How Top Coaching Gyms Close 20+ Sales Per Month

Gym owners often ask “how do I get more leads?” when they really need more customers.

The problem usually isn’t lead generation—it’s leads that don’t move down the marketing funnel.

How do you know if your funnel is clogged? You have to track and analyze metrics.

To help you add more clients, our February 2024 leaderboard show dials in on three critical lead-tracking metrics: set rate, show rate and close rate. How many leads set appointments, how many people show up, and how many buy?

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder and CEO Chris Cooper runs through each Top 10 leaderboard, sharing data from the best gyms around the world.

Then he gives you tips directly from the owners of these gyms so you can find out exactly what they’re doing to get more clients in the door.

One tip came up in every interview: speed—reach out to leads as fast as possible.

Links

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

1:35 - February 2024 leaderboards

3:11 - NSIs set

5:15 - NSIs showed 

6:51 - NSIs closed

8:43 - Marketing tips

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:02

How are the best gyms in the world getting leads right now? Well, I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. And today I'm gonna tell you, we're gonna start with who are the best gyms in the world at getting leads and then I'm gonna tell you how they do it, but we're also gonna go deeper. We're also going to say, who are the best gyms in the world at getting those leads to show up for sales appointments? And who are the best gyms in the world for getting those leads to sign up for membership? They're not all the same gym , but we asked every one of them, how are you doing this better than anybody else? And today, I'm gonna share that with you because today is our leaderboard show. Every month we collect data from thousands of gyms around the world and we look for who's doing the best at different things. It's like you're programming for your gym and you've got data from all these athletes and you say, who's the fastest runner? Who's the best at deadlift? Who is the best at Fran? Who's the best at kettlebells? And then you interview each one and you say, what are you doing that makes you so good? Then we turn around and we share that all with you so that you can copy them, you can follow their business programming, do what they do and become successful. Two , we do that by starting with actual metrics because I'm sure you've heard from 500 gym owners who say, I'm amazing at getting leads, let me help you. And you know by now to be skeptical of those, we wanna start with actual proof and numbers so that we know that we're telling you the right things. So the first thing we're gonna do is look at our leaderboards. We've got three different leaderboards for you today. One is on appointments set. These are the number of people who uh , came through a website and booked a no sweat intro. The second thing is appointments showed, so of those people, how many people showed up for their no sweat intro? And the third thing is appointments closed . So how many of those people actually bought? The reason we break these three things up is because every single day I'm in gym owners united.com, that is our free group. You can join it and people will ask questions about how do I get more leads? But as a mentor, my job is to dig deeper and say, what is the actual problem here? And many times people say, how do I get more leads when they really mean, how do I get more customers? And when we look at their funnels, we don't see a problem with lead gen. We see a problem with leads that don't go anywhere or leads that never book an appointment or leads that don't show up for an appointment or leads that don't actually sign up. And when we break the problem down like that, we can solve it. We can solve it easily and we can solve it forever. The metrics that we track for marketing are set our leads of course, set rate, show rate, and close rate leads is how many people get from the universe to your website. Set rate is how many people who go on your website book an appointment to come talk to you . Show rate is how many of those people show up for their appointment. And close rate is how many of those people buy. If we look at those things in sequence, we can make your business so much better. We can make your marketing so much more powerful. And today I'm gonna tell you how the best in the world do it. So let's start here with our leaderboards. We're gonna talk about appointments set first. And the reason that we're looking at these separately instead of who gets the most leads and closes them all is because we wanna learn from the best in each case. If I wanna get a bigger deadlift, I want to talk to the best dead lifter in the world. If I want to be get the best 400 meter runtime, I want to talk to the best 400 meter runner in the world. If I wanna be good at both of them , I want to talk to both of those people, not