How to Turn Online Followers Into Paying Gym Members

Turn followers into paying members with our free sell-by-chat scripts.

You don’t need a huge following to sell more gym memberships. You need better conversations.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper and CEO John Franklin break down how to turn Instagram followers, commenters, story repliers and even former members into paying clients using simple, word-for-word DM scripts—no pushy sales tactics required.

John explains the “more conversations equals more conversions” philosophy and shares his personal non-negotiable: three conversations started every day, regardless of follower count.

Chris shares how he does the same with fewer than 1,400 followers, proving you don’t need to be Instagram famous to sell effectively.

The pair walk through the full conversation hierarchy step by step: the opener, qualifying questions that move people off “maybe,” and the exact language to use when inviting a prospect into the gym.

Chris and John also break down the math behind the strategy, showing how even a low conversion rate on DMs translates into serious results once you factor in client lifetime value.

This is the first episode in a four-part series on gym sales, so tune in and start filling your gym. Up next week: lead nurture.

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Sell-by-Chat Scripts

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0:00 - Why more followers won’t grow your gym

2:26 - Proof that small accounts can outsell big ones

6:37 - Free scripts and frameworks for gym sales

6:44 - The exact words that start a sales conversation

8:47 - Who to message first if you have a small following

13:01 - How to qualify someone before inviting them in

15:47 - Turning interest into a booked consultation

17:38 - What to do when someone says no or goes quiet

21:59 - The real math behind sell by chat

24:01 - The habit that will change your gym’s marketing

Transcript

John 0:02

Many gym owners think they need more followers. They don't. They need to have more conversations. We spend hours creating posts, filming reels, chasing likes, hoping that someone's gonna walk through the door and buy from us. But the truth is, most gym owners spend most of their time creating content and only a small fraction actually talking to the people that are paying attention. The gyms that consistently turn their followers into paying members do the opposite. The content is just a vehicle to start conversations, then they use simple, genuine DMs to build relationships that naturally lead to sales. And today we're gonna show you how to do that with word-for-word scripts. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of TwoBrain Business, the world's largest gym mentorship company, working with over 3,000 gym owners to help them hit six figures in profit. And joining me today is TwoBrain's founder, Chris Cooper. In this episode, we're gonna show you how to use Instagram DMs to turn followers, commenters, story replies, and even former members into paying clients without sounding pushy or salesy.

Chris 1:00

So, John, in my tenure as CEO of TwoBrain, I probably had a thousand conversations about social media. And everybody understands they need to publish it. But then the big step, the important part of social media is actually the conversation that it starts. And that's where most people freeze up. Why is that?

John 1:16

I think when it comes to sell by chat, it conjures up images of like cold calling and feeling salesy and reaching out to random people who don't want to hear from you and say like something like, join my gym, join my gym, join my gym. And and you sound desperate and needy, but like true sell by chat and the gym owners who are doing this really well, it couldn't be further from the truth. With social media, you have to think about, hey, why am I doing this in the first place? And if your goal is to build a brand and get a million followers and, you know, sell your own electrolyte packet one day, that's completely fine. But for most of us, it's to grow our business. And how do we grow our business? We talk to people about them and we sell them on the service that we're selling. And so this idea of spending most of your time thinking about your posts, your stories, it's backwards, right? You want to spend most of your time having conversations with people about your gym. The posts, the stories, the things you put that people can see, that's just the tip of the iceberg. And that enables the bottom piece. And the better you are at that, the more natural conversations you can have, and the easier it's gonna be to do sell by chat, and the less you're gonna be reaching out to random strangers. But I shouldn't be the one lecturing on this. You are somebody who's built multiple businesses to uh huge revenue ranges running sell by chat. And if I look at your Instagram, you probably have about 1,500 followers at the time we're publishing this. So as somebody who most of their life has had more customers than followers, why don't why don't you tell me why you don't need to be social media famous to do this well?

