A Guest Post By Kellie Sanders From PT Business Success
I have helped many personal trainers market to run their business more effectively and in doing so have discovered 2 important facts that affect nearly every personal trainer.
1. Most personal trainers excel at providing their sessions
2. These same personal trainers do not earn anyway near as much as they would like to.
These 2 facts go hand in hand and I am sure you know of a number of your competitors with average skills who are running highly profitable studios. So what is the key to having a successful personal training studio that allows you to live the lifestyle you have always dreamed?
The key is effective strategies to get new clients but also when these new clients get started you must have the best systems possible to keep those clients in your business and to get those new clients to refer other new clients to you.
If you do not keep that steady stream of leads coming through each week and get those new clients to stay and refer you will never be as profitable as you would like, you will struggle from week to week. I have seen this happen way too many times.
When done effectively and by having the right systems within your fitness business then becomes fun. You know the feeling when you get a new client started then they refer their friends and family in just a few days of starting.
Understand that you will be constantly working to improve the running of your fitness business, this includes the marketing, sales process, customer service to get more results for the same or even less investment of your time and effort.
Now are thinking how do I do that?
6 Steps to growing your personal training studio
- Having a clear direction of where you want to go
- Know your numbers back to front
- Strategies in place to generate consistent leads each week
- Sales process that builds relationship as well as clients
- Ongoing relationships to build your studio
- Personal growth
You have to know where you want to take your fitness business and have clear goals set out that you want to achieve. Areas I get my clients to look at are financial and wealth, business, personal, health, relationships, making a difference and free time goals. As my business mentor says to me your business should fund your lifestyle otherwise you buy yourself a job! Personal trainers come into the industry for a better lifestyle and to have fun however all to often I hear of them burning out and the business struggles to make profit. By having your goals clear then we can work out how to make that happen. I did this with one of my clients, she is a sub contractor to a studio and she filled it out at the end of February, it is now April and she has achieved everything she set out to! As of tomorrow she is filling out a new one– what a tough position to be in.
Action Step: Email me for my template on What Do you Want so you to can get a clear direction of what you want to achieve.
One of the most crucial parts to your success is knowing your numbers! Many personal trainers I come across has no idea how many sessions they are doing each week or what their break even point is – I can not stress how important this is.
Action Step: Calculate your break even, if you do not know how to do this email me and I will chat you through it.
Constantly generate new leads, too often personal trainers try 1 marketing strategy then stop because they did not get a response. Marketing your business has a number of purposes, the primary reason being to increase client numbers and increase profits but also to become the local expert in your area. A person may receive your flier in the mail 5 times before they take action, I did a flier drop every month for 9 months and come that month I got started 87 people in a fitness program, that also came back to having the right info on the flier and logo not being the focus of the flier J. You can’t rely on 1 marketing strategy at any one time, you have to have a minimum 5 running constantly.
Action step: Work out your 5 strategies, if you get stuck email me for some marketing tips.
Personal trainers are scared of sales and by no means should if be like that, if you have those feelings then you are definitely doing something wrong! This whole process should flow and you should convert a minimum 80% of your leads. Have a system in place from first initial phone call through to price presentation. The crucial aspect of the sales process is people buy from people they like and trust.
Most personal trainers think that techniques used to get clients through the door is sleezy sales and tricks them into buying something they don’t want. Ask yourself this:
- Do your clients want or need health and fitness?
- Do they benefit from personal training?
Of course they do! So you will not be selling something they don’t want, you will be helping them.
Action step: Look at your sales process, do you have scripts and systems in place to ensure you convert at least 80% of your leads? If you struggle with the sales process email me for my eBook 47 ways to increase your conversions.
Look after your current clients and ensure that you have a system within your fitness business to keep clients, getting existing clients to pay, stay and refer is the cheapest, most cost effective form of marketing you could ever hope for. It is no good creating huge numbers of new clients if you are losing them out the back door.
Action step: Create 1 strategy that you can implement today that will make a difference to your current clients and make them say wow!
The more you learn the more you earn! Put simply, you always have to be learning whether it be reading, listening to audio book or going to seminars you have to make it apart of your plan. There are sooo many great resources out there that can help you, it is about taking the time to make that happen.
Action step: What are you going to do to starting learning more so you can earn more?
However to build a successful personal training studio you will have to start doing things differently, you will have to change the outlook on how you run your business, the systems and the way you market your fitness business.
Email me at kellie@ptbusinesssuccess.com with how you go, would love to hear from you!
If what you are doing now is working for you, then you are doing it the right way. If what you are doing now ISN’T working, then you are doing it the wrong way.
Justin Herald
