Chris Cooper (00:00):
Is your marketing actually working? I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” And if you’re not measuring these four marketing metrics, it’s impossible to know. So first I’m gonna tell you what to measure, then I’m gonna tell you how the best in the world are tracking at these metrics, and then I’m gonna tell you exactly how to fix them. So this is how you fix your funnel, and it all starts with measuring where the problems might be. So let’s start with leads. Leads are the people who land on your website. They could be coming from your or organic media, from your social media or from your paid ads, but they get to your website. The next thing we wanna measure is set rate. And these are the number of people who visit your site and then take the next step and set an appointment.
Chris Cooper (00:49):
So these are people who are interested enough to sit down and hear your pitch. They book a No Sweat Intro with you. The third metric is show rate: The number of people who book an appointment and then actually show up for it. Sadly, this is rarely a hundred percent. The people who show are the ones who are serious about signing up. They are yours to lose. And the fourth metric to measure is your close rate. This is the number of people who buy. Now, none of these four metrics will be a perfect a hundred percent at any time. However, if you know these numbers, then you can diagnose the problems in your marketing. For example, a lot of people will say things like “Facebook ads don’t work for me.” But they’re not measuring how many people go from the Facebook ad to the their website, or they’re not measuring how many people who hit their website actually book an appointment or how many of those people actually show up or how many of those who show up actually sign up.
Chris Cooper (01:45):
So the problem might not be Facebook marketing at all. Zuckerberg might be doing a great job, but you’re not converting the people who get to the website, and those people aren’t booking an appointment, and then those people aren’t showing up. You don’t know until you measure. So we actually measure these metrics separately, and I’m gonna show you what the best in the world at each individual metric are doing to improve it and do so well right now. Now we report these separately because we can learn from the gyms that post the best numbers in each category. We share their scores publicly so that you have something to aim for, not so that you can compare your results against theirs. Here are our leaders worldwide for appointments set, appointments showed and appointments closed in May 2023. As soon as I walk you through these leaderboards, I’ll tell you what to and do to improve at each stage.
Chris Cooper (02:36):
OK, so let’s talk about people who are booking the most appointments on their website. We’re not gonna track leads because that’s almost irrelevant. If you get a thousand leads hitting your website and nobody’s booking an appointment, who cares how many more leads you can get? That’s why, you know, as a sidebar here, the marketing agencies who promise you 30 new leads or whatever, that’s just not relevant because if you’re not getting them to book appointments, if they’re not showing up for their appointments, if you’re not selling them at their appointments, you could get a million leads and it won’t matter. So let’s start with not how many leads people are getting but how many appointments they’re booking. That’s the first real step to tell you whether your marketing’s working. We’re gonna go through the top 10 in reverse order. Number 10 from Canada. Woo-hoo.
Chris Cooper (03:22):
They had 33 appointments booked last month. That means they had more than one appointment booked every single day for a new client. Pretty awesome. Up from there is 34. The owner of this gym, they’re in the States. They actually have two gyms, but this is just at one of their gyms. They had 34 appointments booked in May. Up from there, also in the U.S., 36 appointments booked. In seventh place, 36 appointments booked. In sixth place, 37 appointments booked. In fifth, a women’s-only gym, 37 appointments booked, also in the States. And now here’s where some of the leaders really start to pull away. Fourth place is a strength-training gym—they had 47 appointments booked. Third place is an F45. They had 60 appointments booked in May. Second place is actually a kickboxing franchise. And they had a hundred appointments booked in May.
Chris Cooper (04:14):
So it’s a hundred appointments, consultations booked. And in first place, this is absolutely bananas. This leader, they’re from Croatia. They had 214 appointments booked in May. Imagine having seven appointments booked every single day through the month of May, right? Maybe you don’t even want that many, but this is what the Number 1 gym in the world is doing for appointments booked, and we can learn from them, right? So whether you just want to get more generally fit and you don’t wanna be a powerlifter, you can still learn from the best deadlifter in the world about how to get better at deadlifting and improve your overall fitness. Even if you don’t want 214 NSIs in a single month or you don’t have that kind of capacity, you can still learn from them. By all means, do what the best are doing and then dial it back instead of just saying like, “I don’t wanna do whatever that is.”
