Cabel

The Right Way to Begin ‘Selling’ Personal Training

The Right Way to Begin ‘Selling’ Personal Training

Published by on January 25, 2010 | 2 Responses

Don

Don't be the used car salesman of fitness.

I’ve seen so many personal trainers just starting out that seem to be very nervous about meeting a potential client for the first time. Maybe rightly so as its next week’s pay check on the line. However I am here to tell you that you are never going to experience a lot of success handing someone a piece of paper that includes your rates for 1, 10 and 25 sessions, even if you give a couple of freebies with the bigger packages. If your potential client has already made up their mind about personal training then they may buy a couple sessions to try you out or they’ll just take your information and, “think about it.” Now you’re in a situation of constantly “re-selling” your clients and will have to constantly be meeting new ones to find those ready to buy. Not a very long term sustainable plan.

The first 10-20 minutes that you meet a new prospective client should never include pricing information at all. (In fact don’t even have it in sight, or in the room, show that you are interested in them, not their money.) This time should be about you showing them that you are genuinely interested in finding out about them, their goals, and that you are a good listener that can ultimately provide a solution to their problem or pain.

When I meet a new potential client for the first time I will begin with a brief introduction and welcome, from there I ask them if they mind if I ask them a few questions. I highly recommend you use a piece of note paper and a pen to write down the highlights from their answers. This shows them you are in fact listening and can address all their concerns as you go.

Questions I like to ask:

  • So what has you thinking about personal training? (Ice breaker, summary of their immediate concerns/pain/goals)
  • So what have already been doing and for how long to (summarize goals from previous question)? (This creates an emotion within them by reminding them they have not been successful thus far, begins an affirmation that they may need your help.)
  • Have you worked with a personal trainer before? (This is incredibly important, if they have and it was negative you know they will be apprehensive to buy again, if it was positive you best find out what they liked to ensure you can provide the same or better level of service.)
  • What would you like to see happen in the next 3 to 6 months? (Keep painting the picture of their goals, and now you are conditioning them to commit for an extended timeline.)

There are many more questions you can ask, and it’s important you find your own so that each presentation exhibits your personal sincerity to each person. The more emotionally charged someone becomes toward the things that bother them the higher their belief that you will be able to help them and the more likely they will buy. Once you have gathered information about their goals/concerns it’s time to show them how you are the solution to these problems while using their terms/words to maintain their emotions.

This may sound manipulative from a sales or monetary standpoint but the truth is its just effective coaching. We all know that we can help just about anyone get in shape with basic fitness principles; the underlying factor is their commitment to the necessary changes. Change is difficult but how difficult is directly related to how emotionally charged we are about what we want to change. By asking emotional questions to your potential client right from the get go you will not only experience more sales but also gain clients who make better progress through greater commitment right from day one.

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The More Lines in the Water, the More Likely You Will Get a Bite

Published by on January 20, 2010 | Leave a response

Don

Don't monkey around with fishing for new clients!

What does fishing have to do with the business of personal trainer marketing in Alberta? Maybe more than you think. Too often, especially as a solo personal trainer, our time is spread very thin amongst a variety of tasks. When we think of personal trainer marketing and attracting new clients we often become really focused on one idea or promotion. Soon all our efforts are wrapped up in one thing at a time, though once in a while this may produce a dramatic result; most often it will be pretty discouraging.

Effective and continual client attraction and business growth requires you to have more lines in the water. One promotion leads to the next or simple awareness marketing needs to run parallel to your latest offer. Each new avenue will provide more credibility to the other campaign. Now a word of warning, I am not suggesting that you have several deep discount offers running at the same time as this will only confuse the consumer. My point is to make sure you always have a plan B, C and so on. The more lines in the water the more likely you are to get a bite.

Here is an example of multiple streams of marketing that reinforce each other within our business. Each one makes the others more successful than they would be on their own.

Let’s say we were running a newspaper ad or a direct mail flyer on a deep discount training program to generate new clients.

Facebook Advertising – Running a free consult ad on facebook continually provides local, targeted branding. If people who seen the flyer were skeptical about the discount program this may provide a comfortable alternative to seeing what we have to offer without feeling any sort of obligation.

