Andrew (00:00):
It’s Two-Brain Radio. And Chris Cooper is behind the mic to deliver the results of recent tests. Coop will give you his data-backed recommendations on Clubhouse, Sell By Chat and sales and free consultations right after this. Back to Superman
Chris (00:13):
Back to Two-Brain Radio in just a minute. Chalk It Pro is a fitness app designed and built by gym owners for gym owners to solve annoying problems that make running a gym hard. It’s an all-in-one app that manages your members, including remote members. It also takes care of programming and it will help you keep clients engaged for longer. Use Chalk It Pro to increase value and build your bottom line. Add more personal training and remote coaching clients. Build a thriving community through social engagement and save loads of time on the backend. Do all this with one app, not three or four. Get your free trial at Chalkitpro.com.
Chris (00:48):
Hey, it’s Chris Cooper here. And today I’m going to talk about failure. The bio on Amazon for most of my books used to start out with, “If Chris Cooper has a superpower, it’s that he’s failed more often than anyone else.” And it’s a really common myth in entrepreneurship that you have to fail and fail and fail, and eventually you’ll be successful. And you have to get these failures out of the way first and the faster you can fail the faster you’ll eventually be successful. I want to tell you that is not true. It’s an absolute lie. Instead, what is actually true is that to be an entrepreneur you’re going to fail, but your ultimate success depends on your ability to learn from failure. If you’re not learning from failure, if you’re not auditing what you’re doing, if you’re not saying, does this work, or could I use my time better?
Chris (01:35):
Or what would work better than this? You will not get anywhere. It took me a long time to get this, because my ego wouldn’t let me evaluate what I was currently doing. And so I was running this gym. It was paying me $40,000 per year. And I thought, well, I’m successful because I’m not literally starving to death. My gym is making money, technically it’s profitable. And so this is what success must mean. Until I said, well, what if there’s a better way? What if somebody else has figured this out before me? What if I don’t need to reinvent this all from scratch? And when I did that, I started realizing that others were doing it differently. Now I still had to get over the hurdle of, oh crap, am I really going to risk what I have to get what I want? And that’s a story for another day.
Chris (02:22):
Change is a scary thing. And that’s what a mentor’s job is to do, help you manage change. But today I want to talk about audit. I want to talk about testing and it’s a really important topic to me right now. And so I’m just going to kind of riff on this for one second. The reason that testing and proof is so important now, more important than ever before is that the market is being flooded with these business coaching pyramid schemes. And so what you get is like this chief kind of business coach who has a great idea. And then he says, I’m going to sell this idea to other business coaches. And I’m going to teach those business coaches how to sell it to other business coaches. And then those business coaches are going to sell it to gym owners. And so by the time an idea hits the gym owner, it’s been passed from hand to hand through this kind of game of telephone from one person to the other.
Chris (03:10):
Unfortunately, usually those ideas haven’t been tested at all and the people who are buying them have no actual experience in business. They can’t say this worked for me and they really don’t own a gym. What they’re doing is they’re selling you an idea. This would be absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with good ideas. There’s nothing wrong with finding inspiration in new ideas. It would be fine if a gym owner had unlimited time and resources to try everything, but we don’t. And so the question that I’m always asking myself is if I had one hour today to grow my gym, is this the best use of that hour? We set up our mentorship programs to basically set you up to optimize that hour. So our ramp up program, the intent is that you create that hour for yourself. You build a foundation where you can try these ideas and work on growth, and then you move into growth phase and you spend that hour a day working on your business with marketing and sales and elevating your team and intrapreneurialism and all those things that will grow the pie.
Chris (04:12):
But you still only got about an hour a day to do that. Your time resources will always be finite even when your financial resources become greater. And so today I’m going to talk about testing. One of the most important things we do at Two-Brain is we perform objective tests on new strategies and ideas. And these go on behind the scenes. They usually run for about three months at a time. And what we’ll do is we’ll pick up an idea from the mentor team or from outside Two-Brain or even from our own clients. And we’ll say, well, that sounds really interesting. Like it has a lot of potential. Let’s test it to see if it’ll actually help gym owners. And sometimes the answer is yes. And so we put that in our curriculum and sometimes the answer is, Hey, it really helped the original gym owner, but it doesn’t extrapolate to everybody.
