How to Create a Relationship with Anyone Anytime | Fitness Marketing

Can you create a quality relationship with your fitness customers? Or do you have to rely on selling to the already interested or people you know?

How old are your kids? What are they doing this summer?

How are things for you during this pandemic? What’s your work like?

These might be logical questions and yet, if you are talking to a parent you’ve not created a bond with them. You’ve just distracted them. If someone’s thoughts go to their livelihood, and concerns about future earning, you may have talked them out of something before you even begin.

Create a Relationship: Don’t Lose Them

Some of the most common questions asked in sales are about family. Are you married? Do you have kids? How old are they?

So, if someone has marital problems, or wonders where their kids are right now and what they’re doing right now – like most mother’s minds will go – you’ve essentially lost them. You think you’ve bonded, but you’ve given them a reason not to pay attention.

Meet Them Where They are

If a prospective client comes to you (by phone, Facetime, Skype) and is thinking about their job status, whether they’ll be working from home, in the office again soon, or they might have hours cut and she’s scared, she is going to have a hard time looking at training three times a week for a year to avoid osteoporosis.

If you’re talking to someone who is soaking wet and you start talking about the benefits of exercise, they clearly aren’t going to listen in that distracted state.

Right Place Right Time

Having the right conversation at the wrong time is going to alienate you from that prospect. It’s nice, it may be true that they’ll reduce their chance of heart disease but it’s not what is going to make someone train with you.

If you show them a bicep curl in the middle of a pandemic, is that going to help with their immune system, their stress level, their cravings for junk food feet away in the pantry?

Give them a Quick Win

To do that you have to really know what they want. What is urgent about it now? Why aren’t they already there? What do they believe about it?

Give them one thing. When you meet you might go deep into core exercise, a stretch for the lower back issues, but one thing. Go deep and solve that and suggest the easy maintenance. Don’t solve all their problems, solve the one that’s bleeding.

If you think if you give them that free session you’ll give them so much they won’t need you, it’s probably the way you’re setting up that session, creating expectations about that session, and conducting that session.

Someone with lower back pain doesn’t need a week’s worth of workouts, and a dozen exercises. They need an understanding of 5 things contributing to their back pain (so you open up needs to get more support from you), they need to understand the difference between immediate relief and long-term solutions.

Trainers are the Best Sales People

You can dig deep into that one thing. And leave them needing and wanting all that you have.

No one woke up in the morning wanting a better bicep curl. So be selective in the things you share in social media. Does your content peak curiosity in the clients you most want to work with? Maybe the answer to that is yes. Maybe you want and love working with women whose greatest urgency during this pandemic is their arms.

Know Who

Choose the person you want to work with, show something they care deeply about, so deeply that during a pandemic they are willing to spend time, money, and energy getting.

A facility is not a sales strategy. Relationships are. Days are coming I believe when the membership sales team is a thing of the past. Whether someone wants to join or they really want and need to train and have a place to do it, a trainer can sell transformation far better than a sales person.

You’re in a Moment of Opportunity if You Can Create a Relationship

You can workout at home and get as good or better results as you do in a gym. It’s just a playground. The emergence of studios and boutiques in recent years has proven that less equipment and higher quality movement is the answer.

You’re a trainer with the world open to you right now.

There are home gym equipment dealers right now overwhelmed with the amount of business they’ve been flooded with. Those people buying equipment, however, don’t know what to do with it.

There’s also a prediction for those people that can hang on through this that there will be a surge in fitness centers. There’s a chance that some are just waiting for the second stimulus check they think may be coming, and then they’ll cash in their chips. That will create opportunity for trainers who have a business mindset and understand profitability and scale.

The question is, what are you doing right now to learn it if you don’t know it?

Other Episodes You Might Enjoy:

7 Tips to Be the Trainer Everyone Wants to Work With

Medical Fitness in the Middle of a Pandemic

When You Feel Like Quitting

Resource:

Health & Fitness Professional's Guide to Social Media