necessarily the person who is currently the best at doing both of those things. Hopefully that makes sense. So if I look at who is best in the world at setting appointments, wow, Canada is represented, which I'm proud to say US is represented, but none of the top six come from North America, which is amazing for this. So , uh, let's start at number 10. We've got people , um, two Canadian gyms getting 39 and 40 appointments booked last month. That's pretty good. If you think about it, that's like more than one appointment every day. And if you're open 25 days outta the month, you're getting close to two appointments a day. Imagine if you had two no sweat intros every single day, how much better your business would be doing. As we travel up the leaderboard, we see more appointments set. 40, 41, 46 in Denmark, 47 in Great Britain, 49 in Sweden. Oh, proud of those guys. 76 in Amsterdam, 87. And uh , the number one ranked gym worldwide for getting NSIs set is it's a tie. Two gyms have 87. What's really, really interesting is that one of these gyms is in South America and one of these gyms is in Europe. You know, I often hear, ah , there's no market for my thing, you know, fitness hits , CrossFit, whatever your gym is semi-private in x, Y, z . I've heard every kind of gym in every kind of country. There's no excuse for your marketing not to be working. We've got two gyms here, one's in Europe, one's in South America, they're both getting 90 or 87 NSIs set last month. Amazing. Now let's talk about show rate because this is a different skill. So number one, if you wanna get a lot of appointments to show up, I'm gonna give you their top tips in a moment. But you have to be good at generating leads. You have to have like four marketing funnels and your website has to be good at converting them into appointments, okay? Those are the two big prerequisites to get people to show up is another skill set that's called lead nurture. So you might use a CRM for this or you might have like a staff person that's in charge of doing sell by chat or, or another lead nurture. Okay? So if we go up the leaderboard this time, here's what's crazy interesting. There are a couple of gyms from the states who are really, really good at lead nurture and they got 26 gyms to show or people to show up for their gym. Uh , the top Canadian is ah , uh, somebody on the mentor team. He got 33 people to show up. So what's interesting here is if you take that gym, he's not on the top 10 for most appointments booked, but he is in the top 10 for most appointments showed, which means he's great at lead nurture, maybe a more important skill. Then I see 37 appointments showed 38, 40, 50 and 76 appointments showed, okay , we're gonna learn from all these people. So not only does this person have dozens and dozens of appointments booked, but 76 people actually showed up for their appointment. Okay? Now your show rate should be around 70% or better. Um , if you're doing free trials, that show rate's gonna go way down to below 50%. What you want is some an appointment that's on somebody's calendar, so they're showing up and meeting you and they're expecting to, but you also have to talk to them on the road to getting there. Now let's talk. NSIs closed . So these are people who said, sign me up, here's my credit card, and they became clients. Alright ? If we look top 10 and we work our way up, we see some crazy numbers here. Uh, Jim and Great Britain, 20 , uh, a couple of gyms in the us 21, 22 different parts of the country , uh, Jim in Denmark, 22. Then we keep going up another gym in Europe, 23, a gym in the us 24 , uh, gym in Canada, 25, a gym in Great Britain, 28 , uh, another gym in the states 31 and the top gym is actually in South America. They had 55 new clients actually joined last month. Now here's what's crazy. This is not the, the stuff that you see on Facebook. I will flood your gym, I will get you 30 new clients guaranteed, right? These are not cold leads. People who are gonna come in for a severe discount or like try your thing and be gone in six weeks. It's not a bait and switch. These are real clients coming in for real coaching. They want to be coached. They are high value, they're signing up for personal training or group coaching classes. They're gonna stick around, right? It's not the the flash in the pan ad agency crap that you see out there. Now I'm gonna get to their top advice for you, but before I do congratulations to all these leaders, you are really impacting these people. If there are one person, five people, 10, 20, 55 people joining your gym in a month, those are lives saved. Those are not just cold leads coming in and try before you buy. These are people who are gonna stick around long enough to meaningfully change their lives. That's amazing. And that's why I love , uh, the gyms that do have a lot of clients because I know they're meaningfully changing their lives. It's not just like the up, down , up, down , up, down that you get from novelty buyers. Let's talk about their