The secret to getting in front of people
My main job is in business development for Snooze Mattress Company. I talk to a lot of people all over the country who are interested in selling sleep, changing lives, making a lot of money, and getting away from the corporate grind.
As a side project (pro bono), I help a local fitness center with their membership sales and Personal Training sales.
When I started with the gym in September, PT sales were low, but they had just hired a new PT salesperson. He came with experience, I had high hopes for him to be a solid closer.
He proved himself immediately by selling some sort of personal training to 40% or more of people he met with.
I also noticed pretty quick that getting new members to meet with PT salesperson (Brian) was not going so well.
The benchmark for a gym should be 70% of new members scheduling a free session (this gym calls it a goal setting session) with PT salesperson.
This gym was at about 20%. Pretty bad.
So, if they sold 50 memberships, the membership sales team would schedule a goal setting sessions with about 10. Brian would sell 4 of those 10 some sort of PT.
Boy, what if we could get 70% of the 50 new members to schedule with Brian? Then he would have 35 people to sell to and that should yield 14 people purchasing personal training services.
Going from 20% to 70% would mean about 10 more people every month buying personal training services. At an average cost of $350.00 per month, that becomes $3500.00 more revenue per month.
What is the key to booking more goal setting sessions for Brian?
Appointments.
In September, the membership sales staff was simply handing a business card to the new member and instructing them to call the PT person to set up their goal setting session.
That’s a terrible system and one too common in gyms, even today.
We made a simple switch. At the point of the new member joining, membership salespeople were trained to pull of Brian’s schedule and book it on the spot for the new member.
It really was that simple. Appointments, appointments, appointments.
In biz development at Snooze, myself and my team work hard every day to fill my schedule with appointments.
No matter what type of business I owned, I would focus heavy on appointments.
In the mattress industry, a retail business, where we “wait” for customers to come in, I would flip that script. I would work the phones, and any time I landed a live voice, I would work to book appointments.
If I showed a customer a few rectangles while educating them on sleep, and offering sleep tips, IF they didn’t buy that day, I would make every effort to book an appointment to come back.
Yes, I know that show ratio is not 100%.
But 70% of 50 is 35.
And 100% of zero is still zero.
Sleep deep. Dream big.
