Run a Profitable Gym
Run a Profitable Gym is packed with business tools for gym owners and CrossFit affiliates. This is actionable, data-backed business advice for all gym owners, including those who own personal training studios, fitness franchises, and strength and conditioning gyms. Broke gym owner Chris Cooper turned a struggling gym into an asset, then built a multi-million-dollar mentoring company to help other fitness entrepreneurs do the same thing. Every week, Chris presents the top tactics for building a profitable gym, as well as real success stories from gym owners who have found incredible success through Two-Brain Business mentorship. Chris’s goal is to create millionaire gym owners. Subscribe to Run a Profitable Gym and you could be one of them.
Run a Profitable Gym
Sales Funnel First Aid: Why Leads Aren't Turning Into Members
Struggling to turn gym leads into paying members? Your sales funnel might need some first aid.
In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” marketing experts John Franklin and Matt Temby break down sales data from three gyms, identify gaps in their sales processes and explain how to fix them.
The pair dial in on three key lead-tracking metrics: set rate, show rate and close rate. They explore why one gym has trouble getting leads to set appointments, why another has so many no-shows, and why a third struggles to close high-ticket sales.
John and Matt walk through changes each gym could make to improve their sales, such as contacting leads faster and asking better questions during the sales consultation.
Tune in to hear real-world examples of sales-funnel remedies, then find and fix the weak points in your gym’s funnel.
To learn more about improving your sales process, check out Matt’s last two appearances on the show, linked below.
Links
Sales Process Overview
Handling Objections
Gym Owners United
Book a Call
0:01 - Intro
0:39 - Setting more appointments
5:13 - Getting leads to show up
6:07 - Closing more sales
8:28 - Increasing high-ticket sales
Hello and welcome to this episode of Run a Profitable Gym. I am your host for the day, John Franklin , the CMO here at Two Brain Business. And joined with me is my coworker Matt Tembe , the head of sales. And uh, if you want to help more people grow your community and make more money, this is the episode for you. So Matt , here we have three different sample gyms that are based off of actual gyms within two brainin . We've anonymized some of the data and we're just gonna break down their metrics and we're gonna try and figure out where they have gaps in the sales process and how to fix it. So gym number one got 57 leads over the last three months. They had a 19% set rate, a hundred percent show rate, a 91% close rate. Their current bottleneck is they're struggling to convert leads into no sweat intros or sales appointments, which makes sense with that 19% show rate. Seems very low, especially when I see 57 leads that under 20 leads a month. I'm assuming all that is coming from organic. So they gotta be relatively warm leads that are finding 'em through, you know, Google my business or something like that for sure. And so they want to improve their set rate . So talk me through what you would tell this person to do if they wanted to get their set rate from 19, let's say to 29%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for these guys, set rate is the biggest lever where they're gonna see ROI . And so this means having somebody on their team that is responsible for lead nurture, right? As you already mentioned, these people are probably coming in through an email inquiry or it's going directly through their website. So they've done a good job of building like brand presence and awareness , uh, but they're just not getting to these people fast enough. So I'm guessing that this is probably an owner that is wearing all of the hats in their, in their gym and like they're just dropping the ball with one of the most important things that they could actually be doing. Or they have a team that doesn't understand the urgency, so it's picking up the phone and dialing. You can use your gym management software to track where somebody's at in the process. The , the one downside to using a CRM , uh, a customer relationship management tool versus like a Google spreadsheet is that you can't see where each prospect is at over the course of x number of days. So for my gyms, we track over five days , uh, did we contact them in the morning and do we contact them in the evening? And so somebody is responsible for that every day . And so it's just very quick for me to audit in the morning to see did we contact these people or not. And that's usually where there's, there's gaps in the system. So they need to put together a process for tracking where each of these 57 leads are at when they got contacted. And something that would be really good for the owner to be held accountable to themselves is documenting the time that that lead came through. So that's very easy to find through your website versus the time and the date that they actually contacted them so that then they can say, Hey, I'm generally contacting people within 12 hours. Great, can we go from 12 to six hours? Can we go from six to two hours? The faster you contact these people, the more likely you are to be able to set them.
