The 5 Biggest Sales DM Mistakes Gym Owners Make

Turn social media leads into paying members with our free sell-by-chat scripts.

What if your gym doesn’t have a lead problem? What if the real issue is what you’re saying to the leads you already have?

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Two-Brain Business CEO John Franklin presents the five common mistakes gym owners make in lead-nurture conversations and the exact fix for each one.

John explains why sounding scripted and robotic kills trust, and shares a simple rule: If your message could be sent to anyone, it wasn’t really sent to that person.

He shows how a short, personalized opener outperforms a long, generic wall of text every time.

He also covers why gym owners derail their own conversations with too much small talk, why giving free advice instead of an invitation can cost you the sale, and why response speed matters more than most owners realize.

John shares his go-to method for reviving conversations that have gone cold, plus a simple reminder: A no right now isn’t a no forever.

Tune in to start turning more of your existing gym leads into booked consultations.

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0:00 - Why your leads problem might not be a leads problem

0:52 - The chat mistake that makes you sound like a robot

3:19 - The trap that kills momentum in every lead conversation

3:57 - Free scripts and messaging frameworks for gym sales

4:22 - Why giving free advice is costing you the sale

5:54 - Why speed matters more than you think in lead nurture

7:27 - What to do when a prospect goes quiet

8:42 - The real reason gym owners think they have a leads problem

Transcript

John 0:02

What if you don't have a lead problem? What if the problem is what you're actually saying to those leads? Every day, gym owners have conversations with people who are genuinely interested in joining their gym. But somewhere along the way, the momentum dies. Maybe it feels too scripted, maybe you waited too long to respond, and maybe you started giving too much advice instead of helping them to take the next step. Before you know it, the lead's gone. But the good news is this isn't like a huge problem. These are five simple mistakes that I'm going to show you how to fix today. I'm John Franklin, the CEO of TwoBrain Business, we're the world's largest gym mentorship company, and we've worked with over 3,000 gym owners to help them hit six figures in profit because yes, it's possible. And in today's episode, I'm breaking down the biggest chat mistakes gym owners make and the exact fix for each one so you can stop losing leads in your conversations. Let's get into it. One of the most common mistakes we see gym owners make is that they sound super scripted and transactional. Our data from the two brain state of the industry shows that the average gym owner only gets around 30 to 35 leads a month. So that's about a little more than one per day. If you take just a little bit of extra effort to make your message sound super personalized and like it was meant exactly for that prospect, you're gonna have a lot more success getting leads from raising their hand to showing up at your gym and buying. Our rule of thumb is simple. If your message could have been sent to anyone, it wasn't really sent to that person. How would you respond to this message if a stranger sent it to you? Just this big wall of text here, sounding like a robot. Hey there. I hope you're doing amazing today. I saw you liked one of our posts and just wanted to reach out because I think that's so awesome you're interested in fitness. And I wanted to let you know we have programs that would be a perfect fit for your goals. It's a big wall of text, and that's not how humans communicate. If I'm reaching out to my friends, I'm gonna send them some short, choppy posts uh that's really like a top of mind. And there's no reason why you can't replicate that when you're reaching out to leads and people who engage on your social posts. Rather than hitting them with this wall of text like you sound where you sound like a many chat robot, try this instead. Hit them with a simple opener, like their name. It's the sweetest sound in the human language. I think that's from how to win friends and influence people. And there's a huge element of truth to that. So simply like, hey Jamie, saw you liked our deadlift post. Are you training for anything specific right now? Three simple messages, and they were sent out like a person normally would. And it takes just as much time, if not less, than sending somebody a huge wall of text. The idea when we reach out to a lead is just to get some type of response. So we don't want to reach out with like a huge right hook. If someone does a simple action like engaging or following our page and saying something like, You want to buy something from me? We want to acknowledge the person, thank them for the action they took, and ask them a simple question. So the response this prospect sent is pretty unconventional. He said, Nothing specific, just love, watch, and fitness constant to constantly improve my form and learn new exercises. So chances are if we asked him off the rip to come in for a call or a free class, he would have ghosted us. But what we've learned is an important piece of information. He's training now. So a next question that would be logical in this sequence is asking him, what is he doing for training? Which brings us to mistake number two, which is never leaving small talk. So we just ask this prospect what they're doing for training. Let's say he comes back and says, Oh, I'm reading starting strength. And then you respond with, Oh, I love Mark Rippetau. I went to his gym in 2013. Check out this YouTube video, and you guys just get into a conversation about Mark Rippetau. Before you know it, you're two days into the conversation. There's been 20 transactions back and forth, and you haven't qualified the