Growing Your Training Business in 7 Steps
By Pat Rigsby
I want to give you a simple plan for you to grow your training business.
Seven clear steps to have a much better business.
But don’t mistake simple for easy or less effective.
These 7 Steps, when combined, will quite literally change your business forever.
Step One: Narrow Your Focus
The big mistake that a lot of business owners make is trying to think about and capture the broadest possible audience for their business, trying to be too much to too many people.
I bet that if you looked at your business right now, you’d find that the top 20% of your clients are significantly more valuable, more enjoyable to work with and get better results.
Imagine that you completely focused all your efforts on marketing to those “most valuable” clients?
Do you think that would make a difference in your training?
Step Two: Create a Marketing Approach That Gets Those Specific Prospects To Seek You
Once you’ve narrowed your focus it becomes easier to market to your ideal clients.
But remember, your marketing should not be about YOU or what you have to offer.
It should be about THEM, and something that’s on their (your ideal prospect’s) mind already.
Your fitness marketing efforts should be designed to convince your prospects that you have something that specifically is of benefit to them.
There are a number of ways to accomplish this:
- You can offer free reports
- You can share authentic content
- You can offer low risk ‘samples’ of your services
The key is that the way you present your offer is compelling enough, articulates your benefits enough and minimizes the risk to them enough that they feel comfortable taking that next step with you.
Step Three: Educate and Motivate
Educate and motivate your prospect so that when they are ready to start achieving their fitness or performance goals, they do it with you.
A lot of people aren’t ready to act today.
For them, your job is to provide value in what you do and educate them as to why you’re the best solution.
But woven into this education is motivation to actually take action.
The education you provide builds trust and confidence that you’re the best solution for their specific needs.
Understand – people want to be led.
They want you to make achieving their goals simpler or easier.
So educate them so they know YOU are the person to do that.
Step Four: Get Them Started
You need to make it easy for them to take action.
Offer a 21 day or one month opportunity to experience what you do.
Provide a really aggressive guarantee like “you’ll reach your goals or I’ll give you double your money back.”
You eliminate the risk in their mind and then give them a clear path to get started by not offering too many choices (choose A or B) and you’ll get them into your programs.
Step Five: Deliver an Extraordinary Experience
Map out your ideal client experience so that the end result will be that people that are so excited about you and your service that they’ll want to introduce that experience to their friends and family.
To do that, you need to figure out what experience is going to turn your client into raving fans.
One of the best client experience design exercises is to ask two simple questions.
- What do people LOVE about working out, going to a gym or working with a fitness professional?
- What do people HATE about it?
Use your answers to help shape your ideal client experience blueprint – then put it into action.
This experience will be the biggest point of differentiation for you compared to other fitness businesses.
Give it the attention it deserves.
Step Six: Maximize Lifetime Relationship Value
The toughest thing to do in business is to get a new client, so when you get them – cultivate that relationship.
The easiest two ways to do that are to:
- Provide the Experience we addressed in Step Five so they clearly see that no other fitness business is comparable to you.
- Be the most complete solution possible for your clients.
Think about it – clients rarely come to you for workouts.
They come to you for a result.
So with that in mind…
How can you provide an even better solution for them to achieve that result?
Can you offer the other pieces of the puzzle that the program they’re currently involved in doesn’t address?
Can you offer a higher level of service for them where you can deepen the relationship with them and they’ll want to get closer to you?
Many clients will invest more for a more complete solution or a higher level of service, so be sure to make them both available.
Step Seven: Make Referrals Happen
People don’t refer in the way that we expect.
We expect our clients to refer because they got results.
Most won’t based on results alone.
Why should they? They paid you for results.
That’s not exactly an out of the ordinary business transaction:
“I pay you to get a specific thing. You give me that thing.”
Happens every day, right? How many gas stations give you the amount of gas that you pay for?
Did you go rave to your friends about your last fill up?
But if you provide an extraordinary experience, that all changes.
If you exceed expectations it’s human nature for people to want to talk about it.
So here’s how you make referrals happen:
- Provide that Extraordinary Experience every day.
- Educate your clients on not only how you’re different, but why you’re different – both in a way that they clearly understand the benefits.
- Help them to be able to articulate #1 & #2 to others so they can easily spread the word when conversations come up and are actually motivated to start conversations about what you do.
That’s making the referrals happen…
…then you reward after it happens to reinforce that action and make it more likely to happen again and again.
7 Steps.
Nothing complicated, but very effective if put to use.
