Two-Brain Radio: Incredible Client Success with Eden Watson
Chris: 00:01 – Eden Watson is the client success manager at Two-Brain Business. I usually call her the right brain of Two-Brain. Today we’re going to be talking about why your gym should have a client success manager, why you can’t just trust something as important as client retention to your coaches who are busy and have other things to do, why you can’t take client retention for granted or really hang your hat on your programming or your quote unquote “community.” We think this is a very highly leverageable role. I’ve been writing about this role with different names like Joy Girl and Joy Person since 2010 and today we’re going to talk about who is the best CSM, how to measure your ROI on hiring a CSM person, what kinds of things they can do and five tips that you can do to increase your client retention today and how to measure success. You’re gonna really love this. This is a very directive, actionable episode and we’re going to have some videos from our summit in here. We’re going to have some great links in the show notes, too. Enjoy.
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Chris: 01:26 – Everybody hates their insurance company until they need their insurance company. My insurance recommendation is Vaughn Vernon of Affiliate Guard. Before I get into this story, I want to make it clear here that I don’t get any kickback for recommending Vaughn, but I’ve done it so many times. Whenever anybody online asks a question about insurance companies, I always say Affiliate Guard. Here’s why. Years ago when we affiliated with CrossFit, my insurance company dumped me, citing quote unquote “tractor pulls” that we were going to be doing, whatever the hell that is. I’ve never pulled a tractor in my life. I’ve driven lots of tractors and I can tell you, I don’t think I could pull one if I wanted to, but that’s besides the point. At that time, the person who swooped in and saved CrossFit gyms in Canada was Joanne LeGal, and if you’re in Canada, I recommend talking to her—period.You don’t have to talk to her first. You don’t have to talk to her last. Just talk to her, period. If you’re in the states though, I recommend Affiliate Guard because the program that I get through Joanne in Canada is really, really awesome and all inclusive. Joanne’s personality, though, is what keeps me with their company. In the states. Affiliate Guard is run by Vaughn Vernon, a massive personality, a CrossFitter, a Jujitsu guy. He drives dirt bikes, he has good-looking kids, all that stuff and his policy is the best. It’s really, really tough to tell when you’re reading your policy if the benefits are the same as someone else’s because they obscure stuff on purpose. It’s just like taxes. However, when I’m looking at my policy, I ask myself, “Will that guy get up in the middle of the night and helped me out?”This weekend was a great example of Vaughn’s personality. One of my friends and clients down in Florida had their garage door smashed open by a Mustang that was doing donuts in the parking lot and they texted me at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday and I wanted to help. So I texted Vaughn, he’s two hours behind me and he responded right away. Your insurance company is not going to do that. As I said at the start of this, everybody hates their insurance company until they need insurance. And when you do need insurance, you want them to answer the damn phone on a Sunday morning and you want to talk to the head man and you just want to know everything’s going to be OK. With Affiliate Guard, it is.
Chris: 03:44 – Eden Watson, welcome to Two-Brain Radio.
Eden: 03:45 – Hi, thanks for having me.
Chris: 03:48 – Let’s start with what client success manager means and then we’ll start getting into why and how and who.
Eden: 03:55 – OK.
Chris: 03:55 – So what is a CSM?
Eden: 03:55 – The CSM is a role in your business that gives your client a relationship with your brand and not one individual. Lots of you probably have read Chris’ books and we talk about the Joy Girl role, and that’s evolved a bit over time. The CSM role, basically your primary tool to increase your length of engagement with your clients. So if you have a high turnover, this is a critical role for your business. If you have clients coming in and out the door, you’re gonna want to have some person in place to make sure that stuff’s happening. So the CSM, we like to call it the CSM, client success manager, can be thought of as a human Bright Spot. You want to really encourage your members to stick around. The CSM person, they make sure your clients feel like they’re doing a great job all the time, they feel good about themselves and they know what’s coming up next. So they have a path in place and they can stick with your service. I’ve often thought like without a CSM, why doesn’t someone just go to a globo gym where they’re just on their own path doing their own thing and being lost in the mix of numbers at a big gym.