Articles – If you are writing articles make sure they get posted online but more importantly try to get them out in your immediate area. I’ve been writing for our local paper for over 3 years and now when someone sees our ad and follows it up with reading my column in the Sunday paper we have developed a great deal of credibility. This makes all our marketing carry more weight.

Radio Branding – Not that I necessarily suggest this, but for us it is so inexpensive that a basic radio branding commercial brings the appearance of our print ad or flyer back to top of mind awareness and maybe increases our conversion slightly with those that had already forgotten about it.

Free Newsletter – If they seen our print ad or flyer, and/or maybe our facebook ad or heard our commercial or maybe all of the above, curiosity may overwhelm them to make them visit our website; just to see who we are since they keep hearing about us. If they are still afraid to feel pressured at all about using our services they can find out more without ever talking to us by opting in for our free newsletter which puts them in our marketing funnel. This gives us an ongoing chance to offer them our services or another promotion in the future.

The only one of these that presents significant cost to a new trainer is the radio branding, and it’s by far the least important the larger your market. We only use it because in our market it’s very cost effective. I hope I have illustrated my point, don’t really on attracting clients through one campaign at a time. Make sure they overlap or blend into ongoing items that ultimately create your marketing system.

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Developing Your Pricing Structure as a Personal Trainer in Alberta

Developing Your Pricing Structure as a Personal Trainer in Alberta

Published by on January 11, 2010 | Leave a response

When starting out as a new personal trainer in Alberta, how much to charge is a common question. At least through central Alberta the average for personal training is around $1/minute. Many new solo trainers are charging somewhat less and many established trainers and studios like ours are charging significantly more. So the question now is what’s right for you?

price_is_rightTruth is how much you CAN charge is determined more by how you present it to the client. There are many factors of an initial appointment far before pricing that will determine whether they become your client or not but since this question was asked directly by email I wanted to try to answer it right away. Over the coming weeks you can expect numerous posts that will breakdown the aspects of meeting a new potential client and increasing your closing ratio. (The number that progress into your services versus those that don’t.)

When it comes to pricing there are two primary important factors.

1)      Can you build enough value? – Whether you are charging $20/hr or $100/hr the deciding factor will be can you create enough perceived value for your potential client? The higher your rate the more value you will need to provide, here are some examples of ways that I have used to create value for my training rates when I was a solo personal trainer:

  1. Explain the testing protocols and process that are involved in developing their program, and that it is in fact a process. Show them the steps and assign a value to this process but then include it in their programming as a no-charge benefit to create value.
  2. Provide more paper. At one time I had written and photographed all the primary foundation exercises. Even though my clients would never read or use these descriptions it was given to them as an additional value to reassure them that if they ever need to exercise on their own they could. It also created a solid tangible product that they were buying as opposed to an intangible service.
  3. Provide additional unique service or service variations. For instance it may be standard practice for all trainers to measure blood pressure, girth measures and a 12 min run/walk or 3 min step test. However you can bundle this and give it a unique name that set’s you apart such as: Dynamic Client Health Assessment. This bundled service also now has a value attached but when included in your programming creates extra value.

All of these additional services take up your valuable time so it is important to charge for them. From a business building standpoint, remember this is a service industry and what will set you apart from your competitors is not price but rather service and results.

2)      What structure you present. – Now many of you are no different than I was when I was a solo trainer. I performed only 1 hour training sessions and I sold them in small packs of 1, 5 or 10. Now I would never sell training like this again (which I will discuss in greater detail in a future post). It is more effective, especially for your businesses health and growth, to sell your service on reoccurring monthly billing but for this post let’s keep it simple and discuss an end or situation.

If you sell sessions I would recommend you build packages that include an assessment period that creates value and bundles your testing sessions together in a discounted format. This creates a large amount of value for the client to base their initial decision off of. After the assessment period I would suggest you bundle your sessions into packages of multiple of 4 to create a typical monthly cycle. (ie. 4, 8, 12, 16) Now for the tips:

i)        When you present these to your client I would only present the 8, 12 and maybe 16 packages as the 12 is what you will probably sell the most of.

ii)       Don’t show the monthly total but rather the cost per session, lower numbers are always better.

iii)     Use nice numbers such as $x5, $x7, or $x9/session.

iv)     Make your rate breaks at least +/- $5/session.

