Handling Gym Membership Sales Objections And Closing The Deal
Fitness was a $17 billion a year industry in 2014, and it continues to grow every year. Your small gym business has every opportunity to make selling a central skill that will drive your business forward. What’s more, all of your employees are counting on you to pull through.
So, who in your gym is responsible for selling new memberships? The answer has to be all of you! You need your team to understand that their jobs depend on their ability to bring in new members and turn curious window shoppers into loyal customers. So, getting the team together for sales training and discussions is critical to getting everyone aligned and focused on capturing sales, whether it is new memberships, classes and development sessions, or add-on sales for extra income.
Use Sales Meetings To Get The Team Involved
If your fitness center is close to the edge and you are attempting to affect a turnaround, you will need to have more sales meetings than if you are pulling in the new members with a rake. Your sales meetings are the perfect time to find out what the objections are and how to respond to them.
The first thing to look at in each session is recent results; if your team has had successes make sure you call it out and praise the person who closed the sale. However, tactfully discussing sales attempts or "pitches" that missed the target and let the prospect get away can be much more instructive.
Empathy Sells
In the presence of a receptive prospect for your services, the first thing you need to do is to listen; don’t project your reasoning and needs onto them. By far, the majority of people will have a different take on fitness, a different history with gyms, and a host of other defining attributes that have nothing in common with your personal experience.
To understand those people who’ve traveled a different path is to let them tell you what they want and why they are thinking about using your gym. Before they open up, they are going to need to feel a sufficient amount of trust in you and be comfortable in your presence.
Overcome The Objections And Close That Sale!
When you have a prospect in front of you, it is the best chance you will ever get to sell your services. If you don’t receive any objections, it probably means that you haven’t broken through that defensive wall. If that happens, back off a bit and try to bring the pressure down and listen for any clues of what they want while you talk about the gym and what it has to offer.
That is the time that you will be able to understand what it is that holds them back from joining your gym or studio. If you find out what the objection to your offer is, you can overcome it using one of many techniques that have stood the test of time, and this link will take you to sources for most of them, and this is also a superb list of how to overcome objections.
Additional Points To Remember
- Learn to sell your product on value, not price. Not all customers are sensitive to price but who doesn’t want to get something great, the more, the better.
- Trainers are a tremendous resource if they have any experience they will have come to the obvious conclusion that fitness professionals have to sell themselves and their services to make a living; they are a ready-made sales crew.
- As they say, you should always be closing, right? I’m just assuming that you agree with me here. Objections are fantastic opportunities to establish what the prospect wants, so overcome the objection and close by asking for the sale.
- Think about ancillary sales opportunities like branded merchandise and convenience items such as sports drinks and protein bars.
- Role-play your sales process. One of the most useful sales training activities is to act out the experience of interacting with prospects that walk into your place of business. During your frequent sales meetings, have one team member play the role of guest and another can attempt to sell a membership to them. Use this to refine the pitch and also to learn the obvious objections and the best response for each.
Selling As A Team Sport
The selling of gym memberships always has been and always will be about capturing attention, building desire, closing on a decision and enabling action. Overcoming objections and closing a sale is something that works best if you have a team that you have trained and working together to a plan. If you can get your athletically inclined employees to work as a team, you are probably half way to a successful gym business.
Bibliography
Changing Minds. Objection-handling. https://changingminds.org/disciplines/sales/objection/objection_handling.htm (accessed September 7, 2016).
Fagan, Lawrence. 7 Ways to Overcome Price Objections when Selling Health Club Memberships. June 5, 2013. https://blog.gyminsight.com/1049-7-ways-to-overcome-price-objections-when-selling-health-club-memberships/ (accessed September 7, 2016).
Spreiter, Daryl. 6 Techniques for Effective Objection Handling. March 25, 2013. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2013/03/6-techniques-for-effective-objection-handling.html (accessed September 7, 2016).
Stern, Phil. How to Sell Gym Memberships: Stop Pitching, Start Listening. https://zenplanner.com/how-to-sell-gym-memberships-stop-pitching-start-listening/ (accessed September 7, 2016).