The Lifeblood Of Your PT Business

By JT | September 8, 2017

Personal Training Clients

Think about this.  Say you have, 1000 members in your facility and say you can get 20% of your members working with your trainers.  You still have 800 members that are not personal training clients.  Something that all clubs need to consider is, what is the best way to manage our non-clients to make sure they stay motivated, see results, and have an opportunity to opt into a personal training program?  This process is called, “6 Week Follow Up Program”.

In her book, “Selling Personal Training”, Casey Conrad talks about a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  In a nutshell, USP is something different that your health club does that no one else does.  Part of your membership USP should be to give your members individual attention with your personal trainers every 6 weeks, free of charge, for the life of their membership, for two reasons:

  1. To make sure they are motivated and
  2. To make sure they are changing

This will give your trainers an opportunity to check in with your members and have a heart to heart conversation if you and the member feel like the member isn’t heading in the right direction.  Most health clubs wont do this because this takes too much heart.  Most trainers don’t do this because they aren’t getting paid for it.  There lays the biggest challenge with most humans, “I am only going to do something if I can expect something in return”.  If this is your attitude, you are in the wrong business.

For the rest of us, here are 4 tips on setting up a quality 6 week follow up:

  1. Your filter to know who goes into your 6 week follow up bucket is your showing rate to your prospects. Once you identify that they are not going to buy from you, then you schedule a time to set them up for a 6 week follow up.
  2. Give your prospects a workout to do on their own. Make sure you teach them how to use the entire club.  Type up the workout.  Throw in some functional movements, strength training machines, and some cardio and cool down at the end.  We all know that all your clients really need is a KB, TRX, and a foam roller.  However, you need to take a look at this from your member’s perspective.  They are paying to utilize the entire club.  Make sure to include a variety of equipment when instructing a member to workout on his or her own.
  3. Set three kinds of goals using a SMART protocol. Set a nutrition goal, usage goal, and a fat loss or performance goal.  In terms of nutrition, be sure to focus on habit-based psychology rather then macronutrients.  Help your members adopt one to two healthy habits every 6 weeks.  For more habit-based psychology, please reference Precision Nutrition.  Usage goal is self-explanatory however a fat loss goal needs to be further discussed.  You should be able to guarantee, pending on health conditions of course, that your members should lose 3-6 lbs of fat every 6 weeks.  With that said, if your member’s main objective is to lose fat, that would be an appropriate goal if they have that much fat to lose.  Be realistic and use your professional judgment.  If your client hardly has any body fat, maybe that wouldn’t be an appropriate goal to set.  The most important aspect to 6 week follow ups is to always be measuring something.
  4. Lastly, always schedule a time to see your prospect in 6 weeks. The understanding must be that in 6 weeks you and the prospect will both see if they are moving in the right direction, if not, then you and the prospect will have a conversation about it.  That doesn’t mean that all of sudden they are going to buy from you, and make sure you express this to your prospect. All that means is what you have done together hasn’t produced the desired result and therefore something needs to change.

About the Author

Mike Gelfgot

Mike Gelfgot is an Anytime Fitness Franchisee. Mike immigrated to the US in 1993 and was the very first AF Franchisee to get an AF tattoo!

Mike has won many awards including:

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