Chris: 05:09 – OK. So I mean you’re the CSM for Two-Brain. And often when people say, “What’s Eden’s role?” I say she’s the right brain of Two-Brain. Your job is to be empathetic and notice when people have big Bright Spots that I might not have seen or stuff like that.
Eden: 05:27 – Right, yeah. Cause it’s time consuming to do all the things that you do and see all the Bright Spots and somehow you’ve managed to do that for quite some time. But for sure that empathy piece, you want to be looking for and for folks kind of falling off or maybe not having such a great go of things, you know. Circumstances change, so we need to be there to rally around folks when they start having those difficult times and to help support the successes when they do have them. So that is the empathetic part that I do and the role that I play.
Chris: 06:01 – Yeah, it’s not that any gym owner or any business owner is so callous that they don’t have feelings or they’re not paying attention or they don’t notice, right, it’s just like all of us work, and tasks fill the time that we have. And so it’s very easy to be like, “Oh man, it’s that person’s birthday. I should send them a card.” And then you get all wrapped up in like a billing error with your software or whatever. And now it’s six o’clock and you’re exhausted and you’re choosing between, do I send this client a card or do I actually go home for my kid’s birthday party? So this is really the value of the CSM. But I never want to give somebody a—you know, here’s a hire that you have to have where we can’t directly attribute it to ROI. So, you already mentioned that the CSM increases length of engagement and we’re going to talk about how, I think, at the end of this conversation.
Eden: 06:53 – Sure, yeah. OK.
Chris: 06:54 – Awesome. So what are some tasks that the gym CSM would do?
Eden: 06:57 – Sure. So, I see primarily, maybe when you’re first starting out is that person is starting out by rewarding people’s Bright Spots; that’s a really quick win for people. And that doesn’t take a lot of a CMS’s time and maybe that’s all that’s on the plate right away. But then maybe the role also evolves to contain some checking in on client progress. Of course you can do some of this through automated emails, but that’s something the CSM would be, you know, in charge of and handle. And they’re basically acting as a liaison between your coaching team and your clients. And potentially the business owner as well, depending on how large the staff is at this time. The CSM also can create some of those automated emails or adjust them and they basically run the client experience. So they can provide feedback on that client experience and shape that client experience depending on, again, the level of the organization and how involved the owner wants to be.
Chris: 07:57 – OK. That’s awesome. So we’re going to walk through like the evolution and how many hours the CSM role takes and stuff later. But let’s say that we’re about to hire a CSM. We already know that we need somebody. What are the characteristics of a great client success manager?
Eden: 08:14 – OK. So I’d say there’s three primary characteristics that are most important when you’re looking to fill this role. You really need to have someone who’s empathetic. You have to have that right-brain person. You can’t fake empathy.
Chris: 08:24 – Right, exactly.
Eden: 08:28 – And that person needs to be able to—the definition of empathy—imagine what the other people are feeling. So imagine what your client is experiencing in the various stages of their journey and anticipate where they might fall off. Anticipate when they might need a pat on the back and some encouragement. Next, you really need to have buy-in. That person has to believe in your brand. They can’t fake that either. But don’t let this hold you back. I think, you know, you don’t have to hire somebody from within your gym to fill this role, so they might not understand or appreciate CrossFit or your gym or your branding right away, but that doesn’t mean they won’t buy in, just make sure your vision is clear to them. Your values are clear to them to bring them on board. And then you need to have somebody who’s somewhat tech savvy, and I don’t just mean they can operate a computer. I mean, basically build it right into the hiring process. Test them by asking them to upload a document and spell it a certain way and, you know, do a couple things there that would get them to check if they’ve got good grammar and that sort of stuff. Cause they’re going to be addressing cards to people, they’re gonna be celebrating wins. They’re going to be maybe posting on your social media. So you don’t want somebody who’s not got a high attention to detail in that capacity. But yeah, using, you know, Google Drive because they’re going to be tracking maybe spreadsheets and that sort of thing. And then maybe eventually using a CRM tool, a customer relationship management tool for you, like UpLaunch for example. You don’t have to test them on the full gamut of these things, but you want to make sure that they can handle the technology you’re gonna throw at them and be able to make that technology work for them. And kind of evolve the role like I said before as they do that. Some bonus parts to these characteristics, number four would be having that high attention to detail. It kind of comes with being empathetic. You’re going to have a high attention to detail for, you know, looking for the feelings of others and looking after the feelings of others. But this is also around the grammar and that sort of thing. Another bonus would be just that they’re a happy person and that they want to bring joy to others. It’s kind of innate in that role; it has to be there.