Chris Cooper (05:06):
OK, so that’s NSI is booked. Congratulations to the top gyms—between one appointment booked and seven appointments booked a day. Incredible. Now let’s go to how many of those clients actually showed and look at the leaders worldwide for appointments showed. All right, so what’s really interesting here is that a lot of the places who are good at booking appointments are also great at getting clients to show up. And that’s really important because if you’re booking a thousand appointments a month and only 200 show up, then your show rate’s very, very low. You’re actually better to have a high percentage of the people who booked appointments actually show up because that tells you the leads you’re getting are good and they’re actually interested in your product. They’re not just clicking on random ads to see what you’re all about. So in 10th place, we had 24 people show. This is the same gym, and they’re in Canada. Congrats!
Chris Cooper (06:02):
In ninth place, 26 appointments actually showed—really amazing. You’re basically doing a sales appointment every single day. In eighth place—tied. We had two gyms with 29 appointments showed last month. In sixth place, fifth place, 33. And again, like that’s a sports-specific performance training gym. Very cool. In fourth, we had a strength-training gym have 40 appointments show. In third, we had an F45 franchise with 41 appointments showed. In second, it was more of a health-care facility in Europe—they had 62 appointments show. And get this: This is bananas. We had a kickboxing studio in first place last month. They’re in the State. They had a hundred NSIs actually show up. Now, this isn’t like the free-tour, try-a-free-workout, free trial. That’s not what this is. This is sitting down for a No Sweat Intro, a sales appointment, and talking about membership.
Chris Cooper (07:04):
OK? If you’re just running a free trial on Saturday and 10 people show up for it, that’s not as good as getting one person to sit down at a desk with you and talk about their best prescription, their best course of action and how you can solve their problems. So this gym had a hundred people show up for those appointments. Congratulations to them. What a milestone. We can all learn so much, and I’m gonna share their top lessons in a moment. Now let’s turn to closes. In the past, some people have asked me, why don’t you show rates? And the reality is that if we share hard numbers, we can learn right from them. So sharing hard numbers means that I can talk about this person’s bench squat and deadlift. If I just share percentages and say like, well this person has a total of 2,000 pounds and 80 percent of that is their deadlift, it’s confusing to try and learn from the best, right? Different people are the best in different categories. And it’s interesting that while a lot of the same gyms are on all three leaderboards for set, show and close, they’re not in the same ranking. So they all still have work to do to improve. And I don’t want to bury that by sharing a rate or percentage. I wanna share the actual numbers. So here we go. First off, NSIs closed. We had a gym in the States do 21. They’re in tenth place. They had people show up, and 21 of them signed up for new memberships last month. That’s great, right? And of course it’s not like the exaggerated numbers that you might see on Facebook: “I’m gonna get you 50 new clients in a month.” But what you actually have to ask yourself is how many people could you get and keep in a month?
Chris Cooper (08:46):
For me, 21 is a big number. Like, I don’t know if I could bring 21 into my gym right now and keep all of them. That’s why these numbers are so impressive: These gyms are signing these people up and keeping them long term. In ninth place, 22 new members last month. In eighth place, 23—amazing. In seventh, 24. In sixth place, 26 new members last month. That’s a new person come in going through their NSI and starting an onboarding process before joining the group every single day that you were open last month. Incredible. In fifth place, 27 new members signed up last month. In fourth place, 28. In third place, 29. In second place, 34. And in first place, 46 new members last month. That’s absolutely incredible. And here’s another thing I want you to keep in mind. For most gyms, according to our data set of 16,000 microgyms worldwide, the average client coming in is gonna pay about $112 for their first month. In a Two-Brain gym, every client that’s coming in is going to pay double or triple that in their first month. Part of that is their onboarding process, or they might be introduced to personal training, but we customize the prescription for the client, and that usually means a higher-value service for the client and a much faster outcome for them getting to their goals, too. So what’s interesting here is that while you know, 10th place is 21 new clients, those 21 clients could be worth as much as 50 or 60 clients at the average gym. 21 is a lot. It’s more than I think I would want at my gym, but congratulations to these people. I also don’t want an 800-pound deadlift. So let’s get back to how they did it. Now, if you’re looking at our blog this week or you’re watching this on YouTube, there’s a cool graphic that’s gonna show you, depending on where the weaknesses are in your funnel, exactly what to do to fix them.
