What would happen to your club’s sales if you had to be gone for a month? Maybe there was a family crisis or maybe you got sick, but for whatever reason, you needed to take four weeks off. How would the sales staff react? How would they perform? Do you know who would take the lead? Is there a plan in place? Let’s talk about some basics that can ensure success, if this situation were ever to occur:
1. You must have clear yearly and monthly goals — your team should know what the goals are for the year and each calendar month. If you want people to be committed they must be part of the plan. They need to know in December what the next year’s club goals are. They need to know what the expectations are for each month. Everyone has to take ownership of the goal. I can tell you this — you are more likely to have success with everyone knowing the goals, than having everyone left in the dark.
2. You must have clear individual expectations. Each sales rep must know what’s expected, regardless if there was a sales meeting or a corporate memo. Each rep must understand how many appointments a day are needed, how many sales are expected, how much outreach must be done, how many referrals to get, and how many calls to make. If each sales person is fully accountable the operation could run forever.
3. Each department head must totally understand their department’s numbers, financial needs and must understand the synergy of working together as one. Sales complement each department and the service of each department complements the sales team. Referrals are much higher when each department delivers what they are supposed to.
4. Incentives — you must incentives each sales rep and each manager. When people have something to gain and everything to lose, then production stays high, accountability stays high and a daily focus or commitment remains intact.
In theory, we would never need an owner or a general manager, if everyone understood the company goals and individual goals, everyone was self-driven and incentivized. But unfortunately, it does not work that way. I believe we can never over train, we can never repeat ourselves too much. We need to make sure everyone understands the mission, so that when the day comes for you or whoever is in charge to be away, numbers will remain consistent with knowledge, accountability and incentives.
Chuck Hall is the executive director at Big Vanilla Athletic Clubs.
