Personal Training Business Tips

Right now I am in Tanzania, Africa. My trip here began with a two day safari to Lake Maynara and Ngorongoro Crater with our expert guide Hubert from Multi-Choice tours. It was amazing, seeing groups of 10, 20, and a 100 or more of many of the animals, until now, I had only seen in zoos. What an amazing experience to see giraffe, elephants, hippos, zebras, wildebeests, warthogs, lions and even a rare Serval Cat. All were within plain sight and often just a few metres from our Land Cruiser. An experience I will not soon forget, if you would like to see pictures many will be posted on my Facebook profile once I am back in Canada.

The next leg of this trip was an adventure of a lifetime, a six day trek up the world’s largest free standing mountain Kilimanjaro. What an amazing experience to reach the roof of Africa at 19,341ft all in the name of a good cause. I urge you to check out www.thewaterschool.org and www.kili2010.com to learn more. My whole story of this adventure and many photos will be posted on my Facebook profile and websites upon my return to Canada.

Anyways, the business of personal training.

This week’s topic goes hand in hand somewhat with my adventure here in Africa. As a means of growing your business and generating stable, secure ongoing income you need to develop a system of finding prospects, warming them up to your services and ultimately closing the deal to create paying customers.

Up until now we have talked a lot about ways to close sales and turnover those that are ready or more likely to buy today. This week’s focus is to discuss how to attract a lot more prospects and producing more sales from those not ready to buy today. A key component of the contact to sales process is a means of repeat contact or relationship building with purpose.

 Many businesses fail at contact management and the reason they fail is because it is often time consuming, sometimes costly, and has to be done in a very predictable and regular pattern.In the past many companies did this with addressed and direct mail, a very costly and time consuming process. Once again thank you to technology email mailing has become both accepted and popular, after all you are all reading this each week.

Now email newsletters are brilliant for personal trainers, simply because most don’t know how or don’t take the time to offer them and when they do it’s usually nothing but a series of sales pitches, here is where you can gain an edge and be different. If you read my report than you already know what I mean, content is key. What happens when you send a group of prospects a lot of content on a regular basis is you are creating a platform of trust. At first it’s as simple as they may actually be surprised you keep sending stuff. Sooner or later they begin to read at least some items, or are just reminded of you again. Or when you share you adventures, like the one I am currently on, they get to gain a part of that experience for themselves which as emotional creatures this is one of the ways we enrich our own life. When they read your stuff the best part is they begin to forward it and refer others producing new leads. Soon they are used to your information, come to trust it and at that point with the right nudge or small offer it’s human nature to move to buy.

The importance of this statistically is significant. For instance for every 10 people that contact you in some manner only about half may ever see you for information. If you are really good at sales you will close 70-80% of those that show up. So now to generate 10 paying clients you need approximately 25 prospects, but why just give up on the 15 you didn’t close today? Over time it’s far easier to gain your next 10 clients by continuing to market to the warm prospects who already contacted you at one point than continually finding brand new prospects.

Now there are many great options out there for generating your own newsletter, but I suspect most of you would be like I was, start with the best of intentions and then fall out of the habit or miss mailings because it’s so time consuming to be finding new content all the time and preparing the newsletter from scratch. Today I am going to go out on a limb and I am going to recommend a specific product to you and flat out tell you that I pretty much promise it will be one of the best investments you make for your business. What I am talking about is a product called FitPro Newsletter. This particular newsletter software is made specifically for the fitness industry and the beauty is it’s done for you. On the 1^st and 15^th of each month a newsletter will be sent to your list automatically with two new articles, tips and a recipe. So even if you never touch it your prospect list is always going to be getting new, good content from you. Additionally you can configure, edit and modify any aspect of the newsletter from appearance to the content, which is great as I mentioned before when you go on adventures like the one I am on right now.

So for this week know that an email newsletter is a very key component of what will become your lead generation to conversion sales and marketing system. Do yourself a favour and use a product that is done for you and guarantee the right result, that product is FitPro Newsletter trust me.

Ok I have to get packed and set to begin my 29 hour journey home I’ll be thinking of my wife and family first, but I am sure by the time I get off the plane in Calgary I will have another great idea for you for growing your business. For now check out FitPro Newsletter and I’ll get back on schedule in the coming week.

If you haven’t already read last week’s post you should do so before reading this one.

In this week’s post we’re going to pick up where we left off. Now that you understand your client’s needs, previous experiences, expectations and have made them a little emotional about the whole situation; how do you move them to a buying mode? How do you make them feel confident that your services are the right decision for them?

In my opinion there are two things you must accomplish in this portion of the sales meeting. The first is you must demonstrate higher value, the second is differentiation. By higher value I mean more than your competition and more than their expectations. Differentiation will be the subtle differences in your services or the way you provide your services that makes you stand out.

I’ve always created value and differentiation with paper. Let me explain.

Begin by understanding that the prospect of weight loss, fitness, and greater health are all promises of an intangible product. We’ve all been lied to before, we’ve all tried to get in shape and failed, we’ve all bought something that didn’t deliver. Why is your service going to succeed where others did not?

For as long as I can remember I have always used paper materials as part of my presentation. I used to show clients sample workout sheets, exercise descriptions, warm up outlines and sample nutritional menus. These days this has evolved to professional looking color slides with testimonials and explanations of the various forms and aspects of the service that One-to-1 Fitness provides. But ten years ago when many personal trainers were just leading people from machine to machine I was showing my clients that my service included instruction as well as a take home education. ß(Higher value and differentiation)

Likely less than 10% of my clients ever read any of those materials, they relied on me to educate them. The point is about two dollars worth of materials created a tangible product for my service that closed many deals because I had generated higher value than the other trainers around me.

As for differentiation the materials that I had generated also gave me a very unique approach to meeting with a client. Today it’s still unique within our facility, potential clients come in to see what we’re about and we introduce them to a process they have never seen or come to expect from a personal trainer. Now when it comes to differentiation the materials are only one aspect of it. I have always made it a habit to offer my services in a different way than the other trainers around me. Perhaps a unique form of assessment, a non-typical session length, some extra type of service or for instance I used to charge less per session but I was the only trainer that had an ‘initial assessment fee.’ This initial assessment made me more expensive than all the other trainers but it also created higher value and differentiation as it made me appear to be the only trainer that offered an initial process that gave the client the perception of likely better results. (And in my opinion it did, so don’t think I am suggesting you develop creative ways to rip people off, just unique ways to create a different service.)

Now many coaches I have used insist that just have a blank piece of paper that you scribble on and draw out important charts and points for the client can be just as effective for an initial presentation. I wouldn’t disagree with this in that you can then emphasize the most important things for each particular client. However I have always liked to project prestige and quality with nicely printed materials so what I have done is generated different materials for different situations to try to limit information overload. The negative to this is the cost and time generating all the materials, the positive is it has given me a defined system I can both teach to employees and maintain an emphasis on quality control of the presentation and information provided.

Though a plain piece of paper will work just fine for a skilled presenter, the final point in either case is it’s critical you have a defined way of presenting that you follow for each and every client, improving each time until it becomes systematic. Loosely scripted is fine but never totally scripted as you need to always emphasize sincerity.

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.