Chris Cooper (10:43):
But remember, if you’re not tracking these metrics and you’re not breaking down your funnel step by step, you’ll never know what’s going wrong, and you might attribute it to something that’s actually working. You might stop doing something that’s actually working because you don’t know that it’s working, right? So here we go. First off, if you need more leads into your funnel, there’s really only about three things that you can do. You can increase your ad spend, you can refresh your creative—so put out more in different media—or you can test an alternate offer. You know, maybe the pitch that you’re making just isn’t appealing to people. Now if you’re tracking your metrics, what you can do is you can be testing three or four different ads at a time. And this is what we actually teach in our course is once you learn how to do Facebook and Instagram ads, you test three at a time, and you run them for a month at very minimal cost, and then you figure out which one’s working best and you move all the money to that one so that you’re going bullets and then cannonballs basically.
Chris Cooper (11:40):
OK? Now next, if you’re getting leads but you need more appointments set, then you can improve your speed to contact. So you can pick up the phone and call them faster. The best rule of thumb is call ’em within 10 minutes if you can. I know this is awkward at first, but the reality is they’ve filled in information because they want to talk to you. And so the greatest service that you can do them as their future coach is just pick up the phone and call ’em. Get over your awkward feelings and just say, “Am I willing to do this hard thing in order to help this other human who needs me?” OK? So that’s the first thing that you can do. The next thing that you can do to get more appointments is improve the call to action on your website.
Chris Cooper (12:22):
Part of this means having a website that actually works. I know back in the day, we all created our own websites, and they were these masterful works of art, and they didn’t do anything. Really. If you’re using something like Kilo, these places will show you exactly how many leads you’re getting and how many of those leads are booking calls. It. The CRM helps with that, and I’ll come to lead nurture in a moment, but the reality is just knowing it gives you a superpower. It gives you a button to push, a lever to pull. You can take action if you know. It’s a diagnostic tool, OK? How to get more NSI booked? There’s a couple more things you can do. So I said you can improve your speed to contact and you can improve your call to action on your website.
Chris Cooper (13:06):
You can also just increase your outreach volume, right? You can run more ads, and you can get more people into your funnel. This is what most people default to. And I know we kinda poo-pooed it because we say “fix your funnel first before you pour more water into it,” but the reality is even if you’ve got a broken funnel, if you pour water into it faster, like more leads are gonna come out the other end, right? And, finally, the last thing is call leads more often. So one thing that you can do is you pick up the phone, somebody fills out a form on your site, you call ’em within 10 minutes, they don’t answer. You think, “Oh, they don’t want to hear from me.” Call ’em again. Try ’em. Like these are human beings whose lives you can dramatically impact. They’re worth the extra effort.
Chris Cooper (13:47):
They are very uncomfortable filling out this form. They’re going to be uncomfortable walking into your gym. They’re gonna be uncomfortable working out in front of strangers. You can shoulder some of that discomfort. You can get a little bit uncomfortable and do the thing that makes you uncomfortable, which is picking up the phone and calling them or calling them twice or three times. You know, sometimes you have to call people five or six times before you catch ’em at the right time or before it’s convenient or before they’re comfortable answering. And they’re not gonna call you a jerk. What they’re going to say is “here’s why I talked to you in the first place.” Right? And it’s not like you’re chasing them. What you’re doing is you are taking the first few steps toward them so that then they can take the steps toward you.