Chris: 10:39 – When I wrote the first book and wrote about the Joy Girl—by the way, the name Joy Girl came from her, the first person that I ever hired for this role, she called herself the Joy Girl. But originally the recommendation was like, this is a low-value, highly leverageable role. You can hire somebody to do this for about $12 an hour, two hours a week, and all they’re going to do is take client Bright Spots that coaches have recorded every single class or PT session. They’re going to call the client on Friday and say, “Congratulations, we’re so proud of you. What are you going to do next?” And that would buy the owner time, two hours to do something else, basically. But back then it was really more like, you need to do this. You’re not doing it because you don’t have time. So how has the CSM role now evolved with like the Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief framework?
Eden: 11:34 – So like you mentioned, in Founder Phase, maybe it’s two hours a week and the owner gets that time back to work on more valuable things that they could be working on and they’re just tracking client wins. They’re just calling them, texting them, sending them a nice message or posting on Facebook, whatever your system’s going to be and asking them, “What’s next for you?” And the big part there, Chris, is that that is keeping those clients engaged, and I know that that starts to contribute to LEG. And then as we evolve and we’ve got more clients and we’ve got more team members in the Farmer Phase, we’re looking at that role evolving potentially to five hours a week. Just because you have that bigger client base, you can’t do that all in two hours. And then you’ve got additional team members that you have to liaise with. So that go-between action of talking to coach A and you know, giving something or celebrating something for client A now goes from just point A to point A to ABCDEFG, whatever number of coaches and clients you have. So OK, so we’ve scaled a little bit more because your client base has changed, your team members have changed. You’re still tracking the wins, but you might be, if you have the right person in that role and you want them to be, you can be checking in on athletes. So doing something we call athlete check-ins or goal reviews, sitting down with them, say every 90 days and finding out what’s going well and where we need to tailor their prescription and get them, you know, working in a different place in your gym. So once we get into the Farmer to Tinker stage, now we’re talking, yes, maybe the role has evolved and it’s taking up a greater chunk of that person’s time. But the role is evolving to include things like metric tracking. So measuring that LEG, measuring the client journey, and developing and coordinate different tracking tools for the clients. So maybe you’re using something currently and your CSM has discovered there’s a different tracking tool. They wanna try it, let them try it for three months potentially and then see how it’s working and go back and reevaluate. They might want to start developing new processes as they pertain to sales and LEG. They’re probably providing some sort of feedback mechanism to your teams. So you know, if they’re hearing a lot of negatives about a certain coach, well, they’re going to have to address that with the coach themselves, or depending on your reporting relationships, maybe they’re addressing it with the owner or you know, your head of coaching.
Eden: 14:10 – Also this role becomes a little more autonomous at this stage. So the CSM’s proven to you that they can succeed in this role, that they can do the tasks you’ve asked of them. And now you can hand over the reins a little bit. For those of your listeners that were at the summit, Greg and I spoke about organizational culture and one of the ways to motivate any team is to provide them autonomy cause you feel really good when you’re able to work autonomously. Giving the CSM a bit more freedom at this time so they can decide the best way to move forward in this role is really motivating. So they’ll stay motivated when you get to this point. Also, basically developing and coordinating how to administer those athlete check-ins. Again, if they have an understanding of training and of the prescriptive model that your gym uses, they might be able to do this athlete check-in role, and they can have a hand in some operations or some HR functions, so if there are coaches that are requiring performance improvement plans and that sort of thing, they can have a hand in either sitting down with the coaches or providing that information back to whoever’s in charge of that. And I think we’ve talked about this all through all of your books, but when somebody is doing a role, it’s important to get them to document that SOP, the standard operating procedure of that role. So the CSM at this stage should really have a good handle on what the operations look like, but they might have a hand in other operations in the business because they’re so plugged into all the different kind of departments, if you will, that they’ll have a good idea of what those are and then they can have a hand in refining the operations as that begins to be a need in your business. OK.
