Many fitness centers tend to change up their offering quite often. They go from a one-week trial, to a six-week challenge, to a three-day class pass, then back to a different challenge that includes nutrition and more. The problem with this is your sales team needs to be comfortable and confident that they know exactly what is expected of them to create a great experience for their prospects. When your core offering changes too often, this can get very hard for your teams, and prospects often fall through the cracks. This can also cause high turnover in your sales team, as a month-long trial can be much harder to gain a commission on than a one-class trial. This does not mean that “shorter trials are always better,” but what it does mean is once you find the sweet spot of when to ask your customers for the sale, stick with it.

One strategic meeting that I have held with countless fitness business owners has been a plan of what to offer missed guests and when. When a lead decides not to sign up, this means you need to evaluate what you could have done different or better. Thinking back to my own personal training days, I believe this is one of the top reasons I was successful in that each time a client didn’t sign the dotted line, I never pointed at the client, I only considered where I could have improved. Remember, fitness can be a very daunting and hard venture to dive headfirst into for many people. In most cases, your missed guests simply need you to not give up on them. Instead of simply considering them “cold leads” and not following up, consider making more aggressive offers on the back end of missing the initial sale.

Once you have found a sweet spot on what tends to work best for your business, you can now take a look at how to change your messaging without necessarily changing the offer too much. For example: many fitness centers will try going from a free class trial to a two-week trial. This is a completely different offering as it requires a massive nurture sequence compared to a free class offering, which now changes your business plan. Instead, let’s say you offer a three-day trial. Instead of extending the trial offer, you can change the verbiage to be “three classes on us” or offer a nutrition consult along with the trial. I have always been a fan of paid trials, and this is another way you can change the messaging here: instead of a flat rate trial, you can offer a discount on the three classes. For example: If your front end offer is three classes for $99, you can offer a limited availability of $50 rebate on three class pass. Again, considering if your full membership is $150 per week, you then can convert trailers into members by the understanding of the membership value based on what they have already paid.

Your key performance indicators (KPIs) should always be the guiding light for any changes you plan to make. Most gym owners think that a different offer, better imaging or videos and even changing the copy will be a game changer in driving better results. The funny thing about this is I often turn this thought process on its head. We must work backwards before we consider a change in offering. Is my programming getting results that drive referrals? Is my customer experience truly exceptional driving sales? Is my sales process written and clear so it can be audited weekly? Is my nurture process documented and being followed near flawlessly? Only then should I seek to potentially make a change to front end offering. Remember, a great business will tell you whether or not people are interested in what you have to offer. Once you get that right, then the key to tweaking the offering is simply ensuring your perfect clients know you exist.

Many fitness businesses often make changes to marketing efforts way too fast. They don’t give enough time to have true data points on each offering, they don’t measure data points effectively, or they haven’t taken all the steps laid out in point four before making marketing changes. Change in marketing can be a good thing since we don’t want to get stale with our messaging, and we certainly need to evolve along with the industry, but following these four steps is a surefire way to ensure that you continually drive guests and more revenue for your business. Now go leave the fitness industry better than you found it!