Coming in hot with four quickies…
1) Positioning – As a training gym owner, you want to control the messaging so you’re compared to personal training, NOT to open access gyms (like Planet Fitness).
While you’ll never win this battle 100% of the time, you can support these efforts by referencing “personal training” in your marketing. That’s why I like “small group personal training” better than “semi-private training.” Exactly 0% of consumers will ever Google “semi-private personal training.” That’s a non-intuitive and insider term.
Another pro tip: anchor the price of personal training in your market by calling it out early in your sales conversation. This can be as simple as inserting this line early in your convo:
Part of our goal today is to find the best path for YOU. As you probably know, one-on-one personal training can be as much as $XXX per session. So I’ll want to understand your budget and how many times you want to train per week before I can make a recommendation. Make sense?
This way when you get to your rates, they will (correctly) feel smaller.
2) Real Time Conversation = Bigger Commitment – Related to the above, if you want to successfully build value for your services, it’s hard to do that over text messages.
It’s all well and good to have a clear and compelling low barrier offer for people to try out your services. It can also be savvy to use an offer that auto-renews into a given membership. And in theory, this can help prospects move into membership while reducing friction.
But at the end of the day, if you haven’t helped your prospects get crystal clear on 1) what they want 2) why it’s important and 3) what’s gotten in the way in the past, you can’t build specific value for your services.
And when you can’t speak to their specific goals and challenges, most prospects will decide on price.
To build value for what you do, have a real time conversation where you ask questions, get clear on what they want, explain how your services can achieve their goals/overcome their obstacles, and then make an ask for them to commit to the next step.
3) New is Sexy – Different markets will have more or less tolerance for seeing the same offer over and over.
In some markets, you can run the same low barrier offer for years and years and not see any dip in results. And as a rule, you don’t want to fix what ain’t broken.
In other markets, eyes will start to glaze over after a few months. This means you’ll have to freshen up your low barrier offer over time.
Here’s the key point: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I’m not saying you need to develop a new service. In fact, let me say, do NOT offer a new service if what you’re doing is working and you just want more leads. Changing the specific offer and its wrapping/name can go a long way to getting your prospects’ attention.
PLUS it lets you test slightly different price points and length of low barrier offers. All things being equal, there’s going to be a sweet spot in all low barrier offers. You want enough of a commitment for people to really try you out and fall in love with what you do, but not so much as to kill your leadflow with too high of a barrier to get started. Trying out different offers lets you test different approaches.
4) Talk About What THEY Care About. Don’t Talk About What They Don’t. – Too many well intentioned gym owners get over-enamored with their own service and talk themselves out of sales.
If you’re great at what you do, it’s likely there are many valuable benefits and features to your gym’s offerings. Plus you’re passionate about what you’ve built. And that’s great!
But people only care about what THEY care about.
You don’t need to enumerate every single reason your gym is great. Once you’ve asked the questions to identify what THEY care about, only talk about what THEY care about. Don’t give them a laundry list with no relation to what they’ve said.
Pro Tip: If you want to nail this, when you’re building the structure of your sales conversation, brainstorm the most common goals and obstacles your clients will mention. Then identify the specific features of your services that provide the specific benefits that serve those goals and overcome those obstacles.
Focus on what THEY care about.
High five!
Mark
PS Want to join us in Philly on Sept 15th-16th for our next Unicorn Society retreat?
Day 1 will be focused on everything related to people. Then on Day 2, we’ll create a crystal clear action plan for your next quarter. You’ll create order out of the chaos and leave with a plan; you’ll know exactly how to kick ass between now and the New Year. No holiday slump for you, my friend!
And of course, you’ll also get lots of quality time with like-minded gym owners, as well as Keeler, Pete, Ben, and the BFU team. We’ll eat Philly cheesesteaks, have some drinks, and enjoy Philadelphia!
Interested?
Early bird pricing ends Sunday August 13th.
Click the link below to learn more: