s difficult to grasp that you really need to be an effective marketer to turn this into a career path rather than a hobby. It has taken me a long time to really understand what it means to be a marketer. Lucky for you I tend to be a little stubborn and seem to learn slower so by continuing to read and attend Profitable Personal Trainer events you will learn and progress much faster than I have.
Many small businesses use the dartboard method of advertising and promotion.
Today let’s discuss one of the main differences of advertising or promoting your business and marketing your business. Many personal trainers (and for that matter small businesses) typically advertise or promote with what I refer to as the dart board method. Let’s try this haphazard idea and see what happens, it either succeeds or fails which determines whether they do it again or if they move on to generate a new idea.
Now if you are marketing your business the process is different, it’s methodical, it’s a system and it removes a great deal of emotion in evaluation of the results. It may start with the same idea, but the application is never haphazard, it’s calculated, focused, systemized and includes a series of events rather than just one event. Let me try to explain.
Let’s say your latest offer is a 21 day boot camp program. Many trainers might look at this and say, “I normally charge $200 I’m going to offer this for $150, that’s a great deal.” Truth is no one will care; there are deals available every day. Let’s say you run it anyways and happen to sign up 5 people and they love your program and all of them stay with you after at $200/month. You just generated $1000/month more in sales, seems successful right?
An astute marketer would make this same offer with a series of events that will greatly out perform the above offer, watch what happens. (To make it even more interesting this trainer is only going to keep 80% of the people that take advantage.)
Initially they offer the same 21 Day program for free, but only for the first 8 people. It should be easier to attract the 8 as it’s now entirely free. So no money up front but they will keep 6 which now produces $1200/month after the initial 3 weeks.
The program doesn’t stop there a subsequent ad or offer is released saying, “Last week we offered you a 21 day program free but only had room for 8 people, these spots were filled quickly. We are going to open up a new time slot making room for 6 more people at $87.” (This ad would be run whether they did recruit the 8 or not, the point is to motivate people to action by using an event, scarcity, deadline, consequence.)
This offer is still far less than the competitor trainer, and because of the use of scarcity in the first and second offer the people that were thinking about it last week are now pushed further to action because they are worried they will even miss out further. By recruiting 6 more people this trainer just added $522 in immediate sales and another 5 people per month or another $1000/month. Would you rather have $1000 up front and $1000/month or $522 upfront and $2200/month?
Depending on the continual response rate the marketer continues to squeeze customers from the prospect funnel with subsequent offers in a continual format. This is the difference between what most trainers do and what you should do. Each promotion should be a targeted series of events with an expectation for an outcome. Each offer needs to be extremely high value, use emotional language and provide deadlines and scarcity to push to action. But at the centre of all of this is a system, marketing your business once again requires systems. When it’s a complete system it’s never a failure because you can eliminate emotion and evaluate each response by the real facts and results. From there each new offer is just another version of this system; soon you will find yourself easily out promoting, out branding and out performing all of your competitors in a fraction of the time. The proof is in the pudding using these very tactics we’ve recently grown our studio’s monthly EFT by double digits during the worst months of the year for our industry and in a “poor” economy.
So are you going to continue to advertise or start marketing?
The Only 3 Ways to Make More Money
There are only 3 ways to make more money as a personal trainer. I explain what they are and how you can use them in this short video.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvayrrlM5ro[/youtube]
Don’t get stuck in the moment, always be looking forward.
Chasing your own tail will NOT make you a Profitable Personal Trainer
Our very nature sometimes has us chasing our own tails, now that you are aware, don’t. The other day I had a discussion with one of my key employees, he’s taking on a larger role in the company, a role he’s becoming very inspired and passionate about. Within this role he has really been striving hard to take steps to rapidly develop himself and its working.
Recently after returning from a personal development weekend he was eager to bring back what he had learned and apply it for the good of the company, unsure of how to do that he chose to discuss what he thought was a good plan with me. Now any time someone takes initiative it’s never a bad plan, Ready, Shoot, Aim is almost always the best answer. However our nature seems to be to chase our own tail, rather than looking forward to how we might develop the future we work backward and apply new knowledge to old problems often never really allow ourselves to take leaps and bounds forward.
By this I mean as you learn from this blog or within your work days many new ways to improve your business don’t get stuck in the trap of fixing and restructuring something that might be working ok in an effort to make it perfect. You are much better to look past that as to how you can continue to develop your system so that as you grow the problem is corrected forever more through growth and the application of that system. Failure to do this has you forever looking for perfection while the world speeds on by to which you will never keep up.
- Focus on your top 5% delegate and outsource the other 95% as much as possible, this is difficult but keep trying.
- Duplicate as soon as possible, find great people and begin to give them responsibilities. This can be a service trade or your first employee but two can accomplish much more than one, make it work for you.
- Schedule your time and always start with the hardest thing (or thing you least want to do) each day. You will get more done and look forward to each day as it only gets easier.
