In this episode, Rick and Jared discuss how to sell gym memberships over the phone and the best practices around phone scripts and touring your facility. You may run the most creative marketing campaign and get lots of people to call you or walk into your gym, but if your phone scripts and facility tours are not on point, your efforts will amount to naught. You need to have these points covered to maximize your marketing dollars!!
Selling Gym Memberships – Initial Phone and Tour Best Practices
- How do you and your team answer the phone at your facility?
- What does a phone conversation need to include?
- How do you conduct a tour of your facility once a prospect walks in?
These seem like really basic questions, but you might be surprised at how many businesses get it wrong and waste the chance to convert the prospect to a client. Strategize, implement, evaluate and continually optimize your processes around how you answer the phone and conduct tours of your facility with the goal of getting a prospect to book a starting point session.
“If your phone scripts and your tour of the club are not on point, you’re literally throwing money away.” Rick Mayo
How to Answer the Phone
Answering the phone correctly sounds really basic, but we’re going to break down how to answer the phone. Let your staff practice this with a script because the customer experience is important from the beginning when they see your ad, all the way through the initial phone contact to the tour. The best opportunity to sell a gym membership is the first contact with the prospect.
- Answer the phone with enthusiasm -When you get a phone call, no matter how busy you are, answer the phone with enthusiasm. Make sure the music isn’t too loud and you aren’t shouting into the phone. Try to stand up instead of sitting down and try to put a smile on your face because you will sound different when you smile. As soon as the phone rings, flip the switch to answer it with some enthusiasm, no matter what you are doing or how you feel.
- Ask questions – The last thing you want to do when someone calls in is to start talking incessantly. So you need to flip the script and start asking questions. The phrase in sales is so true that says “whoever’s talking is losing”. Part of it is the more that you can get people to invest emotionally with their goals and reasons, the less likely they’re going to be to repeat that process with another brand. Now that the prospect discussed some of the reasons they want to work out makes them more emotionally invested. So you need to dig down.
- One question you need to ask is first is how they heard about you. If it was a referral, then that is an immediate connection and an opportunity to be more personable. Maybe they saw an ad, which lets you know where your leads are coming from. Make notes in your software to tell you where you’re going to spend your ad spend.
- Another question would be to ask if they live nearby. Now, as much as we try to do targeted advertising digitally, now and then we’ll have someone that calls in that’s not anywhere close to the gym. When they find out where we are, it can be a huge barrier if they live far away. With the 30 year history in the Alloy Personal Training Franchise model, we have found something like 90% are within a three-mile drive time from our gym. We are in a high traffic area that is very population-dense. So it is going to be important they live relatively close to the gym. So if they picked up your Facebook ad, and they live 30 miles away, or an hour away, you would probably want to know that right away and be able to ask them, well, we’re up to an hour away, are you willing to commute that far to exercise two to three times a week? They might drive it for a month or two, but they will not stick around.
- Start asking them about their goals now in this part of the conversation. The reason that you do that as they will at some point want to know how much does it cost? Since Alloy is a personal training facility, the cost depends on how often you work out. So explain the Alloy process. Once the client comes in, we do the starting point session to find out their health history, goals, and take measurements to create a plan of attack, and prescribe a plan tailored for the prospect. So price in the Alloy brand might be as little as $30 a session, as compared to One-on-One Personal Training in our area is $80 an hour on the average. So we can do it for much less, right, which is great. But it’s really just going to depend on you know, your budget, your time and your goals, what you’re looking to do, and then once we make that prescription, we can put a price to it.
How to Do a Tour
A tour is when a prospect comes into the gym for the first time. It could be after a phone call or it could be a prospect walk-in. So this would be somebody walks in your business who’s never been in who just pops in. They could have a friend that works out at the gym. They might have seen your sign or a banner on the road. Our franchisees are in premium locations with a lot more walk-ins. So tours are something that needs practice, practice, practice.
- Greeting – First, watch your body language. Never sit down when someone’s walking in. At our front desks, we should stand or stand up when someone walks in. Stand up and stand square to the prospect. If you don’t know them, get out from behind the desk as you don’t want a physical barrier between you and the person when you are talking. Shake their hand, give them eye contact, keep your shoulders square, and show them you’re not interested.
- Ask questions like above to get to know them and provide a workout prescription.
- Where they heard about you?
- Where do they live?
- What are their goals?
- How many times a week they want to work out
Having done it for many years and seen what works, Rick and Jared dive deep into this topic and give gym owners actionable tips that will maximize their marketing dollars. Tune in!
Key Takeaways
- What a good phone conversation with a prospect should include (01:56)
- Stand up????♂️ and smile???? while answering the phone… seriously (02:51)
- Don’t talk incessantly….. flip the script and ask these questions (03:56)
- Never sell the process, sell this instead (08:48)
- How to conduct the best tour of your facility (14:54)
- How to ensure your prospects book a starting point session all the time (21:41)
- How trainers should handle walk-ins (22:51)
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Mentioned in this episode
Alloy Personal Training Franchise