Chris 2:49

I don't think about social media followers as my goal. What I'm actually trying to have is meaningful conversations with the people that I can help. And so it's kind of like that old parable of like you can't help everybody, but you can certainly help one person dramatically. And I think that's where conversations takes the con takes the whole strategy from being broad, trying to get a big follower count to narrow and focused and in a place where you can actually impact somebody's life.

John 3:15

So, what does that mean in terms of practice? Are you holding yourself to a set amount of conversations a day? Are you trying to post every day? Like like what how are you thinking about like the routine of selling through social media?

Chris 3:29

Well, one of my daily non-negotiables is posting to Instagram once a day. And that's mostly to keep myself in the habit, stay focused, and that serves as a forcing function for me. But the real goal is to have as many conversations as I can. And I just get curious about people and I nurture that curiosity and I ask questions. And I'm not shy about asking questions because I actually care. And the reality here is like, you know, if you actually care about people and you actually care about the mission to change your community, you have to get over your own internal BS and actually talk to people. And social media is it feels different from standing in line at Starbucks and starting a conversation, but it's really not. And it that's the medium through which most people communicate now.

John 4:11

And I've had this saying I've been uh screaming in two brain for the last three or four years. More conversations equals more conversions. I am not somebody who posts on Instagram every single day. I post less. But my non-negotiable is I start three conversations every single day, uh, regardless of what's going on in my life.

Chris 4:32

Yeah.

John 4:33

And the way I think about it is if you have three conversations talking about your business over the course of the year, that's gonna be over a thousand conversations that you otherwise wouldn't have had. And my guess is my business will be larger than if I didn't have those thousand conversations. And so if you're a gym owner out there thinking, like, how do I do this? It's overwhelming. I don't want to post every day. That's fine. You don't need to. We're gonna show you the exact hierarchy of how you message people and how you go about messaging people. Um, so you can fill those three conversations, even if you only have a few hundred followers. And don't worry if you don't have tens of thousands of followers. There are plenty of people with small accounts running strategies like this well. One of the most popular podcasts I ever did was with an online trainer named Melissa Sevchenko. At the time, she had 1,400 followers on Instagram, and she was taking home over $500,000 a year due to her sell by chat. She's now up to uh drumroll, please, $3,758 followers, and is continue continuing to bring home in profit more than most gym owners take home in revenue. My secondary example is one I already teased, the man, the myth, the legend, Chris Cooper, uh, with $1,389 followers. Uh, but you know, what what was the last time you sold someone over chat? We were talking yesterday, uh, and you actually pulled up your phone. Yeah, yesterday. And you were showing us kind of like the sales that you were going through it. Was it it was a thousand bucks a month from a chat conversation then?

Chris 6:04

Yeah, it was this husband and wife who came into the gym and one signed up for the customized semi-private three times a week, once for twice a week, and that's a thousand fifty dollars a month. And that was just starting with simple conversation. That's all, yeah. Being curious.

John 6:17

So most people when they hear sell by chat, they think it's like, oh, this is gonna be this regimented script that I have to robotically type off to everybody. And while there is a structure you should follow, like a script is a bad thing. So maybe walk through the the flow. This is the first episode in a four-part series that we're doing on gym sales. So if you want the exact frameworks and scripts we're talking about in this episode, along with other assets to help you convert more of your prospects at your gym, I want you to scan the QR code here or click the link down below to grab it.

Chris 6:47

So I know that I can engage somebody in a conversation if I ask them a question. A question is like an upside-down fish hook. And so they responded to a promoted post that we did. And I said, Hey, Brandon, how's it going? Question mark. And that was it. Just like I was running into him face to face for the first time in a coffee shop.

