Tag: sales

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The 10 Stages of a Personal Trainer’s Sales Pipeline. Do You Know What They Are?

If you’re looking at people as either clients or not, you’re likely leaving a lot of money on the table and doing your sales process a disservice.  But, this is how many trainers look at their prospective clients.  If you have any kind of consultative process in your personal training business, you probably have about 10 stages that any person could be at at any given time in their lifespan.  Let’s go over what they are and how you can better manage each stage to hopefully sell and retain more clients.  All of your marketing efforts progress leads into falling into these stages.

  1. Suspects-Anyone in a large pool of people who could buy from your business. You know little about them.
  2. Prospects-A more qualified person who has stronger indicators of being a good candidate for your service.
  3. Leads (unqualified)-Someone who has taken some action to distinguish themselves as interested in your service.
  4. Qualified leads not scheduled for consult-A lead who has all the right indicators (time, budget, location, etc.) for your service, but have not set a consult appointment time yet.
  5. Leads scheduled for consultation-These are people awaiting their consultation appt. with you.  
  6. Leads who have done a consultation, but not signed-Did not convert for whatever reason. Need to think about it, look at budget, talk to spouse, going on vacation, etc.
  7. Follow up of those not signed-This person could sign up in a day or in a year. Follow up is needed either way.
  8. Leads signed on as client
  9. Retention process for signed clients-You need to keep this person successful and happy which requires a whole process in itself.
  10. Referral of new lead (start back at stage 3 again)-If you’ve done stage 9, the person should refer you to others like them who are leads back at stage 3.  Start the pipeline over with that new person.

Chances are you might not have ever recognized that there were that many stages.  Most trainers fail in pre-qualifying leads and in the follow up process.

Tools to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

If there’s that many stages and you have many people in them at any given time, how can you keep track of it all.  How are you ever going to have time to do all of that?  That’s where organizational tools come in to help you visualize where each person is.  And to keep you on track for following up when you need to, what tasks you need to do for each person, who to email, who to call, whose birthday it is, etc.

Tools can also help you automate the process.  Like follow up.  Marketing is a lot about repetition.  In general it takes multiple touches before a person decides to actually pull the trigger to call you.  If you get a lead, email them, don’t hear back and then throw their contact info in the trash, you’re not marketing effectively.  Let’s say you get a lead, they appear to be fairly qualified.  But, you use your automation software to follow up with them through a variety of channels for as long as a year or more.  Maybe once a week for 3 weeks or a month.  Once a month after that.  It might be a year before they ever actually call you, but they were aware of your business the whole time. After a year, they may realize they have not improved at all on their own and they finally need to call you.

I have a friend who built almost her entire business off of following up with 1 lead after a year that turned out to be such a great evangelist and referred a number of other people.

Imagine if you had a system that could prompt you to do all the tasks and follow up you needed to do or just do it for you.  There would be no forgetting, no mistakes, no lost sales, no lack of contact with leads for extended time, no missed occasions.  All the things we’re all guilty of forgetting as humans.

You could have someone move easily from each stage of the sales pipeline to the next with the click of a button and be able to view them all in a clear and organized manner.  Easier still is if they are moved on their own by taking some action that triggers a conditional workflow. Maybe they click a link in an email, respond to an email, open one, subscribe or unsubscribe, and the system takes the appropriate action you assigned it based on tracking their behavior. They may be moved to the next stage, started into another automation, a tag added to their contact, sent to another list, criteria added to their contact to reach a goal, a task added to their contact for you to do.  There are many possibilities.

Let’s say you have 2 new consultations this week, your system follows up with a text to remind them of their appointment (automation) while simultaneously following up with educational content for 100 other prospects and leads on your list (follow up), and sending out a birthday card for an existing client this week (retention).  This is how an efficient business should run.  If you have any amount of clients currently, it’s easy to see how you can get busy and these things can fall by the wayside.  But, you probably don’t want to hire someone else just to follow up with your leads manually either.  The technology at our hands is a solution to this situation.  Subscribe to learn more about maximizing the value in your personal trainer sales pipeline.

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3 Selling Strategies Every Personal Trainer Can Automate

Since most of us as personal trainers don’t like the act of selling very much, wouldn’t it be nice to automate parts of the sales process we don’t like doing?  You can take some of the leg work out of the process and only deal directly with people who are good candidates when they come in to see you.  In that moment, you can be confident that you don’t have to put on some show or use an arsenal of combative sales tricks to try to close the person.  You can be calm and comfortable know that they are likely a good client and there’s a better chance than not that they will end up signing up.

In our experience, most trainers look at people as either a client or not.  And that’s really missing the boat when it comes to the sales process.  If you use any kind of consultation process, there is likely 10 stages to your sales pipeline.  There is a lot that you have to manage between a group of random suspects in your local population and an actual paying client giving your repeat business and referring others.  Getting any given person from one stage to the other requires about 8 other stages in between.  If you don’t know that or if you aren’t managing your sales pipeline that way, you’re likely leaving money on the table and losing leads that you worked hard to get.  Luckily, with the right tools, you can automate a lot of that process.  So if you don’t like it, or forget to do things like follow ups, automation tools will take care of that for you.  Probably better than you or another person can because it will be on time and mistake free. http://bit.ly/2wJuJdj

Click here to read the article.

 

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Personal Trainer Marketing Plan Template and Guide

Do you have a marketing plan for your personal training business? If not, pick up one for your business. Failure to plan is planning to fail!

Follow this template and guide to implement a successful marketing strategy for your personal training business. There are 16 low or no cost marketing efforts INCLUDED to get you started.