Chris Cooper (14:28):
Alright? If you need to improve your show rate—so these are the people who booked appointments, but they’re not showing up. There are a few things that you can do. First, you can send personal messages through video or text. If you’re in gymownersunited.com and you’re getting our free resources and you know, maybe you asked me a question through Facebook Messenger, I might respond with a voice message, you know, because sometimes I can talk faster than I can type, but sometimes I want to tell you a story, or sometimes I want to tell you how your struggles relate to mine. And I’ll tell you. What that does is it builds trust between me and you. And if you send me a voice message back, then I get more context, too, and I get to hear how you’re feeling, and I get more cues about whether you’re frustrated or scared or whatever, right?
Chris Cooper (15:17):
So upgrading like your communication method really helps people to know, like, and trust you faster. So personal messages through video or text are amazing. I don’t use video very often. It’s just really easy to send a voice message. You can also build rapport through email or text. So when somebody books an NSI, you can’t just go dark and wait for ’em to show up. They wanna know that they’ve done it right? They want a confirmation that they have an appointment. They want reminders. People expect this stuff now, right? If they book an appointment and they never hear from you, they’re gonna question whether you got the a booking or whether they did it right? You know? So they need to hear from you. Start that communication thread. Remember, it’s a conversation, not a monologue. Ask them questions. Next, you can also create some scarcity or urgency before your appointment.
Chris Cooper (16:06):
So one thing that you can do is you can say, “Hey, Jimmy, I’ve got three appointment slots today. I’m really fired up that they’re all booked. I wanna make sure that you’re gonna show up, though, because there’s a list of five people who really want that slot. OK?” It’s up to you whether you feel comfortable with this. I don’t—unless I really do have a long waiting list. And you could say, “Hey, Jimmy, dropping you a line man. So fired up to see you at 1 o’clock. If something has come up and you need to cancel, please let me know right now because other people would really love to get in that spot, OK?” It’s not just a psychological challenge for them. It’s showing them like your time is important and that they need to take it seriously and that they are important enough to warrant your full attention.
Chris Cooper (16:49):
The last thing that you can do to improve your show rate is one of those “oh, man, I should have thought of that” moments that I have all the time. And that is get them the appointment as fast as possible. Look, if, if they’re scrolling through your page and they’re like, “OK, that’s it. Now’s the time I’ve gotta book this thing,” and then they wait two weeks to talk to you, or even a week, their passion’s gonna cool off, right? They’re gonna forget the mental state they were in when they booked that appointment, and they won’t think of it again until they’re back in that mental state, and then they’re starting from scratch and they’ve wasted a month. And they could have been so much more fit if you got them into an appointment quickly. So you need to have appointment availability almost all the time.
Chris Cooper (17:29):
If you can only get people into an appointment at 6 a.m. Monday through Friday, that’s not gonna be convenient for everybody. And so as you level up as an owner and you buy yourself time, part of the time should be creating availability to have these consultations with people and get them in there as quickly as you can. Now, if you need to improve your close rate, there are some things that you can do that will help. The Number 1 thing, though, is to practice, practice, practice. Get reps. At Two-Brain, we do reps with mentors one on one. We give you this thing called a “scenario deck” that lets you role-play with your staff. We have Office Hours where you can come in and role-play every single week if you want to. You can grab other people in the group and just role-play.
Chris Cooper (18:11):
But the reality is you will not be comfortable with sales because you’re bringing all this baggage to the conversation. Number 1, you’re bringing the baggage that you were taught by people who don’t have money, right? Your teachers, maybe your parents, about how salespeople are evil or they’re tricky or they’re trying to fool people. You’re bringing that baggage in. Second, you’re bringing in the baggage of projection. There’s so much on the line here. “What happens if they don’t sign up? Oh my god, I’m not gonna eat this week.” So you need to get reps to get over those things and just get comfortable with it. There’s a couple of other things you can do to improve your close rate. First, prequalify your leads. Now, if you have less than 150 clients in your gym, don’t worry about this step. Get people in. Even if your close rate is low, there’s value in getting reps and just having these conversations, OK?