Speaker 1:So to put a visual on what Matt is talking about it , he actually creates a Google spreadsheet within his gym where you have every single lead with their own line and you source where that person came from when they came in. And then you actually just follow every touch point , right Matt? Yep . And then there's , so that's what we're looking at here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a color coding system so that , that each team member that is part of this process knows exactly where somebody's at.
Speaker 1:And then you keep track of all your text calls, just like the total momentum in the sales pipeline here in a separate spreadsheet, right? Yes . That's what I'm looking at here. Okay, cool. So when Matt says, you know, you wanna nurture your leads, one of the steps that goes along with nurturing the leads is actually knowing where the leads are in the pipeline and tracking that data for 57 leads. So less than 20 a month, that should be relatively easy to use. I guarantee if that gym owner puts in a tracking system like this and ensures that they're nurtured in a proper sequence and that nurturing is happening faster than it likely is now we will see that set rate climb up here. Cool. For sure. So that's an easy one and and a common one, right? That's probably one of the more common ones we see People just like don't wanna nurture the leads or, or they do some sort of nurture but it's not very robust. Right?
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. Let's move on to gym two . So gym two in the last three months got 153 leads, so that's a little over 50 a month. So that would lead me to believe there . They do paid ads. Is that a , is this a paid ads Jim ?
Speaker 2:It is, yep .
Speaker 1:Okay, cool. With a 42% set rate. So more than double the previous gym. That doesn't sound bad. That's pretty solid for for paid ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for paid for paid ads. That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and 60% show rate, which is so-so definitely like could do better on that. And a 66% close rate, which is definitely low. They said their current bottlenecks are poor objection handling in a poor sales presentation. So what are you helping 'em with Matt?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for these guys, they do have a gap in the show, right ? So they need to put in more steps into manually confirming these appointments after they've been booked and something that you can do. So in , in one of my gyms, if it's for personal training, 'cause this is an access based gym where we do a lot of personal training, we do incentivize them if they come in for an NSI and then they sign up, they get a t-shirt that's like, you know, it's exclusive for like the personal training clients. So you could do something like that. Again, all of the gyms that we're working with within two Brain are coaching gyms. So that is an incentive that you can say, Hey, I have something here for you at the gym when you come in. That definitely help improve that. But just the manual touch points , if you're leaning on your automations for people to show up, people know when you are using automations and they don't want to respond, they're never gonna respond to that or very rarely will they respond to that. So knowing that there's a human that's actually gonna be waiting for them is really important. Now for the close rate for these guys , uh, they had not updated their sales script since 2022. It is 2025. And the biggest thing, John , I'm not sure if you wanna pull this up in the NSI form for gym number two, but the first thing that I'd point out, and this is what a lot of gyms do unfortunately, is the first question that they have is what are your goals? Goals are important as part of the discovery process. Again, you you can go back to a podcast that we recorded last year about this, but what's most important is what is the pain that they're trying to solve? What's the problem that this person has and how can we improve their quality of life by solving that thing. If you don't start with the problem, there is no sale to be made because the problem is their current state, the goal is a future state and it it's hard to have a strong emotional tie to it because you don't actually have it. And some people have never had that thing that they're working towards. So you need to start with the problem. So I would change the first question and then they, they really don't have any, any deeper discovery questions here underneath, obviously they don't have the problem, but if you scroll down, they only have a , a couple questions there and then that's it. So they're not spending enough time in discovery, which is then leading to having a hard time objection handling. 'cause they're just not getting enough connection with this person. And so the person doesn't feel like either they trust the, the person on the other side of the desk to solve their problem. And then the other piece is like, they're just not good at objection handling.
