To change lives, you have to Help Best: make the prescription that will help the client, then get the client to accept the prescription.
But you can’t help people change their lives if you can’t even get them into your building.
Prospects must first be coached to do three things on their journey to become clients:
- 1. You must get them to set appointments to meet you (set rate).
- 2. You must do everything you can to make them show up for those appointments (show rate).
- 3. You must give them clear solutions to their problems and get them to sign up for your program so they can start changing their lives (close rate).
That’s three simple steps—but no part of the process is easy. In fact, most gyms bleed clients at every stage.
Here’s a common scenario: A gym owner spends time and money on Facebook ads or media content or other advertising. They drive clients to their website:
- The potential client doesn’t book an appointment.
- Or the lead doesn’t show up for the booked appointment.
- Or the lead shows up but doesn’t sign up.
The end result in every case is that someone who needs help doesn’t get it.
If you’re serious about improving health and fitness—I know you are—you must seal up the holes in your marketing chain.
We study these chains in gyms all over the world every month, and we rank them by set rate, show rate and close rate. Then we ask the gym owners what they’re doing to post industry-leading stats.
I’ll give you quotes from this month’s leaders after I roll out July’s marketing leaderboards:
First, you should know that these numbers aren’t flashes in the pan. We asked the owners if the stats were out of the ordinary. Almost all leaders said no.
- “We regularly close this volume and at this percentage.”
- “It’s a fairly ordinary number.”
- “We expect this trend to continue as we are going strong in only the first week of the new month. We’ve closed five of five sales thus far for September (at the time of this interview, very early in the month).”
Now, here’s what our leaders did to post those numbers.
Paid ads funnel: “We have my husband marketing for us, constantly updating, and we spend a fair amount on ads—$60 a day.”
Paid ads funnel: “The numbers for the past two months have been extraordinary, but those are the two months where we started to run Facebook lead ads and have a designated person (client success manager) call leads every day. So even though they are extraordinary in regard to past months and years, it seems like this could be a ‘new normal’ for us because we are continuing this process, which worked for us during summer.”
Paid ads funnel: “I think what we do differently is spending a lot—LOL. We probably have one of the highest ad spends. My husband is also updating the ads as soon as they start to drop in performance.”
A word on ads: You don’t need to spend a ton of money on advertising. We teach clients how to run and test paid ads, and we supply the ads, too. Then we determine which ads are working best and direct cash there to add fuel to the fire. But we start small—maybe $5 or $10 a day.
Gyms that are spending a lot of cash on ads have already gone through this scientific process, and they know exactly what works, so they’re adding fuel. They’re not just randomly firing lots of money into the ad machine and hoping for the best.
More quotes:
Automations and personal touch: “We use Kilo for auto lead nurture but do a lot of personalized reach out, too. We started using the 5130 drip campaign in addition monthly, and it’s increased the number of appointments booked as well.”
Automations and personal touch: “These last two months were the first with the new CSM, and one of her daily tasks was to confirm the NSIs for the upcoming day. Besides her, we have a coach confirm the NSI on the day of the NSI, sending a copy/paste repeatable message. It is more work, but it worked for us in the past when we were tackling the issue of people not showing up.”
Metrics: “We ensure everything is clear and standardized, and we track our metrics very tightly (weekly) to triage things at source if there are any swings in how we are trending.”
Staff training: “Consistency: We do sales training with our client success manager/sales team regularly. We’ve refined our sales process and pricing sheets over time to make it simpler and clearer for prospects.”
And here are a few quotes that warm my heart. Help First means giving info away for free. Help Best means making the prescription that will help the client, then coaching the client to accept the prescription, sign up and start changing their life.
Help First: “We have Help First and Help Best at the heart of everything we do!”
Help First: “We focused mostly on lead nurture and truly being the solution to our prospects’ needs. We provide value even before the prospect buys.”
Help First: “We truly care about getting our members and clients results. I feel like that shows when we present pricing and explain how we can help our members get to their goals.”
Mentorship: “I believe we did not do anything ‘extra’ other than all of the things we learned through Two-Brain.”
Help Best
You have to sell the coaching that will get people results—that’s the Help Best principle.
Let’s face it: It’s not hard to figure out how to lose weight or get stronger. The knowledge is out there.
But people still don’t lose weight, get stronger or accomplish their goals. Why not? They need coaching.
Before you can coach a client to squat deeper or eat better, you must coach a prospective client to make an appointment, show up for that appointment and sign up to work with you.
