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The business community is OBSESSED with lead generation and lead capture. Here’s why you shouldn’t be. If you’re a CrossFit gym, I’m sure you’ve seen the ads on Facebook: “Endless funnels! Download our free guide.” “Guaranteed 100 new leads!” – there are more, but they all sound the same. Very soon, a reliable marketing company will become the obvious choice for our gyms. Lead generation and SEO and ad targeting will be taken off our plates. And I can’t wait for that to happen. But what most gyms need is NOT marketing at all. What MOST gyms need is SALES. Here’s the difference: Marketing puts your name in front of people for the first time. It guides them to your door. And then it stops, and sales take over. Marketing starts with a very cold audience (they’ve probably never heard of you) and warms them up to the point of interest. Marketing won’t get anyone to pay for your service (Virtually no one enters their credit card online before visiting, do they? Maybe one in two hundred.) Marketing gets them to book the free consultation or No-Sweat Intro. At the very least, marketing puts people on your email list. Then Sales takes over. Yes, “Sales” is a dirty word. I get it. When I say “sales”, I’m not talking about the used-car-salesman stuff (or worse, the gym-membership-sales stuff). If you’ve read my books or anything I’ve published in the last 5 years, you already know that. In our case, “sales” means telling the person what’s best for them–in other words, coaching. But for the sake of this post, it’s important to differentiate the two parts of the process. You’ll see why in a moment. Marketing gets people to pay attention. Sales gets people to pay money. The thing is, you probably already have ENOUGH people paying attention…even if you don’t have enough people paying you money. Let’s look at your ...

By Jeff Burlingame, Two-Brain Mentor  Filling programs can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a strategy or plan. In order to get the most involvement and the most signups for any program whether it be a barbell club, a 6 week course, seminars, or even personal training and nutrition programs, we follow this template.  6 weeks out  Host a 20 minute session with all of your coaches to test out pieces of your upcoming course. Be sure to record this session so that you can use clips from it as marketing content. Post the clips from this recording publically on your social media profiles at least once a week for the next 2 weeks.  4 weeks out  Host a free 30 minute clinic with your mavens (your seed clients). If you’re not sure how to identify your mavens, click here for more information on that. You’ll want to record the free 30 minute clinic and ideally get some good photos as well as video that you can use. Make sure you get video of mavens who have tried a new progression and were then able to accomplish a movement they didn’t think they were able to before. Try to capture as many before and after videos and photos as you can because these speak to the efficacy of your program. This is before and after style content is what you’ll be posting 3 times per week for the next 4 weeks which will take you right up to the launch of your new program.  2 weeks out  Host a free class or event where you can test this new program out on your members. You’ll want to make this a public event so you can bring in more non-member leads. Keep this free class or event to a maximum of 30 minutes and be sure to have a sign in where you can collect attendee names, phone numbers, and emails. The people ...

I haven’t sold supplements at Catalyst in over a decade. Early in my fitness career, I thought selling supplements was the way to make money. So I spent most of my “research time” online, sifting through PubMed, trying to find the best supplements. I thought that was what would help my clients most. I didn’t learn the best supplements to sell. In fact, what I learned turned me off selling supplements forever. One of the greatest scams in supplements is “the combo deal”: Protein XXX contains creatine; Super Phosphate ZXR contains the trademarked ZipAminos; PumpUpTheVolume YXT contains protein, nitrous oxide, CO2, gold dust, and pixie wing particles (TM.) The “combo deal” in supplements is a scam because it always means lower quality of every kind. Put two low-quality supplements together, and sellers can offer a lower price. The public thinks they’re getting a better deal, and margins are higher for the seller. But the quality of a combo is always less. I also learned this lesson while selling treadmills: if you want to hide a weak motor, just have a cool-looking dashboard. Greg Glassman doesn’t sell equipment; he recommends Rogue. I can build websites myself. I could hire a site designer, and a SEO expert, and a conversions expert, and sell their services through the TwoBrain platform. I’m in mentoring programs with some of the top conversions experts in the world. I could hire VAs to set up lead generators and click magnets and Facebook funnels and landing pages. But I don’t. I don’t because I don’t want to sell “the combo deal”. I don’t want to make a mediocre website with not-too-bad SEO and pretty good landing pages, and combo that with low-cost consulting. No thanks. I don’t want to sell a “video course”, or combine a website with mentorship. Because I’d prefer to be excellent at one thing instead of pretty good at two. We have partners for ...