John 7:06

And that's it. Like most people complicate things. Um, but all you're trying to do is get a response. Right. And so you can do that through posts. In this specific example, you're you're hot on messenger ads right now. So you'll promote a piece of content you have that's um like asking people to start a conversation or click learn more. And then from there, the opener is really simple. All you're gonna do is say, hey, the person's name, leave that alone, right? We want to avoid these big blocks of text because that's not how people actually message. The second piece is acknowledge the thing they did. So, hey, thanks for the follow. Thanks for clicking learn more, thanks for commenting on the story, and then one question. And don't ask this super hard, open-ended kind of question that requires a massive uh response. It could just be something as simple as like you're training towards something specific, or you're trying to get back into things. What are you doing for your fitness right now? In your case, what was your open erg?

Chris 8:03

Hey, how's it going?

John 8:04

Okay, hey, how's it going? A much more Canadian, softer opening, but uh like the idea is just getting a response and and moving into the conversation. Now, Brandon responds, where do we go from there?

Chris 8:16

Yeah, so he responded like a human would. It was just like a hey, you know, maybe cautious about me being a bot or something. And I said, I see that you responded to this post. What are you doing for your fitness right now?

John 8:27

Perfect. And so we call this block just the the openers. This is a connection piece. What we want to do here is just make sure that the person we're chatting to understands that there's a human on the other side. Now, again, I want to drive home the point because it's really important. You don't need to have thousands of followers to do this. So let's think about what are some what are some reasons we can reach out to people within our existing network. The first one is they answered a call out post. So a call out post is simply you ask someone to raise their hand for a specific thing. So like 5130 is the biggest example. Can you explain what a 5130 is?

Chris 9:05

Yeah. So it's just you saying I'm looking for five people who want to have this one goal, maybe lose 10 pounds in the next 30 days. And when you put that out, they respond and that starts the conversation for you.

John 9:16

The other thing is uh if someone commented on one of the posts you make. So you do a lot of value dense educational posts, uh, which is a lot, it provides a lot more signal than if you were doing like some type of dancing viral trending audio, right? Yeah. And that's why we I encourage gym owners to make value and conversion based content. They're two of the three buckets, because that tells you, hey, if I'm doing a post about, you know, improving aerobic capacity and somebody comments on it, they're probably interested in improving their aerobic capacity. And so that is the next hottest thing. If they like a post, that's also signal. So you can creep on, uh, you know, if you're a smaller account, you're probably only getting somewhere in the neighborhood of five to 20 likes on a post. And you can look at every single one. And if you click on one that looks unfamiliar and you see that there's a mutual follower in your gym, that's a great opener. Hey, thanks for liking my post about aerobic capacity. I see we both follow Deborah. We love Deborah. How do you know her?

Chris 10:14

Yeah.

John 10:15

And then the next one is replying to a story. So when you're doing stories, how do you think about those? Making other people famous mostly. Yeah. So you're like sharing the work in your gym? 100%, yeah. Okay. And then someone who followed you, right? Thanks for the follow. What brought you over here?

Chris 10:32

Are you in the Sioux? I I often ask that question because it shows them that I'm also in the Sioux and I'm not a bot.

John 10:38

And you're fitness famous. You know, you get gym owners from all over the world following you. And then the people who DM'd you first, right? What's your pricing? When are you open? How do I drop in, et cetera, et cetera? Now, uh, if you can't fill up your three conversations a day doing that, you have other options. Some of my favorite things to do is reaching out to past clients. And most people don't think of that as like a sales activity, but it couldn't be further from the truth. And we'll show you some examples of how to do that in a natural way, but something as simple as like, hey, Deborah, been thinking about you. How's your new year going? And then the other thing, uh, and you are the king of this, is current clients. How do you go about engaging with current clients on social media in a way that's natural?

Chris 11:21

Well, I actually look for people having peak moments or important moments in their life and send them a text about it and say, congratulations, or how's this going, or are you doing this race that you did last year? Stuff like that.

John 11:32

And most people don't think about talking to their clients as a sales activity. Why couldn't that be further from the truth?

Chris 11:38

Well, because retention is just sale, sell, sell, sell, sale. Every single day you have to sell your client on sticking around, paying the bill, showing up tomorrow. And so if you think of it like that, you get a lot more engaged and remember to talk to your current clients and keep them engaged.