Chris (04:57):
So we go back and we work on it some more. And sometimes the answer is just, no, this actually doesn’t work at all. And so today I’m going to share some of the results of the testing that we’ve been doing, because I’ve got this bad habit of only talking about the stuff that works. Instead, I want to talk today about some of the stuff that doesn’t work, so that I can save you some time, some resources and you know, probably some money and a lot of headache and stress by stopping you from going down the wrong road before you discover the right road. So I’ve actually got three things that we’ve been testing recently. Some of these are ideas that I love and they’ve been proven to work. Some of them are concepts that I think might work, but we’re still kind of in a testing phase.
Chris (05:39):
And sometimes there are things that just won’t work at all. So we’re going to review a couple of things today. The other thing to keep in mind here is that sometimes something will work if you’re in the tinker phase, something is more appropriate if you’re in the farmer phase, sometimes something will work if you’re in the founder phase, but a lot of the time something won’t work or should not take up that hour of your day if you’re in the founder phase, because it’s a more advanced strategy or it takes so much time to get it going, that there are lower hanging fruit that you can take advantage of. If you’re not familiar with these phases, founder, farmer, tinker, and thief, just send us an email and I’ll point you to my book by the same name. So the first thing that we’re going to review today is Clubhouse.
Chris (06:22):
Clubhouse was super duper popular, around January, 2021. A lot of people were still in lockdown at that point. And the platform looked promising because we could all walk around with headphones in all day. The problem with Clubhouse is that there is no native instant messaging way to reach people. Also, there was no recording. So if you wanted to talk to people on Clubhouse, you had to be on Clubhouse all the time. Now, the biz coaches who were primarily the people saying the Clubhouse was working for them. These are people who are spending literally 12 to 16 hours a day on Clubhouse. And so when we tested this, we set this up with a few different mentors. We hosted a couple of chat rooms daily. And then we said, can this translate into sales for gyms? The problem was when you’re on Clubhouse and you’re talking, you say, OK, to continue the conversation, DM me on Instagram, or send me a message on Facebook messenger or whatever.
Chris (07:15):
You know, you have to take them off platform to have a real conversation. So, you know, we tried this and we actually did get one conversion in one gym, but ultimately if you weigh the time spent on Clubhouse to the actual conversion rate, it’s really not worth your time. So Clubhouse for us was not recommended for founders, not recommended for farmers, and it’s not recommended for tinkers either. The next thing that we tested was a new sales process called Sell By Chat. So if you’re thinking about a marketing funnel, I don’t have to tell you guys like what goes into a marketing funnel. But the top of that funnel is awareness, right? You’re capturing people’s attention. They hear about you. The second phase of that funnel is to have a conversation and that conversation might come through email. I love email. If you’re on my email list, you get an email from me every day or every week.
Chris (08:03):
You know I love email. But you can also have that conversation through chat or DM. It’s a little bit tougher, but sometimes it can work. And so looking at results from other industries outside fitness, we saw that the conversion rate of Sell By Chat was around 3%. Meaning if you started a hundred chats, about 3% of those people would eventually buy. That sounds like a really low number, but chat doesn’t take very much time. And so the cost time benefit really balanced out to make Sell By Chat maybe a little bit promising on our radar.
Chris (08:40):
Hey guys, it’s Chris Cooper. Your members are buying supplements somewhere, so they should buy them from the person who cares about them the most: You. And you should work with my friends at Driven Nutrition. Jason Rule and the Driven team put customers first, every time they’ve got a ton of products with high margins and they’ll even train you so your retail program adds revenue to your business. Kirk Hendrickson from Iron Jungle CrossFit says Driven Nutrition has some of the best support I have seen from any company we’ve partnered with. To make more money with supplements and retail sales, visit drivennutrition.net.
