Why Fitness Centers Fail To Grow

I knew anecdotally that fitness centers and personal trainers sucked at responding to leads.  I can say that because I was once one.  

Letting those leads sit there, rotting like a dead fish in the hot sun.

And when I did get around to following up with them, they either didn’t answer the phone, didn’t remember what form they filled out or worse had already hired another personal trainer.

Over the last several months I’ve had my staff secret shopping fitness centers, yoga studios, pilates studios, crossfit boxes and personal trainers.

And the results are SHOCKING to say the least.

The CRITERIA I used were:

• Response time to inquiry 
• Diversity to response (email, phone, text)
• Persistence of response (the number of attempts)

RESULTS

Here is a graphical representation of the results of the 60 fitness centers we contacted.

Only 25% or (15) of the fitness centers responded AT ALL to our inquiry.  What are the others doing?

Of the ones who did contact us, only 8 tried to reach us by PHONE.  The other 7 just texted us back.

Here is the heartbreaking news.  Of the 15 who responded to us ONLY 3 responded on the same day.  And the AVERAGE response time was 43.2 Hours… Almost 2 FULL days to respond. At that point… why bother?

I also wanted to test how persistent people were.   Of the 15 fitness centers who did respond only 6 tried more than 1 time.  And the most attempts to contact us were just FOUR. In my experience calling thousands of people the average attempts is TEN.  TEN!

HERE'S SOME SALT FOR THAT WOUND

Let’s break that down to the COST OF INACTION with some assumptions based on my 10 experience in my own fitness center and now from my call center where we’ve made over 10,000 calls for our clients.

For easy numbers let’s just use 100 leads in one month and the average lifetime value of $1200.  ($200 per month with the average retention of 6 months).

For the businesses that did respond it took them on average 24 hours to respond.  And per my other blog post you are 30 times less likely to connect if you respond after 5 hours.

Out of that 100 leads, you would only get 10% to respond after the 24 hours.   So when you respond within 5 hours you could easily double that… to 20 leads who connect out of 100.

We now have 20 leads we are speaking with, and when we connect with them immediately we’re two times more likely to book a consultation.  So instead of booking just 5 consultations, we’re now booking 15!

And when you are doing more consultations your sales skills are better so instead of closing 50% you’ll probably close 80%.   Which is going from 3 sales (50% of 5) to 12 sales (80% of 15).

With a lifetime value of $1200 you go from just $3,600 in new sales to $14,400 PER MONTH or $172,800 per year.  WITHOUT increasing the number of leads!

Would you like a raise of $172,800?

HERE IS THE LESSON IN THREE EASY STEPS

1. Systemize your follow up process so it’s done consistently and persistently
2. Connect with your leads within 20 minutes.  Strike while the iron is SIZZLING HOT.
3. START NOW

Of course we do all of this as part of the Business Lead Maximizer service.  If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you increase your revenues, then REQUEST A CONSULTATION HERE.

If you found this blog post helpful, please pass it on to another business owner, I would appreciate it and I’m sure they would as well.