Personal Training Business Tips

In promoting your personal training business, you need to think about your current customers and clients. This is something that most personal training businesses overlook. In other businesses, this is known as ongoing customer relationship management and it is very important if you want to increase the lifetime value of each customer.

You also need to focus on your current customers above all else, as these are people who have proven to pay you in the past. While you should try to create new customers from prospects, your best efforts will be served by focusing on current customers.

While every subscriber on your email list is important and can result in sales, you need to focus on your current customers. Remember that your customers have already spent money with you and are likely to do so again if you retain a good relationship. As such, you need to offer them more value on a consistent basis.

While many businesses only focus on attracting new customers, you need to offer value to those who have already bought from you. This is how you will increase the lifetime value of each customer. You can offer value throughout the relationship in the form of free tips, gifts and advice.

There are many businesses that don’t focus on marketing to current customers, as they are worried about losing them. You need to offer more value to people in order to retain their business and keep them as loyal customers. As such, you can simply offer a more advanced training session for those customers who “want the advanced tips” and are ready to really improve.

You also need to give away free items to your customers as a way of saying thank you. This is a great way to manage your customer list. People love to feel they are part of an elite group and special in some way. You can offer certain special offers or give them free training sessions in certain circumstances. The specifics are up to you, but ensure that you treat your best customers in a special way.

Managing your customer relationships means having their interests in mind and this is something that you can cater for (with articles, videos, special reports and consultations). Everyone on your email list wants to solve the problems with their fitness and health. This is where your products and services come into play. You need to stay active with your customers and ask them what current issues they are having that you can help them with.

Ensure that you serve as a trusted friend and advisor. This is the best type of relationship that you can offer them, and you will make more money as a result.

Remember that you need to focus on your current clients as much as you do when marketing to new prospects. Remember that it is much easier to retain a current client than it is to generate a new one. It is also much cheaper and requires less time.

It’s peak season and what’s the one thing every great trainer is good at doing when it comes to helping clients establish the value of what we offer? Ok I know half of you are thinking results, but even results don’t mean a lot if we don’t have a goal in the first place.

Even the most basic personal training certification generally teaches you the SMART acronym for setting goals; do you actively do this with your clients? More importantly do you actively do this for your business? If I walked up to you right now and asked would you know what your business growth/sales goals are for 2013? Do you know what your revenue or profit goals are? It’s easy to pick a number but if you’re following SMART you’d also know how to measure it.

Here are some of the things I use to set goals in my business:

Sales Goals

Each month has a defined sales target, each quarter has it’s own target as a sum of the months. Within that quarterly goal we have percentage targets for each of our primary services (One-on-one, semi-private and boot camp.) This information is used to plan marketing campaigns to ensure our lead generation and client attraction is congruent with our end goal.

Retention/Referral Goals

Attracting clients is one thing, keeping them is another. If you’re small you might easily be able to keep a quick tally of the number of sessions, weeks or months each client stays with you to determine an average for a month, quarter or year. As we’ve grown larger we just began considering the number of cancellations each month versus the service we were providing to consider a rough average of the amount of service provided before cancellation. Our training core has direct goals to minimize cancellation with a correlation to offsetting cancellation by generating referrals. By having access to this information we’re able to set goals and focus our efforts by developing tools and resources that make generating referrals or repairing failing relationships easier and more consistent.

Revenue Targets

If you have projections for sales and track actual sales you’ll know your average sale amount. Combine this with retention and you know the average value of your customer. Consider this information and you can either set realistic revenue targets based on the above or choose a revenue target and work backwards to know how many sales you must generate, how many clients or even ultimately how many leads you must attract to reach your goal.

This information is super powerful it quickly provides a clear picture that can define the simple tasks to do on a daily basis to ensure your business is travelling the path you want it to.