Chris: 16:00 – So, you know, we are going to talk about like why the client’s relationship should be between them and your brand instead of between them and one specific coach. But one of the things that you just mentioned made me think of, you know, what if they have a bad relationship with your coach but they don’t have a bad relationship with your gym, right? Who will they turn to if the coach is their coach for life or like primary point of contact, right? They have to leave your gym, where one of the things that you do amazingly well at Two-Brain is mentor matching. So somebody new starts at Two-Brain, we have a team of 28 mentors. We’re gonna match you out based on personality and work habits. But a very tiny fraction of the time, after about three weeks, we realize that we could have made a better match. And so the client will say, “Eden, can I try a different mentor?” And that’s great. They don’t lose their progress. They don’t lose traction.
Eden: 16:58 – Exactly. So same thing could certainly happen in your gym where you’ve got somebody, you know, die hard, ready to go when the coach is either reeling them back or pushing them too hard or whatever happens, personality mismatch. And we need to reassign this person to a different personal trainer. Or maybe they discover that group fitness is not for them. Well now the CSM steps in and sees their lack of momentum that they’re, you know, you’re tracking that they’re not attending their classes anymore. And the CSM catches that maybe even before your client comes to you and says, “I don’t want to work with so and so” and certainly before the client says, “I just want to cancel.” The CSM can be all over that and help find what the best fit is for that client. So that’s where they have to have some empathy. Of course, that really relates back to that. We need to be able to anticipate those clients’ feelings, how they’re feeling, and digging in and asking the question like, what’s really going on here? And not being scared of the answer.
Chris: 17:56 – Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. If you’ve ever run out of money, you know that it affects every single corner of your life, all of your relationships, your business, even your self-worth. And so when I found a mentor in 2009, I said, I want to share this gift with everyone. Since then I’ve been building and refining and improving a mentorship practice that we now call Two-Brain Business. We break our mentorship into several stages. The first stage is the Incubator, which is a 12-week sprint to get your foundation built, to get you started on retention and employee programs and finding the best staff, putting them in the best roles, training them up to be successful, and then recruiting more clients. It’s an amazing program. It is the culmination of over a decade of work. It’s also the sum of best practices from over 800 gyms around the world. These aren’t just my ideas anymore. What we do is track with data what’s working for whom and when and we test new ideas against that data to say, is this actually better? Then when ideas have proven themselves conclusively, then we put it in our Incubator or Growth or Tinker programs. I just wrote “Founder, Farmer, Tinker, Thief” to define who should be doing what in what stage of entrepreneurship, but no matter where you are, the Incubator is your first 12-week sprint to get as far as possible in your business. We’re a mentorship practice for one reason: Mentorship is what works. We work with gym owners for one reason: because you have the potential to change the world with us. And I hope you do.
Chris: 19:27 – That’s awesome. You know, we’re going to talk about like how the CSM role pays for itself and more, we want every role that you put in your business to have a positive return on that investment of at least 2.25 times what you spend on it. And one of the most leverageable is the CSM because if your length of engagement goes up and you can keep a client for an extra two months because of the CSM, then that’s an amazing increase. And we found in our research last year that if the average gym with 150 members paying $150 a month, if they could keep every client three months longer, that the owner would make another $40,000 a year in profit. It’s incredible. And you’re talking about, you know, a pretty inexpensive role working two to five hours a week to make that much difference. It’s hard to find another role that’s as leverageable as this one. OK. So regardless of that, some consulting companies say that like you should appoint a coach for life and the coach should be in charge of all these things. Right? So why do we say that a gym needs a CSM instead of just counting on coaches to build and maintain relationships?