best tips. When somebody is, is giving their best tips for getting people to show up, the first quote is speed. They said, we really tried to reach out to new leads as fast as possible, and we have double confirmation before the appointment. So they send texts and emails saying, Hey, just, we're gonna be waiting for you. Can't wait to see you. Reminder 3:00 PM Monday, we will be there. Okay? They're al also good at clarity and consistency. They said we're consistent with new leads and we have a clear path for all of our leads. We have narrowed our offering for no new members and there is less confusion for the lead and our staff that are doing the no Sweat intro. We recently did this at my gym too. I'll tell you exactly what we did. When somebody comes in the door now, they do their no Sweat intro, which is what we've been doing for 20 years. The only thing that they are sold is either personal training or an on-ramp program to get them ready for group. The salesperson has a very easy job. They recommend one of those two things. After they go through their on-ramp, they meet with our team again and they say, would you prefer to continue one-on-one with me? Or do you feel ready for group training? If they start out with personal training mission, a comp , like they're , they just stick with personal training. And then of course every client has a goal review every 90 days where that prescription or or their membership might change. Next, this person is great at getting leads to book and they said, we contact the leads as quickly as possible. So that's two votes for speed contact consists of a text, a call, and an email. So they're not just like setting up an autoresponder, they're actually picking up the phone and calling the person. And if you really wanna be successful at anything in business, this is it. You have to care enough to have the hard conversation. Somebody just put themselves out there, they filled in the form on your website. Oh, oh no, okay, send. They're literally waiting for you to call and extend your hand. Give them a lifeline and say, don't worry, we can help. I got you. And that's what you're doing with a call. People feel weird about these calls. Like, oh, I'm being a prohi salesperson. You're answering a cry for help. People are in the water waving their arms, you are tossing them the life ring and they're waiting for you to do that. If you're not doing that quickly, it seems like you just don't care. This person also said, doing the thing is important. This is his direct quote. Two brain teaches this. I decided to really double down and get outta my comfort zone and call the leads rather than just relying on text and email. I ask them a few questions almost like I'm making sure it's a good fit. And then we invite them into our gym and instead of asking them to come to our gym, we invite them, provide a few times we have available and then book it. I think that's really important because it really shows you the framing that's in that gym owner's head about inviting people to their gym. You know, when I got good at Affinity Marketing that I started with Curiosity and then went to invitation. So I would talk to people mostly at hockey games or whatever sports my kid was playing. Oh, you're the guy that owns that gym. Yeah, yeah. Do you belong to a gym in town? No, I don't. I really blah, blah, blah . I would be curious, oh really? Why not? Or what, what do you think the problem is? And they'd give me a reason and then I would just invite them like, Hey, I'll tell you what, I'm gonna be at my gym on Monday. I know I'm free between 10 and 12. Do you wanna just come in and chat there in private? And it doesn't work every time, of course, but many times people will accept the invitation on the spot and many other times they'll come back to that invitation later because they know that invitation is open. Next. So this is, this is a Jim in Denmark. This guy is consistently on top of our revenue leaderboard or our client headcount leaderboard. But one reason he's there is he's good at booking appointments, having those appointments show up and then closing them. And he says, I followed data backed tactics. So we created a new Facebook lead campaign based on some graphics recommended by Two Brain combined with some variation of a 51 30 post, again taught by two Brain. We then split tested this for women, men and mixed audiences. And then in addition, we've started Google Ads, but 80% of the success comes from our Facebook advertising. So this is what we teach in Two Brain is we give you the ad copy and pictures and everything to use to get set up, but we also teach you to test it and make your ads work and tailor them over time. You don't need different ads than everybody else. You need to get good at running ads and eventually maybe you outsource them if you want to. But don't start by hiring an ad agency. Start by getting good at this, acquiring this skill and then practicing it. Getting reps, it's not as scary, it's not as mysterious, it's not