predictable sales

Being an astute fitness professional you may have heard of the Food Pyramid but have you heard of the Business Pyramid?

The Business Pyramid represents the only three ways you can make more money in your fitness business.

You can…

1)   Get more clients.

2)   Charge each client more.

3)   Sell current and previous clients more products and services.

Almost every fitness professional I’ve ever met, and myself included, becomes distracted with the idea of continually attracting new clients. In fact I’m sure you’ve thought of at least 5 different promotions, ideas or strategies in just the last 30 days that you might use to attract new clients.

Going a step further just doing a quick google search for “how-to get more personal training clients” yields oodles of results.

Though it is important to continually attract new personal training clients one of the biggest points of failure is that most fitness professionals are always creating new strategies to achieve this. Instead, far more effective is choose 2-3 strategies and perfect them. If fitness challenges work for you, keep running them, choose different lengths, package them differently but basically execute the same series of steps each time. If short term programs or trials work for you, keep using them, but perfect the same series of steps with different names and packages and keep running them. You get the idea, creating is good, and it’s good to be continually creating but often we get locked in creation and never perfect anything.

As a consumer I know you appreciate value and service, well the best value and service comes from practice makes perfect. This is also why even as a solo personal trainer it’s critical you begin documenting processes, making an operations manual because the more things you do the same each time the better your client experience, the more perceived value you create and the bonus is it even lowers your cost of doing business.

The next time you’re thinking of ways of attracting more personal training clients stop and think back to all the things you’ve done in the past. Look for ones that exceeded your expectation, revisit them, improve on the steps and run them again. In the last 12 weeks 6 emails and two different fitness challenges has helped our studio attract more than 60 new clients. This alone would almost be enough to start a brand new, full-scale facility like hours in a new market from scratch. By comparison the first fitness challenge we ran yielded like 30 people that quickly fell off to like 10 because we weren’t good at it. Don’t reinvent the wheel just improve it.

The next way to increase revenue is to increase your rates. I don’t know about you but this has been the toughest one for me, knowing when and feeling comfortable enough to raise your rates.

This is where your creativity can really go to work. Look at the service you provide, break it into components and apply the same concept of improving the wheel. There are always areas that you can continue to improve what you offer. Maybe it’s creating a new client resource (like a video exercise archive), maybe it’s how you handle billing logistics, maybe it’s a component of service that you offer (like assuming the role of coach over trainer and learning to evaluate and address different learning styles.) With each component of your business if you break it down into core components you will soon find yourself perfecting patterns of application, developing new tools and resources and ultimately providing more value. It’s at this point that it will be easy to raise your rates as you are truly providing a better product and people will thank you for it.

As you pick apart your services you may find it makes sense to break different aspects of your service off into new standalone products. Some of your clients will want this new service along with their old; you’ve just effectively increased your revenue with your warmest audience.

Here’s where this whole thing comes full circle or why it must be a pyramid or closed geometric shape. At some point in your fitness career your clients are going to move on. They may just need a change; perhaps they’ve reached their goals or have out grown your current service offerings. Out of the hundreds of fitness professionals I’ve met few have had any defined ideas on how to get these old clients to come back, in stead we spend thousands of dollars finding new ones. I know this to be true as I have boxes of old clients and I’ve been asking and asking looking for that perfect process to bring them back.

The answer is simple, talk to them, stay in touch. I’m now convinced that predictable outcomes are the only way to run a successful business. We used defined strategies to meet new potential clients; once we’ve met our prospect we make a point to get to know them by sharing content and contacting them directly. Why did it take so long for us to decide to do this with our old customers? This I don’t know but learn from me in this regard, designate hours each month to send postcards and call your old clients, see how they are doing, offer them high value trials or old rates just like you might do with a new prospect.

It’s tried and true there is nothing more predictable than getting on the phone and talking to people, if you’ve read my recent posts you know how important it is to have defined targets and strategies that ensure you meet them. This is exactly what I will be talking about at my coming www.ProfitablePersonalTrainerLive.com workshop.