Why sales calls DON’T work for online fitness businesses

Do you think a prospective client signs up with an online fitness coach by:

• reviewing the financials 🔎
   
• calling a meeting with their associates 📞
   
• calculating all the return on investment on a spreadsheet 📈?

Probably not.

So, why would you sell this way?

Let me explain.

How we work at Propane

Let’s start by looking at the difference between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer).

In the business mentoring world, we use B2B.

But the way that we sell fitness coaching in our online fitness business, Propane Fitness, is through a B2C framework. And we recommend you do the same.

Why?

B2B and B2C are both about buying things online, but where they differ is:

• the size of the problem you're solving
   
• the implication of the results
   
• how people tend to make decisions

For example: We help fitness coaches to take the skills that they've learned from face-to-face work and apply it online to generate 30+ new personal training clients in around 12 weeks.

That's a pretty life-transforming result.

It changes the way they work, their impact on the people they work with… it even changes their family life and their future plans.

And it's roughly a £36k pay bump on average.

This all involves a lot of detail and we ask a lot of questions to make sure that it's the right approach for them. So our marketing has to match that.

We run ads, to a webinar, to a one-to-one call where we answer your questions and figure out if you'd be a good fit for the programme.

Because we need to make sure that you only buy because it's a good fit for you.

And we do all of this because we feel like it offers a better client experience.

If you're trusting your entire income and career trajectory with a coach, it's pretty reasonable to want to speak to them about it.

Why are we telling you all of this?

Because the same approach won’t work if you’re selling fitness coaching to someone who wants to lose 10 pounds.

This person isn’t going to sit through a one-hour webinar. And they’re unlikely to book in a call.

Believe me, we've tried it.

What works for online fitness clients?

People usually buy stuff on their phone while Netflix is on in the background.

And from a coaching perspective, you can probably help most people to lose fat.

So, you don't really need a phone call to filter people.

Of course, losing fat and getting fitter are very important fitness goals for the client.

But it's pretty simple.

It's not a £5K problem, and there's no financial return on investment associated with it.

What fitness mentors do (and why it DOESN’T work)

You've probably noticed that a lot of fitness business mentors are teaching the same method that they use to sell their business mentoring to you, as they do to sell fitness coaching.

That sort of thing might have worked ten years ago. But nowadays, they’ll run into quite a few roadblocks by operating in this way, like:

• issues booking sales calls
   
• difficulty with the quality of those calls (once people actually show up)
   
• low show-up rates
   
• low close rates
   
• low renewal rates on high-ticket programmes

If you’ve tried this, there’s probably not a problem with your marketing.

You’re just using the wrong tools for the job.

So, how do you fix this?

By using ads to generate leads.

Then putting people through a 14-day automated sales sequence.

And this reliably converts 3-5% of those people into clients.

Using an automated follow-up sequence will then help you retarget the people who might have needed some time to think about it.

And you sell a £100-a-month membership with a semi-automated coaching system so that it has the capacity to coach over 100 happy clients.

Want to see how it works?

If you’d like to give this a go yourself, you can visit this link to see how it all works in our free online training video.

You can also find out more about how we run our online business in our how-to guides.

And if you’d like to have a chat with us to find out more about our business mentoring, you can visit this link to book in a call.