If you want to charge more and be price competitive in your market or simply offer a service that stands out to be unique to your competitors my final suggestion is to change the length of your sessions. Don’t offer a standard 60 minute sessions, offer a 50 min or a 45 min, explain you offer the same results in less time. Cost wise when you divide your hourly rate into the new session length you can now match your competitor or even appear cheaper while maintaining a greater margin for your time.

As for where to start if you are a personal trainer in Alberta I would never suggest you start below $50/session. And a good rule of thumb is that as you grow about 5-8% of your clients should complain about your prices, otherwise you are not charging as much as you could. As my coach used to always tell me go increase your rates by $8/session right now.

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Conquering Google’s First Page

Conquering Google’s First Page

Published by on January 4, 2010 | Leave a response

As personal trainers, and truly business in general, advertising is expensive. If you are personal trainer just getting started in the industry I doubt you are keen about spending a whole bunch of money on ads or flyers that may or may not even work. If you are a new trainer in the industry you are also probably discouraged when you search for personal trainers in your area and find your website on the 15th page of Google, if it’s even listed at all. However the good news is that it relatively easy to get on the first page; if you know the secrets of correctly writing keyword articles.

googleIf you haven’t already downloaded “Factor 3: The Ultimate Guide to Quickly Growing Your Personal Training Business” you should do so now to learn more about building an effective website. Within the report you will learn that the key to a website getting listed, and building a customer following is the content. Your info and services are only of interest if people actually find you.

Your website needs to contain a great deal of content, but specifically two types of content: quality informative/educational content and key word optimized content; this article will teach you how to effectively develop the later.

Key word content articles are composed specifically to be crawler friendly and ensure that the search engines list your website. The more key word content you have the higher your site will be ranked and the better chance you have of attaining a first page listing even in competitive areas.

Tips for developing keyword content:

1)      Your key words must appear in the title tag. (ex. Red Deer Personal Trainer Talks About New Year’s Resolutions)

2)      Your Key words must also appear in the headline. (ex. Red Deer Personal Trainer explains how to have a successful New Year’s Resolution)

3)      Your key words then need to appear again in the first and second paragraphs.

4)      Try to use variations of your key words in other places in the article as well. (ex. In 2009 many local residents experienced weight loss with personal training in Red Deer.)

5)      Keep your article to about 400-500 words and for search engines it generally better to be under than over.

These 5 tips are critical to ensure that the crawlers will find you and include your website in the directories. Keep in mind this article will not read as nice as your informative/educational content but these are the pages new clients will land on when performing random searches, so do your best. It is also important not to go overboard on your keyword use, the optimal density is 3-6% of your total article for keyword usage (about 25-30 times) and you will actually be penalized or delisted for significantly higher density. (Basically they know you are trying to cheat the system.)

If you are a new trainer in a smaller community I would recommend you start with about 25-30 keyword articles and evaluate over 4-6 weeks how your rankings move on Google but continue to add to them as well. The more competitive the area the more keyword articles you will need.

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Never Forget to Recognize People

Never Forget to Recognize People

Published by on December 22, 2009 | Leave a response

Not directly a marketing strategy, perhaps one part common sense, but either way something you can’t afford to miss. Just today I was reminded of the importance of recognizing someone that I never expected to play as big a role in our success as they have.

Just after lunch I finally made it downtown to the bank, my soul mission today was to drop a gift we(One-to-1 Fitness) had purchased for our account manager. She was elated with the gift and shortly after sent a very kind email thanking us for the gift and expressing how privileged she felt to receive it.

banker_catThe significance of this goes back over a year now. When One-to-1 Fitness began to rapidly expand this lady and her colleague(who happened to be my account manager for my other small company) invited us to an awards banquet. Over the course of the evening we discussed how things were going with our new venture. I explained we were in a state of rapid growth which was both frightening and exciting. Our new expansion required substantial investment, one that would put us at risk if things began to shift or go unexpectedly in our operation. Even though I was dealing with another bank, and was not in a position to move my business they offered a great deal of advice and direction to different finance programs available that would better suit our needs and offer us greater protection.