Chris (09:12):
Now these chats can happen in different ways. First, you could set up an automated chat bot on your website. So a client goes on your website, the chat icon pops up. You’ve seen this, how can I help you today? And you start this chat conversation. Second, you can interact with people who like your Instagram posts. So they hit like, or they make a comment and you DM them and you start a conversation. And the third way is to start a container like a Facebook group, invite people into that group, give them a lot of value in the group, like a lot, build up the affinity in your audience and then start chats with people. So for example, maybe you say I’ve got a free fat loss guide, join my group to get it. When people join the group, you welcome them. You send them the guide and you just start a natural conversation.
Chris (09:59):
There’s obviously an art to this and people who are great on chat will be better at this than other people. My close rate is lower because I just like talking to people. And most of the time, honestly, I don’t think of them as a client that I would want for mentorship. So I don’t post them to, you know, buy mentorship. And it’s the same with my gym. The thing with the gym is that if somebody joins my free Facebook group for Catalyst or fitness in Sault Ste. Marie, they’re going to get contacted. I know that they’re going to be interested and I know what the barrier might be, time or price. So Sell By Chat is going to have a different effect in different groups or at different stages of your entrepreneurial journey. Here’s what we found. If you’re in the founder phase, the people who talk to you are very interested.
Chris (10:47):
They’re going to come to you through your personal Facebook profile, through your personal Instagram account. If you’re a fitness coach, they might even come to you through Tik Tok. That’s starting to grow. But the key is that their interest on that platform is not enough. That’s all it is. It’s interest. They’re raising their hand and saying, tell me more. Your job is to start a chat conversation with them. Really find out what they want and then convert them into a consultation. This is probably best done virtually. So, Hey, do you have 20 minutes right now? Or I’m setting up my calendar for the next two days. Do you have 20 minutes tomorrow at nine or one where we can have a chat about your goals? OK. And then from there you need to sell them on your program. So in the founder phase where all of your leads are mostly organic, they’re very high affinity.
Chris (11:36):
It’s probably people you know, in real life or they’re a fan of your service. Sell By Chat should just happen organically. You shouldn’t push it, but your conversion rate will be high. In farmer phase you probably don’t have time for this. So if people reach out to you organically, definitely have a chat conversation. We’ve got a template for this in our growth progra, on the Growth ToolKit, but don’t build a public Facebook group and spend hours every day, curating that group and building content to add value to that group. You don’t have time for that. There’s easier strategies. If you’re in the tinker phase, though, this is probably an idea worth exploring, and you should do it yourself. We give you a template. We give you like chat scripts and everything on the tinker phase Growth ToolKit, you should test this yourself and then hand it over to somebody on your team
Chris (12:22):
only after you’ve got the system dialed. Mistakes to make: You hire a VA company to do this for you. So they log in under your account and they chat, chat, chat to people as you, or they just go out trying to cultivate leads that have absolutely no affinity to your brand. You need to do this yourself first and get it dialed in before you hand it off to somebody else. All right. The third tactic that we’re going to talk about today is what we call next level sales. And so we teach a sales process called the no sweat intro at Two-Brain. I started talking about it in my very first book back in like 2012, it’s been upgraded. It’s been refined. It’s been tested and proven for well over a decade. Now we just had a brand new innovation on this from Gilbert Dougherty.
Chris (13:07):
Who’s in UAE and he is a great, great, closer. He’s amazing at selling people for his gym by showing them value. And one of the ways that he shows them more value during a no sweat intro is to use his iPad. So here’s what he does. He brings people in, he asks the client to sit down and then he opens up his iPad. Then what he does is he says, OK, you know, what are your goals? And he asks them deeper questions, deeper questions. As we do in the no sweat intro. Then from there, he says, you remind me of blank. And he opens up his iPad and he shows a profile of somebody who has a very similar goal to the client in front of him. Now, really, if you think about it, this sounds complicated, but it’s notC Probably 70% of the people who come to catalyst are saying like, I have a goal to lose weight or firm up or tone up or whatever.
Chris (13:59):
All I have to do is pick a testimonial from either a male or a female. Pop that up on my iPad and say, Hey, Joe reminds me of you. This was his goal. Here’s his result. OK. That’s an amazing ability when somebody is sitting right in front of you to share a testimonial. So then what you do is you say, how committed are you to your goals? And you show a slide showing like a little bit committed, committed, or super committed, and they pick one. And then from there you say, OK, you’re super committed. Here’s what I prescribe. You make your prescription. And then you swipe on your iPad and you show them the price. This does a lot. Number one, it helps you overcome that fear of saying the price and it helps you establish a true value. Second, it makes you look a lot more professional because your client knows that everybody’s paying the same rate, that you’re not just pulling a number out of your ass.
