Everywhere I turn, I see fitness professionals talking about how they need to increase traffic to their website and attract more customers. Makes sense right, ‘more traffic = more customers’. Well, not quite.
It doesn’t matter how much traffic you drive to your website if you aren’t able to convert them into customers. This is why your sales process and your ability to sell are far more important than how many Instagram followers you gained last week or how many people visited your website.
The word sales gets a bad rep, however (cold calling people about payment protection insurance aside) sales isn’t about tricking people into buying something that they don’t need. Sales is the process of proving to someone who could genuinely benefit from your services that they should give you a chance.
What people often get wrong about selling, is misunderstanding what the customer wants out of the transaction. The middle-aged woman who comes to you for advice doesn’t just want to lose weight; she wants all the BENEFITS that come with losing weight. She might want her husband to find her attractive again, she might want to become a healthy role model to her children or she might just want a boost in self-confidence. Your job is to identify the underlying reasons for that person coming to you, then prove that hiring you will help them achieve their goals.
When a client first interacts with you, you aren’t going to be able to convince them to pay you $500 a month in one phone call. Would you hand over $500 to someone you have just met? This is the same in almost every industry in the world. The solution is a value ladder.
A value ladder is a set of steps that you use to guide your customers through to take them from strangers to brand ravers.
Have you noticed the countless entrepreneurs that are promoting and giving away free ‘eBooks’ and ‘Webinars’ on Facebook? These are the first step of their value ladders.
They will often pay upwards of $10 for every person that clicks on their Facebook Ad and downloads their free eBook. At first that sounds crazy, but not once you have a solid value ladder and sales funnel. At $10 a click, 100 leads will cost them $1,000. However, if they can convert 20% of those leads into paying customers, who each pay $49 for a personal training session, they can retrieve $980. Not bad, but a net loss of $20 after putting in all that effort still doesn’t seem worth it right? However, if they can then up-sell their $500 a year annual membership to 20% of those customers, they are then making an extra $2,000 per year.
The key to making a value ladder work, is to over-deliver at each stage so that the customer raves about you and your products so much that they will purchase anything you put in front of them. Even though your eBook is ‘free’, it’s the stage that requires you to over-deliver the most. It’s your chance to prove that you are an expert in this field and that you can help them achieve their goals.
Creating a recurring revenue stream from clients is key to business growth. You can sell one off sessions, classes and plans, but doing so requires you to consistently attract new customers. It’s far easier and cheaper to focus on your current customers and create a consistent stream of revenue from them through membership packages.
Using a dedicated personal training software tool such as PTminder allows you to create, manage and track membership packages, as well as allowing you to stay organised and focused as you scale your business.