Running a successful consumer-facing business, like a gym or fitness studio, requires more than solid branding, good marketing, or high-end equipment. To operate your facility healthily in the long term, emphasizing your operations and finances will be critical to avoid being in the red or burning out. One of these operating practices we strongly suggest is developing specific processes, standards, and procedures for the various aspects of your facility. Today, we want to focus on client acquisition with gym lead follow-up as it pertains directly to growing your customer base and, therefore, cash flow.
How Establishing Processes and Procedures Can Benefit a Business
If you believe the words “processes” and “procedures” sound too corporate for your small gym or personal training studio, think again. While many may correlate these types of structures to large-scale businesses or bland office culture companies, there is a powerful benefit to having a structure for your business operations. Realistically, any size business entity can benefit from implementing these, and here is why.
First, processes help build efficiency in your fitness facility. That’s right, if you find yourself doing things repeatedly throughout the day, week, month, or even year, there is a good chance you’ve already developed a process for doing that. Think of these as the bones of a business. Your business is the skeleton, but each bone is a process. So, to attract new clients, you have a lead acquisition bone/process. And the same would be true for retention, trainer development, and even gym lead cultivation (to just name a few).
Next, just as processes act as bones, procedures act as the muscles to move the bones usefully and effectively. The procedures are the more intricate steps, standards, and details in getting the job done correctly to your facility’s standards. These can be as detailed as individual steps needed or more relaxed for autonomy while still having metrics and standards for the elements and outcomes.
Where to Start Building a Gym Lead Follow-Up Process
Building on the concept of processes and procedures for your facility, establishing a specific set for your gym lead follow-up is critical to ensuring your hard-earned work is not getting adequately nurtured (or, even worse, forgotten). So, the first step is to take a good, hard look at your system as it is currently operating. Understanding what exactly is happening (or not happening) as prospects give you their information from various marketing channels and how you and your staff respond. Things to consider in your status quo review can include where the leads are coming from, who typically responds, how long it takes to respond, what happens after that initial response, whether the communication is recorded or shared amongst team members, and if tracking for lead lifecycles to conversion is in place (if so, what are your conversion rates and average time to conversion).
Once you have an idea of your operations, it’s time to consider what is working for you and your business and what is failing. At this point, you need to focus on the broken pieces and view them against your gym’s sales funnel. Identifying the areas that are holes in your funnel in which your leads are stalling, getting forgotten, or exiting is essential for understanding how to not only fix your system but also document it into a proper process and procedure to eliminate issues in the future.
One of the final pieces of the investigation puzzle is determining who is currently handling the gym lead follow-up process. While this could range from “whoever picked up the phone” to “I handle all of it,” it’s vital to recognize the current situation, whether it works, and finally, if you want to maintain the status quo.
Drafting Your Gym’s Lead Nurturing Process
An easy way to start drafting your gym’s lead follow-up instructions is to outline the steps within the funnel and ideal timelines surrounding the events. These can be ranges, estimations, or even precise parameters, but establishing some sort of time-bound element is crucial. These times will help give your processes structure and metrics to judge success off of or make adjustments for optimization from – similar to setting SMART goals.
If you have holes in your sales funnel, now is also an excellent time to develop solutions to test. An important note is that a lead’s nurturing process might require unique steps, especially early on, depending on their entry method. We say this because when leads come from social ads, online forms, or other digital channels, there is often a chance to automate early communications and correspondences. However, when leads come in from drop-ins, phone calls/voicemails, or even referrals from current clients, automation is often not as simply implemented up-front, requiring specific steps for a human to follow.
The final step in building your process is to outline the detailed steps, expectations, and even specific wording or phrasing. As you collect this information, ensuring that it is well-documented in a manual or standard operating procedure (SOP) that employees can access or review is imperative for your facility’s long-term success and scalability. Further, specifying the numbers, details, or percentages that accompany steps or outcomes is necessary to ensure your quality standards are met for delivering a final product that you can stand behind.
Testing, Monitoring, and Enhancing Gym Lead Follow-Up
When you implement your new processes, train your team members, and go live with your new gym lead follow-up operating procedures, it’s time to test it. Parallel to how you started this whole process, taking a quick audit of your process and doing a test run as a fake lead from various entry points can give you a sense of whether things are working as they should. Documenting any time delays/deviations, friction points, or even dead-ends can help you avoid lost opportunities and wasted lead potential on a larger scale. Additionally, continuously monitoring your traffic data, metrics, and overall stats can help you identify any potential problems on the systems side early on.
Finally, constantly trying new scripts, different routes, or follow-up methods can significantly improve or optimize your processes. Just as trends can change, systems can benefit from continuous improvement testing to see if there are better ways to approach your lead follow-up process to help promote conversions for your gym.
Making A Splash
Being a facility owner is a hard job that demands a lot of time, energy, and focus to keep the lights on and build upon your success to grow your business continuously. Therefore, gym lead follow-up should be a priority. One of the most effective ways to help keep your business growing in a steady and healthy manner is to build processes and procedures around this fundamental operation. By building solid SOPs, training your staff, and optimizing your processes, you can comfortably aim your focus onto other parts of your business, knowing there are procedures in place to promote success.
