Simplification is best when creating systems in your sales room. If you can break down the new member acquisition process into a sequential order, you will allow yourself to quickly analyze your business as well and respond immediately when results are declining.
Leads
Appointments
Shows
Enrollments
Referrals
Leads
If enrollments for the month are low, start the identification process with total leads collected. Are you exceeding your targets for the month? Does every team member have and know their goal? Where are you getting your leads from? If you are not exceeding this step, the chances are the rest of them are probably struggling as well. I would then put all of your attention and energy into fixing this immediately, to then allow yourself to move on to the other steps.
Appointments
You have the adequate amount of leads in your system but chances are, if you’ve identified that they are not converting into appointments, there is an issue with follow-up. This will take a little bit of time to dig into depending on your lead tracking system. Chances are your leads are not being contacted due to low activities (calls, text, e-mail). Do you have a follow-up system in place for your sales team? Have you set the right expectations around lead follow-up? Lastly, if you notice that the right activities around follow-up are there, then it’s most likely a skill set issue, and training will need to take place to turn those contacts into appointments.
Shows
At this point, you have collected enough leads and booked enough appointments. However you aren’t executing your show or guest targets. This is a pretty simple fix, as it’s one of two things. Your appointments are not legitimate, or the lead doesn’t have enough urgency. Identifying illegitimate appointments is simple. Personally call the appointments for the day for confirmation. You’ll either get “I didn’t have an appointment” or “I told him/her that I didn’t know my schedule and I’ll come in when I can.” This is just a behavior change in your sales room and/or personnel change. If it’s an urgency issue, then training will need to take place.
Enrollments
This is the easiest step to measure and identify. Are you enrolling enough new members based on the guests that you are touring? If you are not, you need to either increase your closing percentage or increase your guest traffic. It’s always easier to fix an underperforming closing percentage than it is to drive incremental guests. This is a skill set that needs to be trained on by breaking down the guest process into pieces.
Referrals
How you finish this process is crucial to the efficiency of working smarter and not harder. You have an excited new member that loves your club, and all they need from you is the invitation for them to bring their friends and family in to visit as well. If they enjoyed their visit and didn’t get “High Pressured” into joining, they will have no problem giving their family and friend’s contact information to you.
Every month should start with setting goals in each of these categories. This will allow you to quickly measure your process. It really is this simple. The challenge is keeping this as your main focus, and following it in sequential order. We tend to over complicate our business sometimes and try to fix too many things at one time. Sometimes we need to slow down to speed up and just have LASER focus and discipline around the right work!
Ryan Junk is the director of sales for UFC Gym. He can be reached at ryan@ufcgym.com.
