Getting your fitness trainers and gym staff to promote products and services requires some work from you as the business owner first. This means that you’re going to have to do a little selling in the form of leadership. It is up to you to motivate your team to generate sales result from the members of your gym or fitness center.

Individual selling skills are very important and they will help trainers build a career in the long term. However, there needs to be a common frame of understanding within your organization. It all hinges on providing the skills and tools that give your team a bit of leverage. It never hurts to review your sales techniques and always be looking for ways to improve your team’s effectiveness in selling.

Keep Selling To Stay In Business

When you know the customers well enough, you can help them choose the products and services out of which they are going to get the most benefit. By building a relationship over time you grow a trust that you can be the advisor they need to help with tough choices.

The keys to success in this kind of relationship selling are integrity, consistency over time and good habits by the representative who is the contact with the customer. Leading your fitness trainers to appreciate using their selling skills to support the business and to further their own careers.

If you can apply continuous training advancements among your training staff small development steps will add up to long-term success for everyone. It builds discipline and confidence in the minds of your trainers. That serves them well in their careers and supports their relationship with you as a worthy employer. It also helps the customers get the most out of their memberships. If you’re selling effectively as an organization, you’ll be offering the right products and services to help them achieve their fitness goals.

The Task of Relationship Building

It’s very important that there’s a big picture point of view that you create for your gym. If you can develop a sense that team members are sharing in a common identity, which makes them stronger by being part of the whole. Hopefully, it’ll reduce selfish behavior and rivalries that can be so poisonous to teamwork.

Checklists have worked very well at my gym, as a simple framework for accomplishing tasks. Checklists are so simple as a concept and as a structure. When it comes to selling to the membership, checklists aren’t something you need to have the members see but behind the scenes it helps to organize the tasks that go into relationship selling.

Gym management software can help in scheduling the tasks that will support membership relations by creating reminders over an extended period. It’s a framework of contact reminders and status reviews that’s a super-checklist, combined with a calendar function.

This can be used as a selling point to get your staff to buy into the practices of connection. If you can motivate them bit-by-bit to be more effective sales people their increased confidence and career success will translate to motivation to build your gym.

Always Be Connecting

Encourage your trainers to make connections with customers, the old practice of phoning past customers to let them know about an offer, advise them on issues, motivate them, just stay in touch does so much to help your enterprise succeed. When you have a set of tools that is worthy of a skilled sales force, it’s also going to help them provide better service to the customers and give the right advice and ultimately close the sales that build the bottom line.

I wrote about moving the comfort zone in a previous post about training trainers to offer products and services to the members. They aren’t necessarily the most inspired sellers but the do tend to be people oriented and that’s a useful handle you can build on. This is why getting optimum sales results takes leadership, consistent training and a framework on which to build success. As I keep saying, small successes everyday will add up to big bottom line results at the end of the year.

Over to you…

What advanced selling techniques are your employing at your fitness business?