40 Appointments, 32 Shows, 23 Sales: World-Class Gym Funnels

Most coaching gyms add just five clients a month—but the world’s best fitness facilities are consistently adding more than 20 with stellar sales systems.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper analyzes the data behind top-performing marketing funnels, and he reveals which tactics landed these owners on our Top 10 leaderboards, from instant lead follow-up to simplified booking procedures, consistent organic marketing, airtight lead nurture and sales practice reps.

You’ll also learn how mentors help gym owners identify weak spots in their funnels and tighten their systems so they can add large numbers of ideal clients month after month.

Tune in to discover exactly how elite gyms around the world are generating more leads, booking more appointments, increasing show rates and closing more high-value sales.

Get Coop’s “Generate 30 New Leads in 30 Days” guide in Gym Owners United, linked below.
 
Links

Gym Owners United

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1:49 - Marketing and sales leaders

7:33 - Strong systems

10:37 - Lead nurture

11:49 - Events and niches

13:00 - Consistency and tracking metrics

Transcript

Chris 0:02

Here's the bad news. Most big group gyms only add about five clients a month. Here's the good news. I'm gonna tell you exactly how the top two-brand gyms 5x that number every month. No joke, on average, our top 10 gyms add 23 new clients per month. And these aren't $29.99 access memberships or free one-month trials or any of that garbage. These are coaching gyms. One of our sales leaders posted an average revenue per member of $309 and with 23 new members. So if you're looking for the secrets of adding high value clients every month, you are in the right place. I'm TwoBrain Business Founder Chris Cooper, and this is Run a Profitable Gym. Before I get into this, I want to thank all of the listeners who messaged me on Facebook over the last couple of weeks saying, Coop, how come the podcast didn't sound like you? Are you okay? What's going on? And the truth is that I had a throat cold for the last couple of weeks. I sounded a little bit differently. And I want to reassure you, we don't use AI to generate any of our uh blogs or our podcast or our videos or anything. We've been producing this stuff, or I have since 2012. In 2016, we started professionalizing our content, and we still have a lot of humans working behind the scenes to produce this podcast, to edit this podcast, to publish the podcast, to create our social media graphics, to write our blogs. And I'm I still write them and like all I still write all the books. The stuff that you see from me on social media is not coming from a robot. And I hate it when influencers, influencers in our space try to pass off robot or AI stuff as actual knowledge. Today, what I'm here to do is what I've been doing for 15 years now, and that is to give you knowledge that's gonna help you grow your gym by sharing what the best gyms in the world are doing instead of just my opinion. So we're gonna look at the best gyms in the world for set rate, show rate, and close rate today. I'm gonna share our interview questions with them and tell you exactly how you can improve your gym too based on what they're doing. Now, before I give you those specific tactics, I want to show you the data. So, set rate is how many people booked appointments during the month that we tracked. And so here's the leaderboard for that. Our 10th place gym booked 34 appointments. Our ninth place also booked 34, 8th place, 37 appointments, seventh place, 40 appointments. This is a Canadian gym. Woo. Uh sixth place, 41 appointments. This is from a gym in Spain. Fifth place, a gym in Australia booked 41 appointments, fourth place, a book a gym in the U.S. booked 42 appointments. Third place, a gym in the Netherlands booked 43 appointments, second place, a gym in Sweden booked 45 appointments, and first place a gym in Canada booked 47. Amazing! Team Canada. Here we go. Show rate is how many people showed up for their appointments. So of those, uh, a 10th place gym was from Belgium, they had 28 show up, ninth place, a Canadian gym had 28 show up, a Spanish gym had 28 show up, a gym in the Netherlands had 30 show up, a gym in the U.S. had 31 show up, a gym in Spain had 31 uh shows, Australia had 33, Canada had 35, the US had 37, and a gym in Sweden takes the top spot with 45 shows. That's amazing. Imagine uh a one to two people showing up for a no-sweat intro appointment every single day at your gym all month. The close rate is how many people showed up and then bought. So these people were coached to start their change in life. They were coached to actually purchase something. A gym in the UK had 19, a gym in Denmark had 19, a gym in Canada had 19, a gym in Spain had 20, a gym in the US had 20, another gym in the US had 23 signups, a gym in Spain had 23, a gym in Sweden had 24, a gym in Australia