How to Optimise Your Gym Membership Sales Process For Success

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When working with gym owners and studio managers who are looking to optimise their gym membership sales process, only around 25% can successfully track key performance indicators that will help them to increase membership numbers at their gym.

The other 75% are often quick to declare that they know exactly what their problem is and how they can solve their lack of success in selling gym memberships.

The majority usually place the blame for their struggling business on external influences (normally lack of enquiries) and they believe that an increase in their marketing activity will fix the issue.

In this article, we will look at some fundamental processes that will help you move your fitness business towards the top performing 25%.

So what do you know?

How many sales did you achieve yesterday?
What was the daily target?
What was the average sales value?
Are you ahead or behind where you should be?
What is the current promotion?
How many enquiries did not join yesterday? What’s happening with them?
What is the club close ratio? show ratio?
How many appointments do you have for tomorrow? How many do you need?
Which membership category generates the most income?
Where did most of your enquiries come from last month?

If you are unable to answer these questions, please stop promoting your gym facility as you are wasting leads and potentially damaging your brand.

One of the first steps to ensuring you run a more efficient and streamlined business is to implement a lead management system.

Lead Management System

It is crucial to the success of your fitness business that you are tracking all your leads in order to get a true picture of what’s working for your facility.

A lead management system is the defined and consistent set of processes and procedures that you and your staff follow when engaging with potential customers through the sales process. There are various elements to consider in developing the system that is a right fit for you and your product.

This set of procedures defines and enforces the high standard that these interactions which your gym staff need to follow. It will cover everything from the initial inquiry – what information do we need from them, what information do we need to provide them? What are the outcomes we want to achieve – for example, booking in a gym tour or consultation?

Once we understand more about the individual and have conducted a needs analysis, how do we present our proposition to the customer? How do we overcome any objections?

If they decide to go ahead with a membership what are the next steps and how are they welcomed to the club? If not, what follow-up processes are then instigated to make sure we don’t lose the opportunity to sell to them in the future?

The benefits of using the system:

Use statistics as a diagnostic tool
Measures success of marketing
No enquiries get ‘lost’
Increases accountability of staff
Club performance can be measured
Maximises income

Don’t over-complicate it and don’t worry if you don’t have the fancy software. Beginning by keeping a manual record will prove useful immediately.

Start by keeping an accurate appointment diary and recording who shows up and who joins. The other key to success is recording the number of telephone enquiries and how many convert to an appointment.

Recommended Tools:

Accountable appointment record
Transaction/activity records
Visitor registration cards
Telephone enquiry records
Follow up system

Sales Flow

There should be a clear path for every enquiry that enters your gym facility, make sure your team understand this. The sales flow chart should be followed for every lead to increase conversions and consistency. Above is an example that I have found to work for many of the gyms I work with.

Does your Price Structure reflect your business model?

This needs to be right, you will never grow your fitness business by providing a menu of prices. Stream line your offering and incentivise monthly memberships. Consider minimising pay as you go offerings, as 50% of these customers never return.

Always incentivise longer term options and multiple joiners. Make it super easy to join and focus on delivering an outstanding member journey particularly in the first 30 days.

Train your Team

Train your team to engage with prospects emotionally. Do they know the right questions to ask in order to build rapport, find a member’s pain and drive behaviour change?

Upskill them to be masters of the needs analysis, conversion kings and queens on the telephone and authentic brand ambassadors.

There is no point in driving traffic to your club if your team have had no sales training, they will only convert a handful of the leads they could potentially be bringing on-board. Staff should be trained to convert the majority, even the prospects that are terrified, have no believe in themselves and would be traditionally difficult to sell to.

Fortune is in the follow up – what happens to the enquiries that did not appoint, didn’t turn up, or didn’t join on the day? Make sure you have a simple system for keeping track of these individuals that ensures no one slips through the net.

Once you have these fundamentals in place you can then measure your success and plan your marketing activity based on what you know works for your club.

If you manage this data on a daily basis you will maximise your club’s potential and grow consistently. The most important thing to do is to start.

Remember if nothing changes ….nothing changes!