Analyze Each Aspect of the Sale for a Profitable 2011

Sales drive profitability in any industry, and the fitness industry is no different. Whether you want to increase your membership core, personal training revenue or any other profit center at your facility, improving sales is clearly a priority. Yet, increasing sales is often approached incorrectly, by focusing on the end result and not the actions it takes to get there.

It is not enough to tell the team “We need to sell 1,000 memberships.” That doesn’t paint a picture of how the team can meet the goal, nor does it indicate where to look if the objective goal is not being met. On a basic level, sales of anything require you to track certain key metrics. The examples below use membership sales to illustrate the point, but the same interim steps must be tracked for personal training, swim lessons, selling merchandise or any other club sales goal.

–Leads Generated: A lead is simply a name and contact information. Do you track how many new leads you receive each month, where they come from and which marketing efforts are functioning properly? Do you track what lead sources advance to the next step, becoming quality prospects? Tracking these is much easier to track if you have Contact Management Software (some fitness club management software includes CMS, or there are generic programs for sales tracking/reports).

–Quality Prospects: Leads step up to a Quality Prospect with another active step toward joining your gym. For example, visiting and touring your facility, or clicking on the “join offers” section of your website. Some centers find success in motivating this next step by designing and maintaining a high-quality website. Do you track the ratio of lead conversions to Quality Prospects?

–Closing Percentage: Do you track the percentage of quality prospects that become members (closing percentage)? If your analysis shows a big gap between Quality Prospects and Closing Sales, it could be that you’re not making it easy enough for interested prospects to join. Club management software can accept payments online and import member information directly into your club software, making a prospect nearly a click away from being a member. For those prospects who actually visit your club in person, the conversion attempt should be done by the team or individual most skilled at closing sales.

Careful analysis of each type of conversion rate gives you valuable insight into which lead generators, marketing efforts, conversion tools and sales staff are working best for your club and lets you make intelligent experimental changes.

Improve your staff’s skill set/effort in terms of contacting leads (calls, e-mails, referral attainment) if the leads aren’t turning to quality prospects. Train/retrain your sales staff, or examine the price point of your offer if Quality Prospects aren’t turning into members (A well-trained sales team should close over 50 percent of your Quality Prospects).

These strategies also apply to personal training, programming revenue and retail sales. All of the leads for these revenue centers would be members and guests of the center. Quality Prospects would be individuals that have expressed some definable interest in the product or service.

Club management software can help you track this in fine detail, and the more details you examine, the more you will see — male/female ratio, age groups, zip codes, etc — therefore, many factors can effect your sales results. If you don’t know which aspect of the total sales process is broken, it is exceedingly difficult to fix and optimize sales.

If you take the time to track these numbers and then focus on the areas that need improvement, results will improve, guaranteed. Future articles will focus on how to “fix” problems that you find from tracking the results to further optimize sales.

Len is a Sales Associate with Twin Oaks Software. He can be contacted at 866.278.6750 or by e-mail at lbell@tosd.com, or visit www.tosd.com.