had 28, and a gym in the UK takes the prize with 35 new signups last month. So let me give you the top 10 average so you can see what a world-class sales funnel looks like in a gym. Among these top 10, they had an average of 40 appointments set, 32 people show, and they signed up 23. Now remember, these are high value clients. These are not $99 a month or free trial clients. These are people with an ARM well above $200 a month. And in our state of the industry report this year, we saw that the median gym gets just seven appointments a month. So we're crushing that here, right? The average of these top ten was well over 20. So gyms in general, in on average, add about five clients per month, but then they also lose three. So they get this like net two growth. Our leaders are adding 23 a month and they're using world-class retention to hold them to for 24 months or more. That is life-changing stuff. And this month we had five gyms make all three leaderboards set rate, show rate, and close rate. That's amazing. And it tells me that their marketing is good, their lead nurture is good, and so is their sales process. What makes that so remarkable is that it's very common for a gym to have leaks in its funnel. So maybe that gym gets a lot of leads, but none of them book no sweat intros. Or maybe people book the no-sweat intros, but the gyms just can't close sales. Two-brain mentors help clients build and analyze clog-free funnels, and they teach gym owners to sell because selling is the first act of coaching. And if you you can't change somebody's life with fitness unless you can coach them to actually commit to joining your gym. And when a mentor helps you get your sales and marketing systems dialed in, that's when the magic actually happens. One 300-member gym in Sweden got more leads than anybody else. Here's their actual funnel statistics. They had 45 leads, 45 of those leads showed up, which is incredible. And they closed 24 of them with an ARM of $165 a month. Amazing. Another gym, a 300-member gym in Australia, added more clients than anybody else with the same funnel. They had 41 leads, 33 shows, and 28 closes with an ARM of 157. One guy from an elite 400-member gym in the US, uh, who shows up on a lot of our different leaderboards, had these statistics in his funnel. He had 42 leads, 35 shows, and 20 closes with an ARM of 309. Now, if your gym is getting five leads, 10 leads a month, this guy is doing four times as many. Of that, 35 of those actually showed up and he signed up 20 of them with an ARM of $300. So not only is he getting like four or five times the number of leads you're getting, he's signing them up for twice the price. These gyms aren't just closing people at low rates and feeding them into a room full of treadmills or a 40-person class. These are coaching gyms with impressive ARM numbers. And you'll note that all the different flags on the leaderboards, uh, they're from different nations all over the world this month, right? Great marketing is great marketing in Australia or in Spain or in Belgium or in the Netherlands or in the US. And we can teach gym owners anywhere in the world to improve their sales funnels. Okay. So we've done this 3,000 times with gyms around the world. And sometimes we still hear on calls like, ah, that's not going to work for me. I live in southern Louisiana, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What's required there is not tactics or skills or scripts. What's required there is mentorship to change your perspective, change the way that you look at your clients, change the way that you look at marketing, change the way that you look at sales. And once you've done that, you can apply the strategies and the tactics that we give you in our mentorship program and actually make you more effective as a gym owner for life. So now I'm going to tell you how the leaders posted these numbers. And I talked to their mentors and I talked to the leaders, and I know exactly what they've been focusing on. So I group them into categories for you. The first is systems. This person said we've been focused on hiring and dialing in our sales systems to get more clients in the door and close more sales. As a result, frequency of contacting leads has improved, which has directly resulted in more sales, higher revenue, and ultimately a greater net owner benefit. So I want to pause there for a second. Instead of thinking, like, what's the next big marketing funnel or how do I get better at TikTok? What this gym owner did was called leads faster. That's it. And that put them on the top 10 leaderboard. Like that's the sole point of improvement. And a lot of gym owners know they should do this and they neglect it. Some people don't call their leads at all. I mean, it's insane. It's like being out in a rowboat and seeing somebody drowning, waving their hands, help me, help me, and you ignoring them are saying, ah, you know, I'll call them back tomorrow. Come on. That's really like