Fitness, Business, Fitness Business, & Achieving Life Goals

When you sit down with a potential client to discuss their needs, you take down their contact information. Whether or not they become a client their info gets added to your “LIST”. In Personal Training, everyone you come in contact with is a potential customer or knows a potential customer. Your “LIST” is the accumulation of all of the people you know and have met as well as those that have contacted you for information. Contact lists are extremely valuable for future business.

Say that you’ve been building your list. What do you do with it once you get it going? Sitting on it waiting for some perfect future opportunity that may or may not come up and, oh, while you wait your contacts are forgetting who you are, is not going to help you acquire new clients. So what do you do?

From a permission marketing point of view, by initially giving you their contact info, they’ve agreed to allow you to contact them again. This doesn’t mean spam them, harass them, or anything along those lines. It does, however, give you the opportunity to build greater rapport and trust. 

• Send a thank you for the meeting with a “I look forward to working with you” or a “great meeting you, good luck and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions” message.
• In two weeks, send a “checking in” note, not to sell anything except your honest concern for them and how they’re doing with their program.
• Send them your newsletter (and if you don’t have one, get one). Send it predictably so they get to expect it. It can start as infrequently as bi-annual and make it more frequent as you feel you can commit to it.

Things like this keep your name/service in the client’s mind and then when they decide that they DO need/want your service, or someone they know does, guess who they think of?

Of course there are tools to help you to help you with this. Everything from Outlook to Constant Contact and other software can help you to stay on top of you client/prospect relationships. (not to mention connecting via Facebook and Twitter)

Too many Personal Trainers are ineffective at following up after an initial contact and, particularly in this economic environment, those opportunities should not be overlooked. Stay in touch with them.

One of the aspects of Personal Training that many are ill equipped for is the selling of sessions/programs. How good you are at it is reflected in closing/conversion ratios. Huh? You reply. It’s simple really. It essentially is the number of opportunities to sell that you had vs. the number of those that became clients. Or, to look at what % you are able to convert to clients, take the number of new clients divided by the number of opportunities and multiply by 100. i.e. 25 new clients divided by 75 opportunities x100 = 33.33% conversion ratio (you get 1 out of 3 prospects to become your clients). Depending on your work environment (club, PT studio, home training, etc.) that might be good. Who cares? Well… you should. For every person that does not become a client, that’s one more person that you were not able to convince that you could help them reach their goals. Too bad for them and too bad for you.

So what do you do? First, find out what your conversion ratio is. If it’s high, great! (though you should always ask yourself why you didn’t get more) If it’s low, you know that you need to get some specific help in that area. Role play with other Personal Trainers, friends, family, or even better, work with a sales coach.

I created a prospect tracking/conversion ratio/follow up sheet for my Trainers in Excel that I would be more than happy to share with you. Just me (mark @ marknutting . com) and I’ll send you the sheet and simple instructions. As with anything, first know what you’re doing before you attempt to change it.