Eden: 20:39 – Well, I think coaches are hired, presumably, to coach, that’s what they signed up for. So I guess what would you say if you were hired at a fast-food restaurant to serve customers and all of a sudden they started asking you to go up and shingle the roof?
Chris: 20:53 – I’d say they’re going to have a leaky drive-thru.
Eden: 20:55 – I think that’s still a critical function, shingling a roof, but it’s really not what they signed up for. And it might not be within that person’s wheelhouse. So I don’t know—I’m not saying that all coaches do not want to be a CSM. There might be some overlap. And when you have that coach who wants to do coaching and CSM or you know, client engagement stuff, great. Let them do it. But I don’t think that every coach—I can think of a few that don’t want that role—.
Chris: 21:25 – Like me and your husband?
Eden: 21:29 – For this role. So let’s let them do what they’re strong at, which is coaching. And let’s let somebody who’s super empathetic and engaged and wants to engage with people do the CSM stuff. So, OK, so let’s say you do have a coach who wants to do it. Add that role to their plate, right? Great. If you have a coach who doesn’t want to do it, now introduce them to your newly hired CSM and let them know what—keep the lines of communication open and let those two know how they can interact. Whatever mechanism, if it’s just a sticky note, great. If it’s whatever, make sure they know the tools by which they can communicate the Bright Spots or the client falling off the struggle bus or whatever it is the CSM has to know about.
Chris: 22:11 – You know what’s really funny, I never realized this until now. So for listeners at home, Eden’s husband, Mike, and I have been coaching together since 2002 and he was the first hire at Catalyst in 2005, like two weeks after we opened. Neither Mike nor I are jerks. However, when you put however in a sentence—anyway, so several years in we realized like we were super busy, we were doing personal training and coaching and our days were completely packed. And so when a client would get married, we would forget or we wouldn’t have time to like send them a card. Right? And so we said, well, let’s take the happiest, bubbliest person at the gym, that was Charity at the time, and let’s put her in charge of these things. And she called herself the Joy Girl and that’s where it really came from.
Eden: 23:02 – Yeah, you definitely need to designate somebody to this role that’s going to thrive in the role. Like I said before, you just can’t fake it. It falls off your plate. It’s just doesn’t seem as critical as, you know, payroll for example.
Chris: 23:17 – So, if—you’ve got two options, right? You hire a CSM and the coach backs them up or you add the role of CSM to one of your coaches for all of your clients. OK. What tools do you give that person to start being a CSM?
Eden: 23:37 – You want to send personalized messages. So lots of gyms that listen to Two-Brain Radio probably have a private members’ Facebook group for the gym members. If you’ve got a joy person just putting the Bright Spots in there, Great. That’s a really good first step. Costs you nothing except the person’s time. But we’re starting to use; we’ve been using SendOutCards for sending personalized messages, and I think what’s really special about that is if I catch somebody, I don’t even work at the gym, but I actually catch people having Bright Spots at the gym and capture it on my phone and send them a card through SendOutCards sometimes. Right? Take a picture of the PR board and send it to them. People are so grateful for that. SendOutCards, I should explain, is a tool. You take a picture, you upload it to this program and you can create a beautiful greeting card that someone gets mailed to their home. They open it up and they stick it on the fridge.
Chris: 24:34 – We’ll have a link in the show notes, but I actually got one from you this morning. It’s a picture of us giving our chef Mary a bike and her crying. The hashtag on the front says Oprah’s banker. ‘Cause you get to give out prizes.
Eden: 24:50 – It’s being the banker for all these lovely prizes that I give people. But yeah, so on a lesser scale, you don’t have to give bikes to all your members, but you can start with just a nice personalized message in a card. Literally I send out these cards to people and they post them on their fridge and they’re so happy to receive them. It makes my day and it makes their day. So another part of that is the affinity marketing that happens with that because now their friends are over for dinner and they look on the fridge and they see this card and they see your logo on it and they’re asking a lot more questions about the gym. And now you get this person in front of you eventually for a No-Sweat Intro. Next thing, another tool that you have to give your CSM, which is critical, is a budget for these kinds of rewards or a budget for rewarding the Bright Spots or how do we get them back on track when they’ve fallen off track? Some sort of budget for anything that you’re asking them to do.
