Creating Chaos - For Fitness & Sport Professionals

Being the festive period all about giving, it struck me as a good time to think about service offerings and the facility we create to entice new clients into using our services.

In my experience, personal trainers offer a free consultation, session, postural appraisal or introduction into a specialist style of training. Whilst this makes absolute sense, afterall, it is a service and what better way to promote a service than to give someone a taste, is it really enough or is it the best way to bring on new clients? Well, only your conversion rates will clarify whether you're getting the results you want. There are a number of challenges with getting new clients. Letting potential new clients become aware of your services, getting new potential clients infront of you and then finally converting them into a paying client. If it is only a free session that you promote to new potential clients, is this enough to differentiate you from your competition??


Without knowing your client fully, how do you know that a taster session is going to be right for them or what to focus on?

This is not the gospel but the following may be things that you want to consider with bringing new clients on board:

• Pre-taster screening - Get to know your client before you give them a free session. Health and medical screening should be part of this but the more you understand about the person, the more appropriate you can make the taster session for them. Understand their likes and dislikes with exercise, their motivations, their buying strategies etc. If you want to know more about how to find these things out with simple questions, contact info@creatingchaos.co.uk for more detail
• The taster session - Avoid delivering a template session that you give to everyone. If you work in a gym then this will become very obvious to the by-standers. I'm not saying avoid a template as this will help you structure the session but make the specific content relevant. If nutrition is much the bigger area then focus more on this. Fancy exercises don't impress everyone!!
• Post taster report - Let people know how they did. If you've looked at posture or function then give the individual a report / some feedback. This should come with a huge caveat. Avoid depressing people with the bad news and be tactful when giving feedback. Using a very typical management style, give some good feedback followed by an area that could be improved followed by some more encouraging feedback. For example "You've got excellent flexbility which will help us achieve great results. We can work on your core strength quite a lot and combined with your lower body strength we'll be able to make waves in your training." Notice that the example doesn't give excessive terminology and this is something I see trainers do constantly - overwhelm the client with irrelevant information. It is fantastic that you can identify reciprocal inhibition of the glutes from the Psoas Hip flexor but this doesn't really mean much to the client. The language of most clients is results and by when...remember this! There are exceptions and if you're clients enjoy understanding about the anatomical elements then meet that demand when you're able to.
• Offer an incentive that is results based - This shows how confident you are as a trainer. Clients want results and if you offer them a reward for achieving results then this will not only sell and promote your services but it will act as a motivator during the programme which is another challenge for you. This may be in the shape of free sessions or something that is more of a tangible gift. It may be a pair of good running trainers / training gear or indeed anything. This may seem like too much but is it really? Think about it, how much are your clients worth per year? £2,3,4 or 5,000? It would be much better spent money to keep hold of a client than to have to market more for new clients and then find the client of the same value to your business.

A few ideas and hopefully some festive food for thought. Please leave comments and add your suggestions.