It is a fact that adding equipment, classes, and even improving general customer service, both only lead to incremental improvements in revenue and retention. This is because your members want more than they think they want! Members want the “Prize Inside” (Seth Godin).
Through my two-part series in the next couple of issues of ClubSolutions Magazine, I will be showing you how to reach breakthrough goals for your club, including:
1. Direct Revenue: Member’s Dues Rate.
2. Indirect Revenue: Retention, Broader Member Base and Personal Training.
There are Six Steps to Earning Over a Dollar Per Member and More:
1. Edge Method: Tapping into your own creativity to breakthrough.
2. Breakthroughs: Selling the “iPod Prize.”
3. Creative Steps to your perfect club.
4. Edge: How close can you get to your perfect club?
5. Systems Support to make your perfect club viable.
6. Prize: Giving members more than they think they wanted.
Step 1: Edge Method
Over the next two months, I will be taking you through: the “Edge Method” (Seth Godin); how this powerful process helps corporations tap into their own creativity, resulting in actual breakthroughs that reinvent their businesses, and how you can use it in your club. Breakthroughs happen when you give your members more than they even realized that they wanted – a free prize!
Step 2: Breakthroughs: The iPod Prize
In a mature market like ours, it is, at times, hard to visualize and, even more so, believe that we can create something that is more than simply better, but actually revolutionary. Consider iPod’s phenomenal success, in a mature market, with over a 40 percent market share.
So how did Apple enter and take over a mature market while charging twice as much as its competitors for virtually the same features? Apple states that 75 to 80 percent of customer satisfaction is not based on what they are selling, or what price they are charging…Companies must have competitive products, customer service and pricing just to enter the marketplace.
Apple looked to concepts like Cracker Jack for inspiration. I don’t know about you, but growing up, I only ate Cracker Jack so I could get my free prize. I may have known that the box is just as good without the prize, but of course, it wasn’t just as good.
The iPod Free Prize: Selling on the Emotional Level:
• Give them more than they thought they wanted. Consumers want more than they say and even think they want.
• Think: “I will be successful.”
• Realize real growth comes from people who are not looking for a digital player or even thought they needed one.
• Promote being “cool”- “I own an iPod.”
The iPod Prize: So What?
So, who is in a more emotionally charged industry than ours? Yes, we have a higher level of complexity in our industry with many members who have very different needs. However, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the prize.
The truth is that everyday we give individual members that prize. These are the members who take tennis lessons, use personal training, and any other services in which they have been both personally guided and have had long-term one-to-one personal contact with your staff.
Step 3: Creative Steps To Your Perfect Club
True breakthroughs often come from potential members who are not currently walking into your club, and from offerings that your members cannot even visualize. Throw away all you know for a day. Create the perfect club that does not consider practicality.
What is your perfect club?
• All members look to your staff for individual guidance and they both learn and positively alter their behavior.
• Discussions lead to your club’s offerings – not your prices.
• You have the ability to run your club with the personal service levels of a high-end country club, without tripling your dues.
• At your club, member knowledge is not lost when a staff member leaves.
• Your club has one view of your member, consolidated from all sources.
• Over the Web, your member can: book tennis as a single, invite similar members to join, and then place a free standing order so that the juice stand automatically receives a “very berry shake” order five minutes before the end of every tennis game for this member!
• Your club has 100 percent staff and member retention.
Excercise: Write down what would be your perfect club in a perfect world.
Next month, I will be going through the next three steps. And, we will be working through bringing this creative process to our industry, and how to make it actually work (coming to the edge).
Through this series, I will challenge you to ask: “With each additional piece of equipment and club service, have I had a substantial increase in dues rates and retention? Did I see a return like Apple and if not, how can I get there?”
Always remember, “accepting second best will not create something remarkable.”
Scott Johnston is the CEO of InTouch. He can be contacted at 877.521.9937, or by email at sjohnston@intouchtrainer.com.