John 11:53

And the other thing is your current clients know your next best clients.

Chris 11:58

Yeah, as an example, this weekend I looked up every member of my gym who is doing the same doathlon that I'm doing, sent each one of them a message excited to see you. I'll see you in Bruce Minds where the race is. Do you have a partner or are you doing it solo? And if they say, Yeah, I have a partner, I'll say, Oh, great, awesome. Who's your partner this year? Can you introduce us at the race? I can't wait to meet them. And now that's an amazing referral strategy. Boom.

John 12:21

If your athletes do high rocks, anything like that, anything where there's another human being who does fitness and works out, yeah, it's perfect. I I know there's a couple tinkers who are heavy in the running community, and so they go to all the local 5Ks. And it's just like a natural way to meet up with your members and see who they're hanging out with. Yeah. So that's the hierarchy. You should be able to fill three conversations a day from all of those buckets. And if you're someone who is nervous about sell by chat and start like just start out with some of the ones that are easier, like messaging your existing members and past clients. And then once you build up a little courage, start moving into people who are within your orbit. But the most important uh thing here is that this is part of a broader discipline and just make sure that you're staying consistent with it. All right. So we covered the basics of connection content. It's just doing something to get a response, right? And let's move back to people who aren't within our orbit now. So let's let's ignore existing members and previous members and talk about um colder traffic. Once we've connected with them, once we've gotten that initial response, we need to move into qualifying them. How do we do that?

Chris 13:27

Well, the next thing that we want to do is ask questions that will lead to an invitation. So we want to know are they gonna be a good fit for my gym? Should I continue this conversation or not? And in that way, sometimes sell by chat or social media in general feels like speed dating. You need to know something about the person to know if they're gonna be a good fit or not. And so I'll usually come back with a quick question. I'll try to make sure that people understand that I'm a human. So I'll either be like, ha ha, good point, or I might respond with a small typo in the message. And sometimes I'll even just record my voice and send that to them so that they know they're not talking to a bot.

John 14:01

And how are you moving away from, hey, how you doing? And what's got you interested in catalysts to actually getting towards the meat, qualifying them, making sure they are a good fit for your service.

Chris 14:13

Well, that's really where the discipline comes in. But the first sales coach I ever had said, yes is a good answer, no is a good answer, maybe is a bad answer. And so I want to try and get people off maybe as quickly as I can. So if we're having a conversation and we're still talking about the weather, three or four messages in, I'm keeping them on maybe. And the best service that I can do them is coach them toward where the where the conversation is going. So it's I'm gonna turn us to fitness right away. Hey, are you a member at a gym right now? Hey, what do your workouts look like? Are you doing this fun event in the SUNEX weekend?

John 14:46

And that's a great point. While you want the opener to just get a response where a lot of people go wrong as they go off to Tulsa. Yeah. Right? They just keep it in that small talk area and never push the conversation towards are you training towards something specific? Are you working towards any type of goal? Are you a member at a gym right now? And then just giving a second kind of like follow-up punch. So if they say no, what do you what are you gonna respond after that?

Chris 15:09

So that is where people get tempted to slip the punch and give out free advice, give out free information, or just say good luck. But if you really want to change their life, you have to coach them to come into your gym. And so at that point, I said, That's great. Are you ready to start working out? Or are you at a point in your life when you're looking at a place to work out? So another question.

John 15:31

And is that where the ghosting happens most of the time? Where do you see drop-offs in the conversations most frequently?

Chris 15:37

Well, we're Canadians, so there's not a lot of ghosting even in chat, but it would often be something just like no thank you.

John 15:43

Okay. Now, let's assume you get a hey, I want to whatever, lose 10 pounds for the summer, or I'm training for uh 5K, and they seem like relatively interested. How do we turn the conversation into um a consultation?

