The Secret To Earning A Secure, Predictable And Ever-Growing Income As A Fitness Professional
By Eric Ruth
If you wanted to hire a marketing consultant to help you grow your business, one of the first questions out of her mouth would be, “how many people have bought something from you?”
The reason for this is because any capable marketing consultant knows that the quickest and easiest way to show you immediate improvement is to leverage your existing market share (create new up-sell, re-sell and cross-sell offers that can be delivered to your existing customers and clients).
But if your market penetration is limited to just 10, 20 or 30 people, you are at a distinct disadvantage. The single most important thing you can do to create stability, security and an ever-growing income is to build a large customer list. And the way to do that – the way to sell more stuff to more people more frequently – is to develop your Sphere Of Influence (SOI).
In working with over 1000 fitness professionals since 1998, I’ve found that very, very few develop, nurture and utilize an effective database of their past and present customers, clients, referrers, prospects and strategic alliance partners – their sphere of influence. And that’s a big mistake.
I won’t even take on a consulting client unless they have a customer list. That’s how important it is. Because my small business consulting clients want quick results, and it becomes much more challenging to give them those results if they don’t have a list.
But many of those who have a good list still don’t understand how to maximize the profitability of their list – how to mine their “acres of diamonds.”
Here’s a quick example:
Recently, the owner of an upscale Italian restaurant asked me for help. Business had dropped off significantly and he was in trouble.
He had a good-sized customer list, so we went to work creating a personal letter from him to his customers explaining how his restaurant is different and better than the competition and how he had recently acquired a wonderful and highly rated red wine.
The letter made a specific offer of one glass of this fabulous wine free of charge to each dinner guest. We tested the promotion by mailing to 400 of his customers. Within two weeks, the mailing brought in 43 dinner parties and almost $9,000 in sales. He introduced over 100 people to the red wine (serving over 25 bottles in his free promotion), but this “sampling” of the wine also led to sales of 22 bottles. The bottles that were purchased covered the cost of the free wine.
This is the power of making a well conceived, personalized and specific offer to people who know you, like you, and trust you – your sphere of influence.
What does this have to do with fitness marketing? I’ll explain....
The obstacle many fitness professionals face is the very small number of customers/clients that you sell to/service. This puts you in a precarious, unstable position. You are dependent on very few clients to provide you with the vast majority of your business revenue. You are at the mercy of your clients.
Even if you’re earning $100,000 a year, if you have only 20 clients, you are in an unpredictable and insecure position from a business standpoint. If you lose 4 clients tomorrow, your income could drop 20% or more overnight and it could take you months to replace those clients. Even if you don’t lose any clients, you have probably hit your earnings peak because there simply is not enough time in the day to train any more clients.
And with only 20 clients, if you have a new product or service offering (something that you should be doing on a regular basis) and 10% of your clients avail themselves of it, you will generate just 2 sales.
But if you had 200 customers and clients and made the same offer with the same closing percentage, you’d have 20 sales. Obviously, you probably can’t have 200 training clients (unless you’re a big-time studio), but you can have 200 customers.
I define a client as someone who trains with you and a customer as someone who buys from you, but may never train with you. Customers allow you to leverage and diversify your income by selling things other than your time. If your focus is strictly on obtaining training clients, you have no leverage – you are earning a linear income – you are simply exchanging your time for dollars.
That is why it is so critical to create, develop and/or control products or services that you can sell to people who may never train with you, but can and will buy from you because they know you, like you and trust you.
So much time, effort and money goes into obtaining and servicing a training client that even at a $100/hr rate, you are not making the kind of money that can create wealth and a secure financial future unless you can stay booked solid 30 hours a week, year-in and year-out and not get burned-out in the process.
That’s why you’ve got to have a long-term strategic plan for your business.
And that plan should incorporate strategies for doing business with as many people as possible. Because customer/client volume gives you stability and security. And the way to develop customer/client volume is through the maximum utilization of your sphere of influence list. The list is king.
The larger your list – your database of past and present customers, clients, prospects, referrers and strategic allies – the greater your stability. It is the secret to earning a secure, predictable and ever-growing income as fitness professional.