Chris: 25:47 – I would go nuts if I didn’t have a budget.
Eden: 25:49 – Yes, you would.
Chris: 25:52 – Now that we figured out how to send steak and lobster dinners to people and stuff, like I can just press a button and I’m logged in and hit send, right? I would just do it every day.
Eden: 26:03 – And you don’t have to give them a budget in dollars necessarily, but you can give them a range of choices. So some parameters are very helpful for somebody who’s an empathetic person to choose from. So they don’t have to think, “What would Chris say if I sent this person a a hundred dollars worth of stuff” or whatever. You just set it up so it’s easy for them.
Chris: 26:25 – And usually you’re sending meaningful gifts too, right? Like, the lion flag. I’ll share the video in the show notes of us handing out lion flags at the summit. I have no idea what those things actually cost, but their value is tremendous.
Eden: 26:40 – Yeah, it’s incredible. I actually was blown away by the value the lion flag. It’s just so, it’s so sentimental. It’s so personal. It’s so touching for entrepreneurs to be rewarded for their struggles and their challenges. And when they overcome them and are rewarded with this, they feel like $1 million. It’s a measurable. But part of that budget and the range of gifts, you know, something that your CSM can choose from or use to track this is that they can track it afterwards, right? So they’ve got this range and I’m allowed to spend $50 a week on this or whatever. And now I can actually track and look at my LEG score increasing and have some values and some actual concrete numbers to pay attention to.
Chris: 27:25 – And that’s key, right? You have to look at LEG like just as you track your cost per acquisition when you’re doing Facebook lead ads and you follow that through the funnel to figure out like what a new client’s costing you, you should be able to track like what is it costing you to increase the length of engagement with every client.
Eden: 27:43 – And another tool that they need, they just need a tool as basic as you want or as sophisticated as they need to track these—to communicate with the coaches or, you know, figure out who is getting what. If that’s just a Google Doc spreadsheet, great, to start. If it’s sticky notes, great. We’ve also had some questions recently, can a CSM work remotely? So sticky notes, that’s not a tool you can use if you’re working remotely. But a simple spreadsheet shared between all your coaches and the CSM who works, you know, 50 miles down the road, that can work. There’s other tools; we use Slack with Two-Brain, it’s just a online tool that’s tracking all your messages in one place that can really work for you. Or if you want to use, you know, the actual software folks use like Wodify or Mindbody if there’s places for notes that pertain to the client, then use those. Or maybe a separate group on Facebook, something as, like I said, sophisticated or as simple as you want. And then we also recommend UpLaunch as a great customer relationship management tool and that will be to send out some automations and some information to your clients in an ongoing fashion and in a directed fashion, depending on what stage of the client journey they’re at.
Chris: 29:00 – So just keeping track of people, right? So maybe they called you, maybe they did a No-Sweat Intro and didn’t sign up. Or maybe they have left your gym. And nobody ever followed up with them. I mean, even for the sake of getting client stories, like in the Farmer Phase, you need to make your clients famous by telling their stories on video or whatever. Exactly like CrossFit.com did. But if the coach doesn’t have time to do that, having the CSM do that is incredibly valuable.
Eden: 29:28 – Absolutely. Your gym is there to help people feel good about themselves. I think we’d all agree, and this is such a easy, affordable and beautiful way to do that.
Chris: 29:43 – All right, Eden. So I think we made the point that like this is a strong ROI. So what are five things that gyms could do right now that would really affect their length of engagement with their clients?
Eden: 30:01 – So one thing is, and I think we’ve made this abundantly clear, is get started with a CSM today. I think that role can be started in as few as two hours. And we talked earlier about, you know, who to hire, how to hire them. Just jump in, you know, a remote person to do this. Or a person from your gym, we’re good either way. Number two, second thing would be map your client journey as it stands today and find any gaps, because we need to know where those gaps are so we can have somebody fill those gaps in that role as the CSM.
