How to improve the sales process at your fitness club

Surely you know by now that sales are the most crucial department for any kind of business. Of course, this is also true at your fitness club, whether talking about a sales representative or an entire sales team.

However, just like any other aspect concerning your business, sales can also be improved, right? Therefore, I won't tell you what campaigns to run or discounts you should give. Instead, I will briefly discuss how you can improve your sales process.

You can always work on a few aspects that can be improved constantly regarding your sale process.

 Simplify your sales process

The most important thing is a sale process that is as simple as possible for both members and your team.

Check how long your staff needs to register a membership for a new member from the moment the client decides what they want to purchase.

If it takes more than 2 minutes, your sale process is cumbersome.

Remember that during those two minutes, you must also register the new member's personal details and the membership's dates, register the payment, and generate the invoice.

If you are selling memberships online, pretend you are someone who has never been to your gym and try to purchase a new membership. How long does it take to do this, and how intuitive and user-friendly is the process?

What steps could you eliminate or combine, so your new member doesn't lose interest and abandon the purchase mid-way through?

Automate

After you go through the sale steps online and offline, make a list with everything you can automate. Of course, that means everything your management software should be able to do on its own, not by your staff or members.

It can be small things that might not require too much time each, but combined, they can decrease the purchasing time significantly.

Here are a few examples: when your employee registers a membership, do they have to fill in the start and end dates? Why, if the membership already has a set duration? Instead, after you have selected the start date, your software should be able to calculate de end date automatically.

If a member makes a purchase online, is the membership activated automatically after the payment is confirmed? Or you or your staff must approve the payment and then activate it manually?

Digitize

And since we are discussing automation, I'd be remiss not to talk about digitization.

Digitizing a gym can have different shapes, from online services, like fitness classes through live streaming, to a fully automated reception desk, with turnstiles and an access control system, to digitized processes that replace minutes or even hours of work..

Though, it's true that online workouts are less popular than before, and you need to redesign your front desk for a fully automated access control system. However, you can start by digitizing certain processes. That way, you can systematically work towards transforming your front desk into a fully automated reception if you so desire.

I suggest starting with contracts and invoices. First, these documents should be generated automatically after each purchase, particularly the member contract.

Invest in an automated email solution to automatically send contracts and invoices to members. That way, you won't have to print them out at the front desk.

A genuinely essential step would be to use an electronic signature for the services you sell at the front desk. In addition, all your contracts should be digitally archived with the signatures.

Moreover, neither your staff nor your members will have to wait to fill in a contract or print it out in two copies so they can all be signed.

Extend your operations

Once you streamline your sales process from a technical standpoint, you can work with your sales team.

My first question here is – do you have a sales team? I'm not referring to the actual sale of memberships at the front desk when members come to their own accord. But to a team whose sole responsibility is to persuade people to purchase memberships.

Form a team of two or three employees who only sell memberships and services. Remember! To encourage them, you should give them a percentage of the sales they make. This way, it's in their direct interest to sell as much as possible.

If you are not yet ready to have your own sales team, transform your reception desk staff into part-time sales representatives using the same incentive – sales commission.

Give them the necessary tools so they can increase sales while they are fulfilling their day-to-day responsibilities.

First of all, make sure you have a concrete report on the sales made by each employee, so you can track their activity.

If you sell memberships online, you can give your staff at the front desk a discount code with their name. The discount doesn't have to be significant; this way, you'll know how many members purchased memberships online at your staff's recommendation.

Of course, during low hours, receptionists can call expiring members or those with expired memberships to persuade them to buy another one. For maximum efficiency, they can even register the memberships in your software and simply send the member a payment link. That way, they can quickly finalize the payment without going through the entire process.

You can involve your trainers in this activity. For example, provide a simple way to sell PT sessions to their clients without referring them to the front desk. That way, they can organize their activity independently and be more persuasive since they know their clients best.

After you provide all these tools, you also must teach your staff how to sell. Unfortunately, not all your employees are natural-born salespersons. But that doesn't mean that after a few training sessions and with some speeches in hand, they can't increase your sales.

I know most of these suggestions need quite an effort on your part, but you should know it's not that complicated. Moreover, for most of these, it's only a one-time effort. And if you do things right, you'll immediately see a sales increase.