It will help you work through the process and develop a comprehensive, action taking plan for marketing your business.

Clearly define your:

Mission
Target market
Niches you want to serve
Revenue goals
And more

Also get Our “How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan” eBook guide.

Save thousands of dollars by learning how to prepare your own marketing plan that is unique to your business objectives and goals.

There is no longer a need to pay a small fortune for a marketing plan or neglect preparing one because you cannot afford it. You now can do it yourself!

We are giving you the opportunity to create your marketing plan like a pro so that it is taken seriously by others when it is needed for loans, investments or other areas to benefit your business.

And this marketing plan will also act as a guide and an instrumental tool in effectively increasing market share and developing a thriving, successful fitness or personal training business.

Download a copy of the “How to Create a Successful Marketing Plan” guide and workbook today so you can start reading it right away.

Once you complete your purchase, you can download the guide immediately in a PDF file and the workbook in a DOC file to get started on making that great marketing plan.

Get a Personal Trainer Marketing Plan Template and Guide Here

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Fitness Business Ideas

Fitness Business Ideas

If you’ve considered getting into the fitness industry, you’ve probably wondered how to start a personal training or fitness business and what model you should set up.  Below we are going to go over three possible models that you have as options.  These are by no means the only ones.  You could have  a hybrid of any or all of them.  Or if you’re a trainer already, you could add elements of one or all of them to your current model.  Let’s break this down into three different models you can choose from in personal training.  We will look at them from the perspective of lowest cost and easiest to set up to more complex.  In each case, it will still be your own business and you’ll be self-employed, but the environment will be different.

  1. In home or mobile personal trainer.
  2. A trainer that works in someone else’s facility.
  3. Studio or gym owner.

Let’s take a look at each in more detail.

1.  In home or mobile personal trainer.

In this model, you’ll have little start up costs and capital expense.  However, your efficiency can be compromised as you’ll be eating up time driving and running up expenses in gas.  You won’t need a lot of equipment, you’ll focus your programming around body weight training and devices you can carry with you and manual exercise.  This can be a viable option to start in and some trainers never leave this stage.  Others use this as a spring board to take them to the other models.  This type of model can allow you to charge a premium due to travel time and personal attention in the privacy of the client’s home.

2.  A personal trainer who operates in someone else’s facility.

The option for this model is an autonomous personal trainer operating the same way as in the first scenario, but you primarily operate out of someone else’s facility.  This may be a commercial or corporate facility you contract with.  In this model like the first, you will also have low up front costs as you won’t have to buy or rent a larger facility and won’t have capital expense in filling it up with equipment.  However, you should be prepared to pay as much as 40% of each session’s revenue in rent or shared revenue with the facility owner.  You can still charge a premium or you may choose a lower price point to appeal to a wider audience.  You may be able to afford to do this as you’ll now be able to see clients back to back without wasted driving time in between.  They will be able to come to you.  You’ll want to make sure the place in which you choose to rent or operate is a good location for your target market.  But, again, remember, up to 40% of your revenue can go to the facility owner in exchange for you being allowed to operate there.  You need to balance that and factor it into your calculations when establishing your pricing structure.

3.  A studio or gym owner.

This is usually the ultimate for most aspiring trainers.  The in home trainers usually get tired of having limited access to equipment and the trainers who rent other spaces get tired of not having their own space to make the rules.  This model will have significantly more up front costs associated with it in the form of rent and capital expense in equipment.  It may take more time with the prospect of adhering to zoning laws and regulations and acquiring signage and other administrative things required for you to actually open and operate.  Once all of that is satisfied, you’re the boss and make the rules.  You can run it as you wish.  Location will be extremely important in this model.  Most clients don’t like to travel beyond a 15 minute radius of where they live or work.  This type of model will firmly root you down in place.  If you are unsure of your near future plans, it will be harder to move.  You will have a finite capacity so your estimates on space needed and revenue it can produce will be critical.  You will want to plan for future expansion should you need it.  This can be a very good self-contained model and once mastered, replicated over and over again.  Ideally, it could be documented and licensed or franchised for other business owners to purchase. Again, these are by no means all of the options.  You can pick and choose elements that you like from each or focus on strictly one.  If you have limited resources, these can offer a step ladder or progression for you as you grow and become more successful until you reach your ideal model you have in your head.  Let this stimulate your thinking.  If you have further questions, be sure to reference our fitness business books or register for one of our free phone consultations to explore your options further.

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Personal Trainers: Automate Your Sales and Marketing with Infusionsoft

Personal Trainers,

 As a small business owner, have you ever found yourself:
  • Working too many evenings and weekends?
  • Missing too many important life events (vacations, children’s recitals, date night, etc.)?
  • Neglecting your favorite hobbies because “you have to work?”
  • Working 80 hours a week to avoid taking a 40-hour a week job?
If so, you are suffering from small business insanity and IT MUST BE STOPPED. Join us for this life and business changing webinar, “Ending the Insanity of Small Business – Part 1.” This webinar series is on-demand, meaning you can access it any time that works best for you! Simply register here and you will receive a link to Part 1 of the series.
Let Infusionsoft’s Lifecycle Marketing Expert, enlighten you on how the seven powerful steps of Lifecycle Marketing will eliminate inconsistent customer traffic flow, reduce lost sales, generate more referrals and SO MUCH MORE!
Register today by clicking here!
If you are tired of suffering the insanity of running your small business, register today to attend this powerful 30-minute webinar. It’s your first step to ending your own insanity.