prospect or found out anything to know if you could actually help them improve and reach their goals. Hey, I just want to take a quick pause. We're talking about sales for the entire month on this channel. And if you want the scripts and messaging frameworks that helps gym owners close prospects already sitting in their DMs or on the other side of a contact form, just scan the QR code here or click the link down below to grab your copy. The goal of lead nurture is to get somebody to come into your gym and have a consultation. So we have the destination. We know where we want to go with this talk. If we do too much small talk, we're veering away from our destination. I call this going off to Kansas. Don't go off to Kansas when you're nurturing your leads. Which brings me to mistake number three, which is giving advice instead of an invitation. Now, we got into coaching because we love helping people. And it's our natural tendency when someone says they have a problem to try and solve it. But if someone isn't currently working out, we don't want to give them tips on how to walk or go from a couch to 5K. Giving a bunch of free advice isn't what's going to actually help these people. If advice was the answer, we would all have six packs right now. What people need is accountability and coaching, and you're doing yourself a disservice by trying to help people by throwing more information at them. Two-Brain founder Chris Cooper calls this slipping the punch. They open the door, they want to talk business, but you gave them a pep talk. Let's see what this looks like in practice. You ask them, are you training for anything specific right now? And they answer, to be honest, I haven't been working out recently. Life's just been too busy. And instead of saying, Do you want help with that? You say, Totally get it. Just try to move a little every day. Even a 10-minute walk helps a lot. You got this. It's totally normal as a coach to want to be helpful, but by not asking this person if they want help, you're doing them a huge disservice. Here's what I would do if I was in this situation. The prospect just told us that they haven't been working out because life got too busy, which means they were working out at some point. So I would just acknowledge what they said. Ha, totally get it. What were you doing for workouts before life got busy? That opens the door for the prospect to give us another piece of information that we can use to qualify them for our gym. Now we're filming this video in 2026. And year after year, less people want to pick up their phone because they're just getting barraged with spam calls, which means a lot of the lead nurture process is moving away from voice to voice and to message to message, right? And it's so easy when we're doing message to message to let time elapse. We're busy, we got to go coach. A lead actually walks through the door and you need to sell them in person. And so that reply just sits there for hours on end. But the reality is the faster you respond, the more trust you can build. You don't want your nurture conversations to drag out for weeks. When someone's responding, it means they're by their phone and willing to talk to you at that moment of time. And there's science to back this. In 2011, the Harvard Business Review released a study, and what they found was that you are 60 times more likely to qualify a lead if you respond to them within the first hour rather than waiting a full day. Now, this study analyzed call attempts. So it's not an apples to apples comparison, but the reality is when you connect with someone over the phone, you can have that entire conversation at once. So it's even more important today when we're doing it via text, where there's a bunch of different exchanges that requires the prospect to be near their phone. Now, here's my challenge to you. I want you to respond to new leads in less than an hour. And I want to make sure that no message in your inbox goes more than an hour without a response. Treat this as a target, right? I know that's unreasonable for some of you who are still on the floor a lot, but this should be the benchmark in which most of you strive to hit. Even if you have the best lead nurture in the world, prospects are still gonna ghost you. It's just part of the game. But a lot of gym owners give up after that first no or when a prospect goes quiet. But the reality is they may not be saying no to your gym. They may just be saying no right now. You want to have a reason to reach back out. And I have a follow-up message that I love to use when things go a little quiet. I just send this meme of Kevin Hart with the eyeballs looking like that. And I simply say, Did I lose you? I've tested a bunch of different things, and for whatever reason, this meme just works. Give it a try, let me know what you think. Another way that successful gyms and two brain revive dead conversations is they reach out to prospects when they have something interesting to tell them. Let's say you're running a bring a friend day or an event where outsiders are invited, just shooting a quick text to let them know what it is and that they're invited can get them active in the chat again. And to bring things full circle, keep those invites really brief. Something as simple as like, hey Steve, I saw you like pickleball. We're having an event at Chicken and Pickle on Sunday. Would you like to come? The bottom line is a no right now isn't a no forever. Most gym owners think they have a leads problem, but the reality is we can do a lot more with the leads we already have. And if you're careful to avoid these five mistakes, you're gonna get more qualified prospects on your calendar. And if you've ever found yourself in a situation where a lead reached out to you and you had no idea what to say afterwards, I want you to go check out the full sell by chat framework. It's the episode we just released with Chris Cooper. Go watch that right here.