Teach Your Sales Staff To Sell With Purpose

by David Rockman (Entrepreneur & Fitness Marketing Consultant)

If you are in any way like the typical health club owner or operator, you’d probably give almost anything to learn the secret to better member retention. Believe it or not, how you sell your club’s memberships and services does in fact impact your club’s retention rate.

The difference between what customers expect to experience from a product or service, and what they actually experience, is what determines their level of satisfaction with that particular product or service. The same applies for the new health club member with their membership.

The larger the gap between what new members expect to get from their club experience and what they actually experience is a key factor when it comes to retaining that person as a long term member or losing them to another facility or even worse, turning them off health clubs altogether. Plain and simple…when people are promised one thing and receive another, it upsets them.

This may seem like common sense, but it’s really important that you train your sales staff on how not to set new members up for having unrealistic expectations. This is where your sales presentation process and staff training come into play. There are times when a sales person will tell the prospect exactly what they want to hear in order to close the sale. This results in a disgruntled member as soon as they realise that what they were promised hasn’t happened. You don’t want people leaving your business telling all their friends and family that your business does not do what it says it does.

Motivating sales people to sell for the sheer purpose of just getting the new membership— just getting the sale and commission— quickly leads to salespeople and even personal trainers to make unrealistic promises to prospects and members that your club just can’t fulfil. This leads to staff saying and doing certain things they shouldn’t be saying or doing, just to “make the sale.” It also leads to members being let down by unmet expectations.

Once that happens, you’ll constantly have dissatisfied members on your hands and your retention rate will suffer. For this reason and this reason alone, it’s critical that you motivate and teach your staff how to sell memberships and personal training in a manner that sets your members up to have an experience that’s better than what they expected.

So, how do you balance your goal of selling lots of new memberships and personal training with making sure that your membership consultants are setting up appropriate member expectations?


...BY TEACHING YOUR STAFF TO SELL WITH PURPOSE!

Sell With Purpose
Selling with purpose is an approach to sales that gets salespeople and personal trainers focused on the needs, wants and desires of your prospects and members first when presenting, and not just thinking about getting the membership, making the sale, or getting the commission.

Selling with purpose in the health club business is about teaching your staff to recognise that prospects and members can truly benefit from what your business is offering, and that it’s their obligation to help them see that. It’s important that you never allow your staff to forget what business they are in. Do your staff members really believe in the product they are selling? Do they use the product themselves? How can you expect an overweight, unhealthy looking membership consultant to convince a prospect that your club offers the solution to meet their health & fitness needs?

In this industry you are in the business of helping people. You are in the business of assisting people in having fun with their fitness and reaching their personal health, wellness and fitness goals. You're in the health club business—a business about other people. And the way you approach every selling situation needs to be with a focus on that other person.

You need to teach your staff that they can easily reach all of their sales and personal finance goals if they adopt the mindset that famous speaker and sales trainer Zig Ziglar popularised:

"You can have anything in life you want, if you can only help enough other people

get what they want!"

That’s the key to selling with purpose and that’s certainly the key to immediately impacting member retention.

Motivating and teaching your staff to sell your club’s products and services with an attitude of doing it just to generate revenue will ultimately lead to many dissatisfied members and a member retention rate that will have you pulling your hair out.

However by training your staff to sell with purpose will automatically lead to an exercise floor filled with happy members who’ve had their expectations exceeded,service focused staff, and a member retention rate that gets higher and higher everyday. By reminding your staff what business they are in every time they turn up for work can have a significant effect on they way they sell your clubs services.