And that’s why one of the aspects of fitness marketing I emphasize is the building and nurturing of your sphere of influence. Your SOI represents your market share. Your SOI contains the people who know you or know of you, and are therefore more likely to trust you and do business with you – or continue doing business with you. They are the easiest people to sell.
Your business marketing model should (in general) look something like this:
30% to 50% (depending on the maturity of your business) of your marketing efforts are focused on external marketing: lead generation to bring qualified prospects into your SOI.
50% to 70% of your marketing efforts should be focused on internal marketing in two categories:
1. Front End: Low-cost product or service offerings to your SOI to grab new customers and clients and/or up-sell, re-sell and cross-sell them. This is ongoing. This is the foundation of your marketing efforts.
2. Back End: Regularly scheduled high-priced product or service offerings to your SOI (generally, your front end customers and clients will be more predisposed towards making these larger purchases from you, but that should not preclude you from making these offers to your entire SOI). Your back-end is the most profitable part of your business. As your customer/client list grows, so will your back-end profits.
If you limit your business growth to just the acquisition of personal training clients and ignore the wealth of opportunity you have to sell other products and services, your customer/client volume will never reach the point of critical mass: where it is large enough to provide you with a stable and predictable income month after month, whether you are training or not.
A limited customer/client volume means limited and unstable income for you. Increased volume means increased security and an ever-growing income.
Focus on selling to a large number of people. Even if it’s just a simple information product or supplements or stability ball. Capture contact information. Stay in touch.
Make offers. Stair-step the customer up your ladder of profitability by making repeat sales. Selling more stuff more frequently to your customers/clients is the easiest, fastest and most predictable way to create income stability. But you can’t do that if the extent of your market penetration is 20 people.
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Personal Trainer Leveraging Secrets
What is leverage?
When you can put $20,000 down and control a $200,000 real estate property, that’s leverage.
For 10% of the price of the property, you now control it. If the property increases in value by 10% in one year, to $220,000, you have not earned a 10% return on your investment, you’ve earned a 100% return on your investment. That’s the awesome power of leverage.
Another example: when you invest 30 hours of your time to create an information product like “How To Maximize Your Metabolism” and you can sell that product for $100 over and over again, you have leveraged your time.
Think about it. That same 30 hours spent working with clients at $50 per hour would yield $1500 – once.
But when you create a product with that 30-hour investment, and let’s say you sell 30 units in your first year, that’s $3000 you’ve earned. In the short run, you’ve doubled your hourly income, but in the long run your hourly income can become almost infinite. If you were to sell 60 units in the second year and then 100 units in the third year, you will have earned $6000 and $10,000 respectively…without doing any additional work.
Let’s take it one step further. What if you create a second product and sell it to many of the same buyers of your first product (a buyer is a buyer is a buyer). This type of back-end sale can literally make you rich.
This is my business model and the model of many of the most successful (and profitable) fitness professionals in the game.
One well-conceived information product can jumpstart your information marketing empire.
It’s a mystery to me why more fitness professionals aren’t doing this. It’s one hundred times easier to sell a $39 book than it is to sell a $900 service.
Your market penetration will double or triple within months. And every person who buys your book is a hot prospect for your training services.
Creating information products does take some investment of your time and effort, but much of what will be included is already in your head. You’re an expert in the field, right? Prove it by authoring a book or creating an audio program. Your credibility will soar – as will your profits.
For a low-cost, comprehensive home-study program on creating and marketing information products, go here.
If you want an outstanding information product that’s already created which you can own outright and sell over and over again, starting immediately, then look at Success-ercise.
How To Leverage Your Marketing
What would you prefer, making your sales presentation to one person at a time, or making your sales presentation to dozens of folks simultaneously?
Doesn’t it make sense that the more people you can “pitch” at once, the greater your ability to maximize sales?
A well-crafted health and fitness presentation (seminar) to small or large groups is the answer. All you need is the right information, constructed in a logical format, which resonates with the listeners.
Norm Belanger has created Stop The Confusion® specifically for this purpose. I encourage you to check it out.
http://www.howtosellfitness.com/powerpositioning.html