- If you’re a solo trainer think long term, you will never have the life you want always working IN the business, schedule time you need to work ON the business.
This website is full of champions, together we succeed. Share your comments push each other forward.
Raving Fans of a Facebook Personal Trainer
If you don’t have a Fanpage for your business you are missing out on a lot of potential customers. Facebook is so well populated with so many people spending so much time on Facebook the search and traffic volume is ridiculous. As such any new page create on Facebook is crawled and indexed by the search engines soon after. I talk about it a lot because I believe that using the internet is easily the least expensive with the highest rate of return strategy for attracting many new clients.
Go create a Fanpage right now but make sure you set it up right.
Your Fanpage name should begin with your dominant key words. (ie. Red Deer Personal Trainer – One-to-1 Fitness, Red Deer Fitness Boot Camp – FIT Camp by One-to-1 Fitness)
Make sure to complete all areas of your Fanpage, the more information the better. Next make sure you have all your Fanpages linked to your Twitter account, the more tweets you send the more people that are going to follow and pay attention to them, automating this process will save you massive amounts of time.
Now if you’ve been following my blog you know that it’s critical that you add new content to your website every week, in fact multiple times a week is preferred. Each time you add new content add the link to your Fanpage AND share that to your profile. You will soon find your Fanpage with a high listing on key word search engine searches and by sharing to your profile often you create more traffic to the page further enhancing its ranking.
Now you can also easily and quickly send a broadcast to all your fans, just use the edit page link on your Fanpage and on the subsequent screen on the right side you should find the option to send an update to fans. Content and regular communication builds a loyal group of listeners that will hear and respond to an offer when you are ready to present one.
Additionally once or twice a month suggest your Fanpages to all of your friends, not often or they’ll just ignore it.
Now for the icing on the cake, use the friend locater, find people with similar interests (fitness, personal training, weight loss, working out, boot camp, etc) and begin inviting all kinds of new friends. In my opinion this is the true power of Facebook it’s an advanced social network that the astute marketer can use to funnel new prospects to your services.
Delegation for the Sole-Proprietor
In our world of technology even a one man show can have a team or staff, even if their virtual. If you haven’t already I highly recommend you read one of my very favourite books, The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferris. Outsourcing taken to extremes, it’s a fun read and one of the most enjoyable and inspiring books on being an entrepreneur that I’ve ever read.
How could you benefit from outsourcing?
Well imagine the relief of having someone that can return calls, or perhaps clean and tidy your studio, respond to emails, writing content, optimizing your website, or creating opt-ins?
Some of my coaching clients have already faced the danger of burnout as they dive into supercharging the engine of their business to setup for explosive growth, the danger of course is running out of steam as you hit the launch phase. So how can you build a team if you have little resources or funds to do so?
Well if you’ve been paying attention the first thing you should have been doing is organizing and building your list. Not only is your list a source of new customers it’s a great place to look for part time colleagues. Offer service trades to delegate out your tasks to well suited people within your network. The best part of this is you can often easily turn these people into paying clients later, leverage your time and kick off your group programs with adaptable people, or even better they contribute so much that you hire them long term and leverage them to grow your business even faster.
Additionally check out websites like www.elance.com and www.odesk.com within this virtual world it’s amazing how easy it is to draft a quick description and hire someone to provide a number of functions seemingly overnight. This is an especially efficient way to tackle your content needs for your lead generating high conversion website, or to have true experts optimize and position you according to specific instructions all on a pay as you go basis.
The wealth of knowledge and talent available is staggering. If you’re not delegating and outsourcing you are stunting your ability to grow quickly. Check it out today!
How to Get on the Map!
Have you ever noticed that when you are looking for a business on the internet that Google usually pops up with a little map and all the similar businesses near your location?
It’s now easier than ever to get listed on this map and something you should do immediately today, it will almost guarantee you a first page top link in a matter of days.
Here’s how simple it is…
1) Goto Google.com
2) In the top right corner if you hover with your mouse you should see the option to sign in. Click here and if you haven’t already created an account do so now.
3) Once you have signed into your account the main page should have a number of links on it. Mid way down there should be a section titled “my products”. On the right hand side of this section there is a link for “Places” click here.
4) On this page you should see the option to Add a New Buisiness.
5) Complete all the details of your listing, once it’s complete and saved you will need to verify your listing with a PIN entry. This is now super easy as they will call or text you with the PIN. A quick entry and your listing is now complete and will begin appearing on Google Maps and local searches shortly.
6) When completing your listing take advantage of being able to list in 5 different categories, start typing your keywords and choose the best results accordingly.
Make sure when you write your description you use your primary key word, make it real easy for people to find you. Additionally I highly recommend you attach videos to your profile, the internet now is all about video people want to check you out long before they ever talk to you. Gain an edge over your competition by always having the best listings.
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