Chris 16:01

Well, you shorten the distance between where they are and where you want them to go. So you'd say, I have an opening at noon on Tuesday, are you free then? Or I will be at the gym Monday at one o'clock. Do you think you could swing by and have a conversation there?

John 16:14

So let's say a different variant would be somebody's trying to do a 5K, right? And it's like they want to complete it. You can just say something as simple as like, that's awesome. That's exactly what I help people with. Do you want a hand with that? And they say yes. And it's like, great, the next first step is coming into the gym for a 20-minute talk on your goals. I have time X, time Y. Which one would you prefer? Do you do any type of pre-framing like that or are you straight like get your butt in the gym?

Chris 16:43

No, it's just an invitation from one human to another and meet you in the gym. I think implies that there's going to be a conversation. But remember, like my sales conversation is really a coaching conversation. And so that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to coach them to the point where they commit to themselves in the gym.

John 16:59

Okay. And let's say you actually get a yes. It's 4 p.m. next Tuesday, you're all set. What are you going to do after that?

Chris 17:05

I'm going to send you an email to confirm, but I'll also shoot you a text just to remind you the day before. Is that cool? Question mark?

unknown 17:11

Yeah.

John 17:11

Yeah. So you 100% want to move off platform and get a phone number that you capture so you can do proper nurture. And we're going to do a full episode about lead nurture. But one of the pro tips you can do is uh instead of doing generic confirmation emails, send them like a personalized video message so they can see your face, they can see you in the gym, uh, because they're pretty nervous. They just talk to a stranger on the internet and booked a consultation for a gym. Um, this period from the time they book to the time they come in is absolutely critical. Now, what if they say no?

Chris 17:44

You say that's okay. I'm always here. I've been here for 20 years. And do you mind if I reach out to you again in a couple months? And most of the time, what do they say? No, don't do it. But sometimes to just be polite or get me out of there, they'll just say like, yeah, go ahead. And then I just mark it in my calendar to do it. But the thing that gets me over that, because I I used to feel really awkward about this, is the minute I start talking to somebody, I am their coach. And the first thing I have to coach them to do is get in my gym. And if I give up after the first time they say no, I am giving up on that human.

John 18:18

Another um, a more common one that comes up a lot in the chats that I read of T-Brain Gyms will be like the conversation is going well. You offer them to come into the gym, and then all of a sudden they get really busy or they're dealing with uh whatever crisis in their life and they're gonna be dealing with it for three weeks. So reach out when they're ready. Um of the things that I recommend doing is just lower the stakes. So if they're too busy to come to your gym, be like, totally get it. I'm busy too. Why don't we just hop on the phone for 15 minutes so I can ask you a couple questions? And worst case, I'll just give you a couple things you can do on your own. And so that way you're not forcing them to come into the gym. You've lowered the stakes a little bit, but you can still progress the conversation. Yeah. Now, let's say you are gonna follow up or mid-conversation, somebody ghosts you in the rare case, because you're, you know, kind Canadian people, you know, they respond to their DMs. Uh, how do you handle that? Do you just let them ghost and you leave the conversation open or you do some type of follow-up?

Chris 19:16

I would look for a reason to follow up. So I might not follow up immediately, but when something comes up later, might be two or three days, four or five days later, and I think that would interest John, I'll shoot him this message. Hey, did you see this? Did you see this event that's happening in the Sioux? Hey, how are you handling this heat? I'll find a reason to restart the conversation. You know, the old George Costanza leaving the keys behind.

