If You Can Answer This 5-Word Question, Your Personal Training Client-Acquisition Worries End Now
There was a time when I wrote over 100 sales letters a year. It was early in my career and I had to pay my dues working for a marketing sweatshop. You either got results – fast – or you were gone. Luckily, I discovered quickly how to get results. My sales letters generated millions of dollars for my clients – once I learned the simple secret to making them work. The secret of the 5-word question.
A secret so important, it must be used in every communication with your target market if you want to survive and thrive in this competitive industry. Particularly if you are utilizing any form of “salesmanship in print” marketing tools: brochures, sales letters, postcards, advertisements, newsletters, etc.
Because with these tools, you don’t get a second chance. You’ve got to get it right the first time, or your marketing tools may as well be toilet paper. You don’t have the luxury of being face-to-face, nose-to-nose with the prospect and “peeling the onion” with your probing questions.
Articulating the answer to the 5-word question in your marketing tools is a skill that must be developed. Few people intuitively understand how to do this without practice. But it is worth practicing because this skill is easily one of the most powerful – and profitable – there is.
Why?
Because effective, emotional copywriting gives you ultimate leverage.
When you create powerful salesmanship in print, you no longer have to personally sell each and every prospect on your products and services. Instead, you can write one letter, deliver it to your target market, and a certain percentage of them take the action you want them to take, with little or no personal contact at all until they give you the check and get started.
It’s a skill that gives you the ability to leverage your marketing message for maximum response from your most qualified prospects, without you having to utilize manual labor.
And it’s a communication skill that will make or break the effectiveness of every contact you have with prospects; whether it be through the written word or in person. Unfortunately, this skill is so frequently overlooked and so poorly utilized, it is almost shameful, because it is this one thing that matters most.
It’s the one thing, more than anything else, that magnetically attracts the best prospects and bonds them to you.
If you can answer this 5-word question, you will be well on your way to understanding and mastering this skill for creating compelling, action-generating, client-acquiring power, not only in your copywriting, but in every facet of your business.
The 5-word question is this: "What are you really selling?"
The answer to this deceptively simple question, when properly articulated in your sales message (in copy or in person), holds the key to the client-acquisition vault.
Let’s explore – and I’ll explain.
If you were to do a Google search of fitness professional web sites, you would see that 99% of them say essentially the same thing.
There is much talk about features and even some benefits. But they are all sorely lacking the answer to the 5-word question, "what are you really selling?"
You’re NOT selling weight loss. You’re not selling fitness. You’re not selling tighter buns or six-pack abs. You’re not selling disease prevention, flexibility, cardiovascular endurance, strength, fat-loss, faster metabolism or lower cholesterol. These are all benefits, but they’re not CORE benefits. They’re not what you’re REALLY selling. And they’re not what people are REALLY buying.
What you are really selling is confidence, prestige, security, freedom, power, joy, peace, happiness, fulfillment, pride, control, sexuality and sensuality. What you are really selling is self-actualization.
You are selling feelings. You are selling emotions.
Seniors don’t want flexibility and disease prevention. They want freedom from caregivers. They want control over their lives.
Overweight folks don’t want tight buns and flat abs. They want confidence and pride.
Golfers don’t want stronger shoulders and core strength. They want the prestige, power and fulfillment of driving the ball longer and straighter (and making their playing partners turn green with envy).
Rich wives of corporate executives don’t want a faster metabolism. They want to feel sexy, attractive and joyful.
The real benefits of personal training are feelings. The real benefits of anything we want are feelings. You don’t buy a Porsche because it has 17 inch wheels and 350 horsepower. You buy a Porsche for the prestige, confidence and personal power it gives you. You buy it because of the way it makes you feel, not because of what it has or does.
When your marketing messages are generously peppered with these core benefits, they will resonate with your prospects and you will attract – and acquire – many more of them. Because you will be offering them what they really want.
Deep down (at the core), what we all really want is to be all that we can be. That is the very definition of self-actualization. Being all that we can be gives us inner-peace, confidence and real happiness.
Tony Robbins has become incredibly wealthy selling self-actualization. For decades the Army was the top-recruiting branch of the military because of their slogan, "be all that you can be." It is a siren song. And it gets response.
Secret #2: The Mighty "SFP"
Even with powerhouse emotional marketing and adept selling skills, acquiring personal training clients cold can be challenging. One of the greatest strategies for warming up prospects is to sell them something smaller…and tangible…as the first step, the “front-end” of your marketing.
Unless you live under a rock, you know that publishing your own book, creating your own video or audio product gives you power-positioning and provides you with a great front-end.
I encourage all fitness professionals to do this. But many can’t or won’t. Putting out a quality information product that delivers excellent information AND works to sell your “back-end” – your training services – is hard work. (You can see a great example from one of my customers of exactly what I’m talking about at www.MelOna.com scroll halfway down the page to see his new book “Changing Bodies, Transforming Lives” which is available at Amazon.com)
An excellent information product like Mel’s book gives you the opportunity to use the mighty SFP marketing strategy. SFP is Self-Funding Promotion. What that means is you are promoting yourself by selling a lower cost front-end product. The revenue generated from the product sales covers all the expenses of your marketing (and can put profits in your bank account).
Essentially, the SFP gives you a way to market your services free. Because all your costs to advertise and fulfill orders on your product are paid for by the sales of your product.
This is a classic, powerful and highly effective strategy for selling high priced services.
Let me give you an example.
Back when I used to offer marketing consulting services to small businesses, I would never attempt to sell a cold prospect on my high priced consulting services. Instead, I offered them a lower priced marketing manual as my front-end.
Many more people will buy a lower priced tangible product than will pay for high priced consulting. I didn’t want to sift and sort through the throngs of prospects in an attempt to find quality consulting clients. So I let my front-end product do that for me.
My product was designed to teach small business owners all about direct response marketing AND to sell my consulting services on the back-end.
A certain percentage of those who bought my manual would then hire me as a consultant.
And when they did, the fees I earned were pure profit because I had no associated marketing expenses to land that client. All the marketing costs were defrayed by the sale of my marketing manual. Thus, a self-funding promotion.
Are you following me?
Now, this is a brilliant strategy and it works like a charm…if you have a quality front-end product to sell. For most, that’s a big “if.” You need a product that meets certain criteria:
- It must get read, listened to or watched (that’s a bigger battle than you may know)
- It must deliver truly valuable information
- The information must be actionable and motivating (self-actualizing)
- The information must implicitly or explicitly sell your back-end (your services)
If your front-end product meets these criteria, you are off to the races with one of the most productive marketing strategies on earth, the Self-Funding Promotion.
67 Fitness Business Owners Reveal The Strategies, Systems And Secrets To Their Extraordinary Success Transforming Fitness PASSION Into Fast Fitness PROFITS!
Click Here To Get Your Copy Now!