When we went back to our current account manager with this information we were actually discouraged to pursue these finance programs. The underlying reason, it was a lot of work for the account manager to help us and with no particular reward for them, they didn’t want to do it. We now could not afford not to change banks. To make matters worse we had contractor issues and the paper trail of our full scale renovation was a complete mess. None the less our new account manager was determined to see us through it, with many hours invested, dozens of calls made, a number of visits to our facility (since when does a banker come see you?) she helped us apply and qualify for a unique finance program that allowed us to complete the improvements of our facility and continue to grow at a rapid pace. In fact we’ve continued to grow so fast that we’ve just completed our next upgrade, again with her help.

The point of all of this is; we simply would not have been able to grow as fast as we have without her assistance. Assistance she was not required to give but felt it was good service to provide. Thanks to her the home I live in is not at risk and I can sleep much better at night. This is a rare thing in the world today as I am sure we’ll all agree, so I think it is an important lesson to always try to express your appreciation for the people you deal with. In our case having an account manager that enjoys working with us has made a difference of tens of thousands of dollars in new sales thanks to more space and a better facility.

The nicer you are to people the more likely they are to talk about you, help you, and refer people to you. If you are not in a position to provide gifts for recognition that’s ok, simply start with a phone call, a card, or a letter. It’s so rare today for people to take time out of their day to contact someone and say thanks that when you do the impact is tremendous.

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Popeye’s Supplements

Published by on December 18, 2009 | Leave a response

popeye_logoWe have been operating Popeye’s Supplements Calgary for many years and have done all of our own marketing to this point.  As we have been concerned how the current recession would impact future business we actively searched for new and innovative marketing ideas.

We’ve known Cabel for some time and are delighted to see him launch profitablepersonaltrainer.com. He has provided significant input on many different advertising avenues that are both simple and cost effective.  These ideas are not only up to date but combine the best of previous marketing campaigns with that of new technologies, networking, and direct to customer contact.

What impresses me the most about Cabel is that he has not only studied many marketing techniques and programs but has tested, implemented, measured, and proving what works on countless occasions.  He is a wealth of knowledge on alternative marketing techniques and provided invaluable input on where to focus not only advertising dollars but more importantly, ones time.

Thanks again Cabel!

Shane and Terri Abraham
Owners, Popeye’s Supplements Calgary

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How I generated Killer Leads in less than an hour

How I generated Killer Leads in less than an hour

Published by on December 18, 2009 | Leave a response

fb_leads_postHow I generated over 200 prospects, 67 emails and 6 potential clients in less than an hour (and you can too!)

In fact some of you reading this post may be within that group of prospects. With that being said don’t feel duped, jaded or tricked into sales scheme because that is entirely not the case. The point is this whole experience was a test to just see what would happen, and it was based on two things that I have learned to be universal:

  1. We learn best from others, so communicate with as many like minded people as you can and you will learn far more than you already know.
  2. Sincerity goes a long way, the more you give the more you receive. I am determined to have an impact on our industry, it’s given me a lot now I hope to give to you. (There was far less apprehension than I expected this really seemed to resonate well with many people I contacted which is completely awesome!)

If you don’t take anything else from this post remember these two things alone will be invaluable.

Anyways, how did I generate 200 prospects, 67 emails and 6 potential clients in less than an hour?

Continue reading How I generated Killer Leads in less than an hour »

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Welcome to Profitable Personal Trainer!

Published by on December 17, 2009 | 1 Response

Welcome to my very first personal trainer marketing blog post.

What I hope is that I can share with you even one tenth of what’s been shared with me by some of the best minds in the industry. My life has completely changed in less than 3 years. I went from being a solo personal trainer earning an ok living and struggling to buy my first house, to building a fitness studio that employs 11 trainers, completes nearly 500 training sessions per week and sells over 1 million dollars in new programs every year.

I’m not telling you this to brag, I simply want to share with you what is entirely possible if you only just take action and apply a few of the things I am going to teach you within this profitable personal training blog.

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