John 19:39

Yeah. The uh the two things that I think you do if you're hot on a conversation and you move to the next step. So if you're going from uh like the connection piece to qualifying and then from qualifying to convert, that qualifying to convert is going to be um a big gap. You'll lose a lot of people in there. So if the conversation's hot and then it goes cold, you may just do something like, Did I lose you, Steve? question mark. And a lot of times I'll I'll send it with some type of like meme, like a funny photo of Kevin Hart or something like that, just to kind of lighten up the conversation. And then to your point, if you're towards the end, they don't want to come in, they're busy, they give you some type of objection, but you've determined that they are a good fit for the gym, you you hit the nail on the head. Like we got this pickleball tournament coming up. I'm doing this 5k in town. Are you doing it as well? Uh hey, I know you said you were doing a 5K. Did you see this video we just made about zone two training or whatever it is? Um, that gives you an excuse to just kind of like keep the conversation warm because it's not a it's not a no forever, it's just a no right now. Yeah. And let me show you what that looks like. So this is Two Rain mentor Corey Lewis. He is what we call the alumni whisperer. Almost 40% of his new members came from people who had canceled previously. He is constantly reaching out. And so all he does is, you know, how's life in the world of Joe? You can see it's just a simple, opener question. Or good morning, Carrie. How is Christmas and New Year's? Checking in after the holidays. This is obviously a time when people make the decision. People respond and he just has like a natural conversation following the exact same flow that you would follow with a prospect in your gym. So it is no different. It's reaching out from a positioning of caring, having some open-ended question, getting a response, and trying to qualify if they are ready to come back. Nothing salesy about this because Corey's really doing it from a position of care.

Chris 21:36

So another great one is that Facebook still shows me every day, you know, five years ago or three years ago. And if there's a picture of a former member in that post from Facebook, you've got an amazing reason to screenshot that, DM that former member and say, look what just popped up in my feed. Like they've started the conversation for you.

John 21:54

So if people have made it this far, they're obviously interested in implementing this. Uh maybe we should set some realistic expectations. How well is this supposed to work? If I do my three conversations, am I am I gonna sign up a new member every single day?

Chris 22:07

No, the reality is that you might sign up one in a hundred, but every new client requires multiple connection points. And what you have to think about is moving the ball further downfield every time you talk to them.

John 22:19

So a lot of people will hear one in a hundred and give up because they don't immediately get a sale. But we need to lock in and think about this through our effective hourly rate, right? Let's say you only sell one in every 300 people that you message, right? So you start 300 conversations, one of those leads to a sale. Sounds terrible, right? But that's only a hundred days of starting three conversations a day. Starting three conversations a day takes five minutes tops. That's 500 minutes of work over that 100 days. That's under 10 hours of work. My guess like, what is the lifetime value of someone in your gym, Chris?

Chris 22:59

Well, I know that the length of engagement for the average client at my gym is 16 months. And I know that the average revenue per member at my gym is $205. So that sale is worth about $3,200. And that's just one.

John 23:11

And so under 10 hours of work, $3,200, that's over $320 an hour for that work, right? And that's assuming you have under, like you underperform. Only one out of every 300 conversations converts. Yeah. The reality is even if you're bad, you're probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one in a hundred if you are only reaching out to these warmer audiences, which is what we're recommending doing.

Chris 23:32

The truth to that math is that these things compound and snowball over time, though, too, because that first connection might not be the point at which you've convinced them to join, but then you also follow them on Strava or you see them at an event. And I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and say, Oh, we've chatted on Facebook, but you probably don't remember me. And if I hadn't had that chat on Facebook, I wouldn't be able to invite them into my gym in person, let alone the referral strategy that follows that and the trust that you've built with them in advance.

John 24:00

So to wrap this all up, because we want to keep it tactical, we recommend doing three conversations a day. Those conversations should be three bubbles a name, the action they took, and a question trying to get a response. If you do that, your gym's marketing will fundamentally change a year from now. Any closing thoughts, Chris?

Chris 24:21

Yeah, a big one. It's really the mindset that stops people here. But if you really care enough about changing the health of your town, you have to care enough about talking to every single person in that town. You have to get over your own internal barrier, your own internal dialogue, and ask yourself, do I care enough about this person to actually make a difference? And that's what starts the conversation for me. And then reminding myself that I am coaching them now is what helps me to invite them into my gym.

John 24:51

Well, let's go out on that one. I believe in you. Get out there, start talking to your town. And if you got value out of this, be sure to subscribe and leave a comment.