what this is all about here. And just having a system for fast callbacks makes a massive difference. I talked to another mentor who worked with the gym on this leaderboard, and they also talked about analysis and systems. So the mentor said, this gym has tightened their organic and affinity marketing, improved website clarity, simplified the NSI booking and pricing flow, and built a consistent follow-up process, especially around bring-a-friend events. All these we identified during our calls the past few months, and they put it into rapid action. As a result, they're now attracting more of the right leads, which makes the sales process easier and way more predictable. The sale feels easier because the systems are doing the heavy lifting long before the conversation even starts. Another key habit that was shared by a lot of people on the leaderboard were advertising skills and lead nurture. So this mentor was talking about this gym, and he said his metrics are a direct reflection of the deep work we did on improving his ads and teaching him how to read his data in the marketing office hours and our one-on-ones. We then got really granular on the exact steps needed in his lead nurture to make those leads uh book and show up for their NSIs. So what we're talking about there, office hours, every week in the TwoBrain ecosystem, we have this group call in the growth program where Columer Riley gets on and he talks about advertising. And it's not just like a lesson or here's what's new. It's let's call up your ads manager and troubleshoot your ads, let's tweak them, let's fix it on the call. And then we also have one-on-one mentorship for every single person in TwoBrain. So they can do an analysis with somebody who knows what they're doing, who has an objective perspective on all their marketing and can say, like, here's what you need to improve. In this case, it was lead nurture. And without that objective perspective of a mentor, the gym owner probably would not have been able to say, like, yeah, lead nurture is our problem. So the mentor said, let's look at your metrics. They tore down all the metrics. They said, here's exactly what you need to do, here's what you need to uh the system that you need, here's what exactly to say, here's the text to send, and they improved it. This is not just a matter of like cut and paste this template or automate this system in your CRM. This is where mentorship is actually critical in improving your gym, just like your coaching is critical in improving somebody's air squat bench press handstand. Another common denominator on this leaderboard is lead nurture. So this mentor I was talking to said this about the gym. He said his total leads were already high. So we targeted his lead nurture process and the no-sweat intro, and that really helped improve show and close rate. Another mentor said that the client did best by buying back their time and reinvesting that time into marketing. They said one mistake that the gym owner made early on was overbooking himself, which limited the available NSI time slots, lim and also limited his ability to nurture the leads he was getting, and limited his mindset on what was possible. Once we optimized his funnels and bought back his time in a few areas, he was able to generate more leads, call them quickly, and ensure his automations were correct. You know, one of the big failures that a lot of gym owners have in marketing is they just don't carve out time to do it. It's kind of like the last thing they do after everything else is done. And so they spend all their time on low-value roles that other people could be doing instead of blocking off time to be deliberate about their marketing. As a result, their marketing either happens by accident or not at all, and they always feel like they're in the back seat of their business and their business just slowly fails, and they say, I guess I was unlucky, or they blame somebody else. Now here's a unique idea. So this client did something called an open house. And what they did was they they ran this like relaunch with a new rebrand and an open house when they did it to generate a bunch of leads. Then they did a really good job of booking those people into NSIs, nurturing those leads and closing those sales. This comment from a mentor I love. They talked about focusing on niches and networking. And they were talking about the gym owner when they said she has a great close rate as a result of a project we've worked on to reach out to locals interested in her services. We identified a niche in her local market for beginner lifters, and she markets directly to them, as well as networking with local businesses, which provides her with a pipeline of warm leads that are ready to sign up. She also recently added Pilates to her offerings and has gotten many new members from that as well. So that leads us into the next comment, which is knowing your avatar and getting lots of reps. This gym owner has vastly improved