Chris Cooper (19:01):
But if you’re at 150 clients, you know you’re making over $80,000 a year take home, you might wanna prequalify your leads. There’s some simple ways to do this. Number 1, put your prices on your website. If price is gonna be a big objection and you’ve got enough clients, let’s get that outta the way first, OK? Next you can call ’em up and say, “Hey, making sure that I’ve got the solution for you so that we don’t waste each other’s time here. What goals are you looking for?” And you have a conversation. You get a sense of their budget, whether they’re a good fit or not before you actually sit down to the NSI. Again, if you have less than 150 clients or you’re not making what you wanna make per year, skip this step. Don’t pre-qualify. Just get them in.
Chris Cooper (19:43):
Another way that will help your close rate is to build rapport in advance. If you’ve got a solid bank of media out there—even if it’s social media, like Instagram—they will feel like they know you before they enter your office. If you don’t have a good social-media presence, if you don’t publish a blog or a podcast and they know nothing about you, then they are making a deal with a stranger. It is so much easier to make a deal with somebody when you feel like you know them, you like them and you trust them. They will be excited. So build rapport by constantly publishing. Third, clarify their problem. Follow the Prescriptive Model. Their problem is not “I don’t have a CrossFit gym to belong to.” Their problem is “I wanna feel better. I wanna have more energy. I might wanna lose some weight. I might wanna make my arms bigger. I might wanna feel stronger. I don’t wanna feel tight anymore. I don’t wanna feel sick all the time.” Whatever that problem is, you need to help them clarify that and then sell them the solution. Simply selling your spin class, your kickboxing class, your workout—that is not solving their problem. And you’re gonna have a much lower conversion rate because now you gotta convince them to just try your thing and see if it works. OK? The next step to improve your close rate is clearly tell them how you will help. So don’t just say, “You can come to class three times a week.” You can say, “Doing constantly varied functional movement at high intensity will help boost up your metabolism. And so you’ll see a little bit of weight gain slowly, but those results will compound over time and you’ll start losing weight faster and faster.”
Chris Cooper (21:15):
That’s how you tell ’em how your service will solve their problem. You don’t do it by pulling out your spreadsheets. You don’t do it by drawing graphs on the floor. These are all mistakes that I’ve made. You don’t need to barf on ’em for an hour. You just need to clearly define their problem and then tell them how your service will help. And if it won’t help, you need to tell ’em that, too. Finally, create conviction and ask them to sign up. Creating conviction is easy. It’s basically, “Does this make sense to you? Make sense? Sound good?” And as soon as they say yes to something, then you’ve got some conviction, and it’s time to say, “Are you ready to get started?” That’s it. Not, “How would you like to pay for this?” Not, “Will you sign a one year contract?” Nothing that makes you uncomfortable. Just say, “Are you ready to get started?”
Chris Cooper (21:58):
And their answer to that is gonna be a yes or a no. If it’s a yes, say, “Great. Here’s how to pay.” If it’s a no, then say, “OK, what do I have to do to remove the obstacles that are stopping you from getting started right now?” You’re coaching, right? You are solving their problems for them. You are good at this. All you have to do is get rid of your own baggage. So that’s how you improve your appointments set, showed and closed. And, of course, you know, nobody needs to do all of these things all the time all at once. Nobody needs to do them right now. But what you do need to do is figure out where the weakest links are in your funnel by looking at metrics and then strive to improve them. I’m Chris Cooper. This is “Run a Profitable Gym.” If you want to talk about this episode or any episode, you can go to gymownersunited.com. That’s our free Facebook group, where we answer questions. We share these leaderboards. We share top tips publicly for free for over 7,000 gym owners around the world. Thank you for your service. Thank you for changing lives!