Chris (14:49):
And you’re not just randomly handing out discounts to people in your gym. Nothing undermines client trust in you like, Hey, that guy’s paying less than me or the feeling that you’re just making it up as you go along. You have to look professional if you want to establish trust, and you have to establish trust if you’re going to sell for your true value because you’re a professional. So then the next step, if you’re using an iPad is you can say, here’s the rate. Are you ready to start today? You swipe to the waiver they sign and you’re done. It’s all done. And you’re not shuffling papers. You’re not trying to find your pricing charts. You’re well-prepared, you look professional, you’re sharing success stories. And the result here is that we’ve tracked close rates. So, Gilbert is amazing at his metrics and he actually takes his staff off-site for one day every month.
Chris (15:39):
And they practice making prescriptions. They practice sales. Now this isn’t the usual used car salesman sales, it’s are you a good enough coach to make a prescription that will get the client results? And then, and this is part of your coaching job. Get the client to commit to doing that program. So when I say sales, it’s really coaching that I’m talking about. Now, the close rate is how many people trust you enough to say, yes, I will follow your plan. Here’s my credit card. Close rate for Gilbert was around 72% on no sweat intros. Now he is selling to a very cold audience. People in the Emirates are not familiar with his service nearly as much. They’re a lot of the times just walking in off the street. So 72% close rate is actually amazing. But when he started using this iPad in his sales presentation, his close rate jumped to 83%.
Chris (16:32):
That means out of 10 people who just walked through his door, one more committed to making the life-saving choices that he, as a professional coach, said that they should make. That’s really profound. And not only does the iPad strategy make things a little bit easier for you as a novice presenter or a novice salesman, it makes things easier for the client to trust you. And to know that they’re going to be able to get the results that they want, and then to take the steps necessary to change their lives. That’s what sales is. So the iPad presentation, we recommend it in founder phase, farmer phase, and tinker phase. And so we’ve now added a sample presentation with the updated script and white labeled slides to our growth Growth ToolKit and our tinker Growth ToolKit. And you’ll be hearing more from Gilbert too if you’re in Two-Brain, he’s going to teach how to use this.
Chris (17:24):
He’s going to be running some role play sessions for us in growth. And, yeah, you can get the benefit of those too. So to summarize, there are a million ideas out there. You’re probably seeing Facebook ads for, I will grow your gym. I’ll do it for nothing. You pay nothing. You know, whatever. I know that you’re seeing this stuff cause I’m seeing it too. The point is though that if you had unlimited time and resources to pay for all these programs, it would be awesome, right? You could try stuff all day long. You could experiment. You could be creative, but you don’t. I don’t, nobody does. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, if I had one hour to grow my gym business today, is this the best use of my time? This testing stuff, it’s not sexy, but we do it because the individual gym owner can’t possibly test everything.
Chris (18:09):
When you’re on an online Facebook chat group, there are a lot of other gym owners jumping in to give you help and support and ideas. And that’s amazing. You really don’t get that in most fields. And I love it. The downside is that you’re getting their N equals one experience. This worked for me. That doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. And so we do these big tasks so that we can say, yes, this will work for you. Or maybe, Hey, it only worked for that person. Or maybe this doesn’t work at all. It’s a scam. I’m Chris Cooper. We put this together because we think it’s our responsibility as a leader in the fitness industry. I hope it helps you. And we’re going to keep reporting on stuff that works and doesn’t work on this podcast because people are asking us for it. Thank you for that.
Andrew (18:52):
Thanks for listening to Two-Brain Radio. Please subscribe for two great episodes every week. And for more industry insight and tactics from Chris Cooper, join the Gym Owners United group on Facebook. Chris is constantly posting articles, instructional videos, and advice in there. And these resources will literally help you make more money. That’s Gym Owners United on Facebook join today.