Chris: 30:36 – What’s a client journey? Maybe somebody hasn’t heard our episode about that.
Eden: 30:40 – OK, sure. So your prospect’s journey starts before they actually become a member of your gym. And your client journey can contain that piece of it. But it’s actually the way in which a client travels through your gym. So by the time they come to the front door, who’s greeting them? Are they sitting down for a No-Sweat Intro or do they just start group classes? Maps it all the way through till they actually, if or when they cancel and leave your gym. It just maps the steps they take. If they interface with the software, if they interface with a human and if they interface with, you know, your coaches, you need to map the steps that they take and the person or people or softwares that they contact.
Chris: 31:26 – And we do that in the Incubator.
Eden: 31:28 – Yes. Another thing that we would encourage you to do today that makes a huge difference is just start Bright Spots Fridays if you’re not already celebrating and having your members celebrate their own successes in your Facebook private members group, I would encourage you to start that. It’s so powerful, on Fridays, Chris and I have to close our computers and not look at the Bright Spots on the Two-Brain private members’ page. But within Catalyst, Chris’s gym, they’re so powerful. Like the people are celebrating successes and milestones in there that are so wonderful to hear about. And if you start doing that and have a CSM hire, they can celebrate right along with them and they can actually start that ship, right, they can start those Bright Spots off on Friday mornings and then they can take those Bright Spots, turn it into a card and send that card to someone—.
Chris: 32:20 – Or testimonial or whatever.
Eden: 32:23 – Yeah, exactly. Go to that person now and talk to him about that Bright Spot and record it on film. Fourth thing is you have to actually measure your current length of engagement. Your current LEG. Don’t assume that people stick around for two years and be surprised to find out that they stick around for 12 months.
Chris: 32:41 – Yeah, I think this is huge and a lot of people make assumptions about what improves retention. Like, so a lot of gyms will actually come in and they’re doing like two gym family member outings a month, you know, so one night, oh we’re all going to the bar and the other night, oh we’re all going to play slow pitch. And that’s a lot of extra work. You know, it really, it plays on your family time if you have a family and you’re a gym owner, and you might be doing that for nothing.
Eden: 33:08 – Your members might not be that interested or they were interested one time, once, but you’re continuing on and it might be a huge waste. So, the fifth thing that you can do that we’d encourage is to institute an on-ramp program at your gym. Cause that will make a huge difference on how clients can actually be set up for success.
Chris: 33:31 – It’s funny that we even have to say this now because it seems self-evident, but you know, when I wrote the original “Two-Brain Business,” most people didn’t have an on=ramp process at all. And so after tracking this stuff for over a decade and thousands of gyms, the number one determinant of how long somebody stays is how well they’re on-boarded, right? So it’s mapping the client journey first so that you’ve got everything on paper and you know exactly what a person’s steps are going to be, but then also like providing the best steps to exercise with you. And that might lead to group training. It might not. So, OK, well that’s awesome, Eden. Let’s say that somebody has some questions and they’re like, how do I find a CSM? How do I hire? What should their job description be? How can they get ahold of you?
Eden: 34:18 – So you can email me. It’s Eden, eden@twobrainbusiness.com, and I promise to return your messages and I am really excited to help other people implement this in their business. So drop me a line. I would love to help you make a difference.
Chris: 34:34 – So amazing. Thanks.
Eden: 34:36 – Thank you.
Greg: 34:37 – Thank you for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Make sure to subscribe to receive the most up-to-date episodes wherever you get your podcasts from. To find out how we can help create your Perfect Day, book a free call with a mentor at twobrainbusiness.com.
Greg Strauch will be here every Thursday with the Two-Brain Radio Podcast.
Two-Brain Marketing episodes come out Mondays, and host Mateo Lopez focuses on sales and digital marketing.
On Wednesdays, Sean Woodland tells the best stories in the CrossFit community on Two-Brain Radio With Sean Woodland.
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