5 Tips for Selling More Gym Memberships

Exceed Team Blog
5 min readOct 28, 2020

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You were expecting more memberships by the current date, but now you feel stuck? Selling gym memberships to new customers can be tricky. Our significant experience in gym management software development helped us to prepare a list of ideas that work.

From this article, you’ll learn how to sell gym memberships through all of your sales channels, both face-to-face and online.

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

Table of contents

1. Get to know your prospects as well as you can

2. Analyze needs and adjust your gym presentation to them

3. Work with gym membership sales script

4. Launch a referral program

How to organize a referral program? How to ask customers for referrals? Why would they want to give a referral?

5. Take all shots with specialized CRM software for gym

How CRM software for gym optimize your membership sales?

1. Get to know your prospects as well as you can

Ask more questions. Seriously. Nowadays, customers are more open to sharing not only email addresses and phone numbers but also links to social media profiles. This way, you can discover more about their interests and try social selling. Plus, don’t lose your chance to schedule push notifications with discounts for birthdays.

N.B.! Include questions about their previous gym attendance experience. Knowing customers’ “likes’’ and “dislikes’’ will help you create a more individualized offer to cover their concerns.

Read also: 5 easy steps for building a food delivery app

2. Analyze needs and adjust your gym presentation to them

A general offer will not appeal to a specific customer no matter how good your services and facilities are. Customer Trust Trends Salesforce Research identified that 84% of interviewees say that to gain their loyalty, sales managers should treat them more like individuals rather than as another contact on the list.

Analyze their goals and motivation and adjust your offer to add more personal value.

  • What’s your training goal? What time period do you set to achieve it?
  • What kind of activities do you prefer?
  • What training schedule would you like to have?

And don’t be afraid of a direct question:

  • How do you choose what gym to join?

Store the answers — they will be helpful in the future. After you close the deal with a customer, keep updating their information, track their training progress, and check whether new goals are set. For those who rejected, you can form proper follow-ups that increase the possibility of turning “cold” prospects into your gym club members later.

3. Work with gym membership sales script

When you know your customers well, it’s not hard to predict their questions and objections. If you have already sold a couple dozen or hundreds of memberships, you know what questions and objections are nearly always the same. Turn your experience into the optimized script.

Good scripts serve to direct a productive dialog. ‘’Listen more, speak less’’, — it’s a key principle. Carefully adjust your offers to customers’ needs, but don’t push them right away. Your dialog should flow like a well-composed melody:

  • Customer asks.
  • Sales manager answers and leads a discussion with the next question.
  • Customer answers.
  • Sales manager asks additional questions.
  • Customer gives more information on their needs
  • Sales manager presents a 100% match offer.

Use scripts for all stages of conversation with a potential customer: from gym tour to cancellation policy explanation.

N.B.! Two words to close a deal: personalized experience. Show your prospects that you really care by giving them offers that match their best interests.

4. Launch a referral program

A satisfied customer is your source of free well-performing advertisement. Referral Marketing generates 3–5x higher conversion rates than any other channel.

As Nielsen discovered, the likelihood of a person to make a purchase is 4 times higher if a friend referred to the product. A referral program is one of the most effective gym membership sales strategies.

Picture alt: Nielsen, “Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages”

Read also: 13 working methods to increase gym member retention

How to organize a referral program?

  • guest passes;
  • referral competition scheme;
  • open classes, workouts, and boot camps;
  • social media referrals from users.

Read also: How a gym crm system can boost your health club to new ground

How to ask customers for referrals?

  • let them know about your referral system at the beginning and include this information in their membership contracts;
  • face-to-face request from front-desk manager;
  • place posters and referral cards in your gym;
  • launch a referral marketing campaign on emails and social media;
  • put referral CTA button on your website.

Why would they want to give a referral?

First of all, they should be satisfied with your service. Encourage your current members with good rewards. The statistic shows that material incentives as discounts and free attendance period are the best motivation for referrals.

N.B.! A set referral program is good, but not enough. To make the most of this channel, you should have a tool to scale this program. But more about that later.

Read also: Fitness industry trends for 2020

5. Take all shots with specialized CRM software for gym

In previous paragraphs, you learned about effective ways to sell more gym memberships, now let’s talk about how to get maximum results from each of them.

Revising the best ways to sell gym memberships, you probably concluded that you have to process a lot of data. And that’s definitely true.

How CRM software for gym optimize your membership sales?

The well-organized base of clients’ profiles

You’ll not lose any piece of data. Within CRM system prospects, customers are properly segmented according to their status and loyalty. With implemented comment fields, your sales managers can add notes after every contact with a client and update their status.

Improve personalized experience based on members behavior reports

The Business Intelligence module built into the CRM system processes data, including customers’ interests, previous choices, attendance tendencies, progress, and so on. Algorithms can even calculate which of your customers will continue being a member of your gym, and who is more likely going to quit. All this data helps you to see the full picture with both strong and weak sides and to react accordingly.

Build and scale an effective referral marketing campaign

Integrate all your referral channels to CRM, receive reports on channels’ performance, and optimize your referral program.

Optimize sales funnels and follow-up campaigns

You, as a business owner, will have reports on all sales/lead interactions. Graphics, you can find on a dashboard, reflect all prospects in a sales funnel according to their loyalty. Allowing you to see what leads are converted to members and who rejects completely. For those who reject, automated follow-ups should be set up in the CRM-system. Expertise shows that “cold’’ leads can easily turn into “hot’’ leads when life circumstances or lifestyles change. Automated follow-up techniques with appropriate offers are crucial for effective online promotion.

Originally posted at: https://exceed-team.com/blog/how-to-sell-more-gym-memberships/

Learn more about CRM for gym functions and possibilities here: /services/fitness-club-and-gym-management/

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Exceed Team Blog
Exceed Team Blog

Written by Exceed Team Blog

We write about web & mobile apps that help startups and businesses achieve their missions

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