Speaker 1:So for the people listening along, so it looks like the flow is you ask what are your goals? Why are they important to you? Why are you ready to make a change now from one to 10, how committed are you to actually making this change? And then it goes on to like a general health assessment. And so Matt kind of alluded to this, but when we see, you know, a Jim telling us struggling to handle objections, that usually means one of two things, what Matt said, they're, they're usually not asking the right questions during discovery. So they're not getting enough information when they go into the pitch. So there isn't trust there or they don't know how to structure the pitch in a way that's actually gonna help solve the prospect's problem. Or they're just kind of like rolling over, right? Because I think we talked about this before, Matt, there are plenty of people who are conditioned to just say no, no matter what you pitch them , uh, even if it is something they actually wanna do. So looking at this and hearing your assessment, I'm assuming that this is a discovery problem. Alright, so we gotta ask better questions here. Let's move on to gym three here. We got 43 leads in the last three months. That's , uh, just under 15. So that's leads per month, which is gonna be organic 65% set rate . So they're doing a lot better than gym. One was 84% show rate, which is definitely above average and a 79% close rate, which is also solid. So when we look at the current bottlenecks, I see not selling enough personal training and price objections. So while their process looks pretty good on the outside, to me at least, I believe when you were coaching them through this, their issue was they have too many people taking them up on their lower ticket stuff when they'd benefit more from their higher ticket stuff. Is that , uh, the correct diag, the , the correct diagnostic of the the problem here diagnosis?
Speaker 2:It is, it is. And then the other thing that I just point out is when you're looking at a sales process, it is married to your marketing. And so truly the the biggest problem that I see for this Jim , is that they don't have enough leads. So that means that they're not doing enough marketing. And so they, if they can generate more leads, like based on the numbers that they currently have now, I wouldn't go crazy if they're gonna turn on paid ads. They don't have, the owner is doing all of the lead nurturing, they're doing all of the selling. So they only ha they know that they only have so much capacity. So if they were doing maybe double the leads per month, that is still reasonable for one person to handle that entire process. Their percentages might go down by maybe three to 5%, but overall, if they were doubling the leads, their gym is gonna grow significant significantly faster. So for price, for pricing objections, this is probably a confidence thing. Um, a lot of times gym owners will, they're, they're gonna default down to like the lowest barrier to entry just because they don't have a lot of experience with sales and then they're not selling enough personal training probably in most situations this is because they're not leading with the thing that is most valuable.
Speaker 1:So let's take a look at what the bottom end looks like here. All right . So there's a little more clarity on what you get for personal training. Yep . Why do you think they're struggling a lot more versus group training? Is it just the discrepancy in price or you think it's just not selling with conviction being okay taking the down sell and probably should sell personal training?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I haven't gone through the actual sales conversation with this owner, but it, it probably is conviction and not staying in the pocket when your objection handling long enough to challenge that person to make the best decision for themselves. A lot of times , uh, we just want to help the person across from us, but instead of helping them most we will settle for helping them at all because we're, you might have a scarcity mindset if this person's gonna get up and walk out the door, I'm never gonna see them again. They're gonna go to the, the gym across the street that I already know has cheaper prices than I do. But it , at the end of the day, it's not about pricing, it's about value. And if you have that conviction, somebody can feel that. So , um, that's where I would spend more time if I were them and I'd work on generating more leads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 'cause at under 15 leads a month right? They get three extra a month. So that's one more every 10 days, that's a 20% improvement, right? Yeah . And they got a solid funnel, so some of those are gonna trickle into closes. And so if you need help with objection handling, we did an entire podcast on it and we'll link to it down below. Matt, I know we're getting close on time here. If people need more help, what should they do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they should book a call. You can do that through the two brain website and they should talk to our team so that we can understand where their problems are at in their gym and then we can walk them through how mentorship can help them solve those problems and , uh, have a better quality of life as a gym owner , both making more money and then having more freedom of time.
Speaker 1:And that's gonna do it for this week's episode of Run of Profitable Gym . If you got value out of this, be sure to like and subscribe and share this , uh, with the gym owner in need. We'll catch you next week. Gym owner. Uh , thanks for tuning in .