as mind numbing as it seems. It's a skill just like a snatch, way less technical than a snatch. You can learn it, you can get good at it. The same person also says Speed. We've heard that before. He says, we try to contact all of our leads within 20 minutes. Yes, we have automation set up to help with lead follow up , but nothing beats a call and human contact. You know, we're three for three recommending that. He also says, relentless follow up . In a perfect world where we have the time, our lead follow up is very intense. One, we call all leads once an hour until contact is made. Two, we always call twice to increase the rate at which they answer their phone. Three texts and emails are only used from day two onward four. We ideally try every hour between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM every day for at least six days. Of course we don't have time every single hour, but that says something about the volume and attention that I'm willing to give each lead to help them get started again, invite help. This is the skill that this gym owner has mastered. He also recommends having staff to scale when you get to this level. He says, when we hit on this effective marketing that's multiplied our leads, I hired a meeting booker, you might call them a setter in North America. Uh, we hired a meeting booker that I pay per showed appointment combined with a small hourly rate. She can book no sweat intros directly into my CSMs calendar in order to keep up my CSM does nearly 200 goal reviews per 90 day period now. Wow. And so that's why she's not doing all the lead follow up anymore. Now that person outsourced a lot of their marketing and also their, their goal reviews. You might be tempted to jump to that, but you need to do this work yourself first so that you know what it is that you're delegating and you can help 'em when they run into trouble and you can coach them on getting better. Okay? Systemize means you do it yourself. You record exactly how you do it. Optimize means you try a couple of tweaks. You change your ad copy, you change your lead, nurture your sell by chat. And then automate means you give it to another human. You delegate it to them. Here are some tips. Another person who's really good at both booking NSIs and closing. He says, surprise, speed and practice. He says, I'm the sole lead, nurture , and salesperson. The two things that I focus on the most are one, call the lead as fast as possible, making sure to write notes of our conversation so I can keep lots of the conversations straight. And two practice, no sweat intros all the time, mostly just to my camera so I can have a smooth sales process once I get the lead into the gym. Speed and reps make him better and help him get such a high close rate. He also says to practice help first . He says, I'm doing pretty close to what two Brainin teaches. Just trying to perfect it every time and having a genuine help First mentality, help first means approach with curiosity. Make an invitation to help you. And I know that we can help people by giving them advice, but they won't take it. We really need to invite them to come into our gyms and that's what Help First is all about. Another person from Amsterdam gave us a little bit of advice. So first they use specific tools. He uses Kilo, which is a CRM and a website company. And they started running paid ads. So they're setting up like lead gen. They're setting up kind of a capturing funnel. And he said, we think this was directly responsible for our high metric. I expect the coming months to be the same, if not better. That's right, because he's not doing a bait and switch, you know, shot in the dark tactic like a lot of gym owners got sucked into back in 2018 and are still getting sucked into. Now, if somebody says, we're gonna get you 30 leads this month, guaranteed, I guarantee you it is a short term tactic that is gonna harm you in the long term because you are not learning how to do this yourself. And then the person also reinforced, just do the thing he said, we really just do everything we're told by our mentor and that is what makes us successful. We consistently tell stories on social media. We engage with our clients through Kilo using our own voice, and it all just works well. Surprise, surprise. The reason all this stuff works is because we start from data, we collect what are the best actually doing. We codify that and mentor gyms on how to do it, and then we hold them accountable for doing it. That's why two brand gyms are accelerating way faster than anybody else. We're not out here guessing, we're identifying, we're copying, we're approaching with curiosity, we're codifying and we're teaching it. In other words, exactly what I'm telling you to do. Systemize, optimize, and then automate. I'm Chris Cooper. This is Run a Profitable Gym. I hope this podcast has been helpful to you. Even if this is all advice you've heard before , maybe this time is the time that you'll do it, and I hope that it is . Thank you for your service.