his close rate by defining who he serves and speaking directly with them. He regularly does practice reps with his team and audits his sales pipeline. Are you doing practice reps with your team? Are you auditing your pipeline? Are you looking at your numbers? If not, get a mentor to help you right away. And this leads us to consistency. Every single person on the marketing leaderboards are consistent. So here's the quote from a mentor. This gym owner's set rate is the result of several two-brain best practices, consistent social media marketing to help build brand awareness and trust, calling and texting leads immediately, and offering plenty of availability for appointments. Consistency across all three has helped ensure leads already know like and trust is gym and has reduced friction in taking the next step of signing up for a no-sweat intro. Look, you could work with a mentor for the next 10 years just on these three things your marketing, your lead nurture, and your sales. And when you get really, really good at one, you start working on the next one. And when you get great at that, you start working on the third thing. And then you come back and you improve the top of the funnel even more. If you had a mentor who just did that with you for the next 10 years, you'd be unstoppable. Nothing could stop the growth of your gym. We work with on a lot of other things because there are things that are stopping your growth in two-brain mentorship. But eventually you get to a point where you just need to get better and better and better at marketing. And that takes a lot of reps, it takes a lot of practice, and it takes an objective eye to see what your big opportunities are. The last comment, and the thing that these marketing leaders all have in common is they track their metrics. I've said this a few times in this podcast, but this mentor said our first focus was to review metrics weekly. So from this, he could see how close he was to a lifetime revenue PR. By monitoring his metrics, it was easy for him to increase the volume of his outbound lead nurture via phone calls, WhatsApp, and emails. So they used the two-brain dashboard, and the mentor said, I identified his set to show rate was low from the amount of leads that he was getting in the two-brain dashboard. Then I used two-brain's lead nurture resources to help him improve his nurture process and increase his show rate. This led to improved revenue for the gym. Another mentor also mentioned the two-brain dashboard. He said this gym owner is very metrics driven and pays attention every month to trends in his dashboard. He didn't use any dramatic tactics. He was just consistent with applying them. Look, nobody starts off being metrics driven or passionate about looking at the two-brain dashboard or looking at the spreadsheets or pulling numbers. That is a skill that you have to build. But I promise you, once you do it a few times, you go, oh, I get it. And immediately your big opportunities in the gym become obvious. The reason that your gym is probably not growing and you're listening to this podcast is because you're not having those epiphanies. You're not seeing what's stopping you. Learning to read the dashboard is what mentorship is all about. It's not forcing you to put in your metrics just so that we can track your progress. It's about teaching you to use metrics to identify opportunities and then solve your own problems in the future. Right? So sound marketing is based on systems consistently doing the important stuff, metrics, knowing where the weak links are, and then targeted improvement with the help of a mentor, having an objective perspective, say here's what you need to improve. So you build systems, you track your metrics every month, you ID your weak spots with an expert's help, and then you take swift action to improve your system and repeat and repeat again and repeat forever and retire wealthy. The gym owners on our leaderboard are following that plan. They're not using secret marketing tactics, they're using the right marketing tactics consistently over and over and getting better and better and better at them. One of them used it to add 20 new clients at $309 per month. That's $6,000 in new recurring revenue, not one-time bait and switch offers. I'd like to help you earn more clients too. So do one of these two things right now. First, use the link below to get to our Gym Owners United group. When you're in there, send me a DM to request my guide to generating 30 leads in 30 days without using paid ads. I'll just send it right over to you. Or go big. Let's talk about building a detailed marketing plan for your unique business. A mentor can analyze your funnels and give you the exact steps you need to take to add more high value members every month. To talk about working together, book a call via the link below. I'm Chris Cooper. Thanks for checking out this episode of Runner Profitable. Jim, please hit subscribe on your way out the door.