Marketing and Sales Mastery: Tactics for Better Gym Lead Conversion

These are the best gyms in the world. At one specific metric, if this was a fitness podcast, I would share who the best dead lifter it was in the world last month, who the best 5K runner in the world was last month. But today I'm actually gonna share three leaderboards because marketing can be broken down into separate parts.

You can be really, really good at one part and still have bad marketing if the rest of your funnel is broken. We break marketing in two brain into four stages. There's lead generation, there is appointments booked, which is what we call set rate. How many appointments are set to come and talk to you? There's show rate. How many of those bookings actually show up to have a conversation with you?

And then there's close rate. How many of those people who show up actually buy when people have marketing problems? And let's face it, every gym does. It helps to break the problem down and find where the problem actually lies. Lots of gyms will say, I need more leads, but they've got lots of leads.

Those leads just aren't booking appointments, or those appointments aren't showing up, or the ones that show up are not signing up. And so we wanna break those things down. Just like when a client comes into your gym and says, I want to improve my fitness .

Maybe they're already deadlifting 500 pounds, but they're also obese and they, they need to, you know, whatever your prescription is, do some zone two, start jogging, whatever. Okay, so today I'm gonna share three leaderboards with you. Our set rate leaderboard, our show rate leaderboard, and our close rate leaderboard.

Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna highlight the top three gyms who actually won the leaderboard in, in all three categories. Now this is crazy because it's like you're taking the top dead lifter in the world who also happens to be the fastest 5K runner and also they're great at rowing or whatever, right? That they're great at CrossFit and interviewing them to get their top tips.

Like that's who we have on the show today. And we, we went really deep with one special guest. You're gonna hear that on the next podcast. So first today I wanna share some metrics. Some of you are gonna be really, really into the metrics because you want to hear proof. Everybody wants to give you advice on marketing, right? Every other gym owner that you talk to is gonna have a tip for you.

They might be good at marketing, they might not. I'm sharing these metrics with you because I want to prove that these people are good at this and you should listen to them. Then I'm gonna give you their top tips, okay? Next time on the podcast, we're gonna have one of these people go into great depth. I'm gonna share his story with you here in a moment.

So first, let's talk about the leaderboards and we want to talk about set rate first. So set rate is how many people go on your website and book an appointment. Your website is not a piece of art. You're not just putting it up there because, well, I feel like I should have one. You're putting it up there to convert interest leads into appointments. That's it. That is the point of your website.

That's how you measure whether your website's doing a good job or not is how many appointments is booking you per month. If you have a beautiful website that costs you $30,000 and it's not booking you any appointments, it's a bad website. If you have a , you know, a type pad blog that serves as your website and you're paying 12 bucks a month and it's booking you appointments, that's a good website.

You measure your, the efficacy of your website on ROI , how many appointments it's booking you, not on design or anything else. Okay, so let's start with set rate. Who is getting the most appointments booked from their website per month from all thousand two brain gyms worldwide? Here we go. We had a few gyms get 32 appointments booked. Two of these are from Canada.

Yes, we had a gym get 35 appointments booked last month from the us . We had a gym in Sweden. Get 36 a gym in Croatia. Get 36 a gym from the us . Get 38, a gym from Denmark. Have 40 appointments, booked a gym in the , the states have 47. That was the top US gym. We had a gym in the Netherlands. Have 48 appointments booked last month, and a gym in Mexico. Have 91 appointments booked last month.

Imagine having three sales appointments booked every single day of the month. That's what this gym in Mexico did. It's wild, but there's more you're gonna hear from these guys again. The next leaderboard is for show rate. How many people showed up for a sales appointment last month? Look, as much as I'd love to say, everybody who books an appointment will show up. That's not true, especially if you're running paid ads.

You get people who are interested, engaged, they book an appointment and then they ghost you. Don't be offended. This is just how it works. But there's ways that you can improve that, and that's called lead nurture. So who has the best lead nurture? Well, let's look at their stats. So we had a gym in the us , two gyms in the US actually last month, have 25 people show up for their appointments.

We had a gym in Canada have 27 show up for theirs, A gym in Denmark had 27 people show up for their appointments. A gym in the Netherlands had 28, 2 gyms in the US had 28, a gym in Canada had 30 , uh, the top gym in the US had 32. And this gym from Mexico, where you're gonna hear more from later had 68 people show up.

That means that 91 people booked appointments and 68 of those actually showed up for them, which, you know, depending on where their traffic is coming from, is a pretty good number. Now let's talk about close rates. We had a gym in the US sign up, 17 new members last month. Now they're not signing up for a , a low paid come twice a week. They're signing up for OnRamp. This is a high frontend revenue offer.

And so if this gym is selling 17 people at like 400 bucks a month, well it's $6,800 in frontend revenue and a great chance at converting them long term . So not only do the free trials not work to convert, but they usually lead to a very low value sale and very poor retention too. So this is why we want a sales conversation or an appointment. Okay, let's get back to this leaderboard for close.

So we had three gyms have 17 new clients sign up last month, two from the us , one from the Netherlands. We had a gym in Switzerland, sign up, 18 new members Last month we had a gym in Ireland. Sign up 22 gyms in the us . Sign up 22 and 23, a gym in Denmark. Sign up 23, a gym in Canada. Sign up 25 and a gym in Mexico.

Sign up 54. Now I'm gonna , I'm gonna break those down for you again in a moment just for context. But look, here's the reality. In our state of the industry guide, we report how many new members a gym is getting every month. And you know, we, we draw from the biggest and best data sources in the industry.

And what we see is like on average, most gyms are getting seven to eight new members a month and losing three to four. So their net, you know, three to four best case, these people are signing up, double, triple, another multiple of that and their retention is good too.

So if, if the average gym is signing up, you know, let's literally say eight a month and this gym is signing up 64, they're growing at eight times the industry average. That's incredible. Even the gyms that are signing up, 17 are growing twice as fast as your gym probably is or mine is, right? That's the industry average.

I wanna talk about how they're doing it, but first I want you to understand who's giving you this advice. We had a few gyms, four of them actually make it to all three of those leaderboards in a month. And again, these are people who are like top 10 in the world for the deadlift, top 10 in the world for running a 5K and also top 10 in the world for Fran, for example. That's amazing.

Uh , one of them, the Mexico gym , uh, had 91 appointments booked, 68 of those appointments showed and 54 of those closed, which is really interesting because all of those ratios are very, very good. Us . One of the US gyms had 47 appointments booked, 28 showed 22 closed. The other US gym had 38 appointments booked, 32 showed and 23 closed. And the gym from Canada, let's hear it, they did really well.

Their funnel was amazing. They had 32 appointments booked. Great. 30 of those showed wow and 25 closed. They only leaked seven people outta their funnel from appointment to sale. And I mean, maybe we're just too polite in Canada. If we book an appointment, we wanna show up, we don't wanna disappoint the gym owner, whatever. Great job.

Now the US gym that went 47 book 28 show 22 closed, they had two nearby gyms shut down and they applied the help first principle to reach out to members who didn't have a place to work out anymore. One of those gyms was an orange theory and the other was something else. But that help first principle is what brought these new members in.

Now, Matt Micho of ever Proven is the owner of that gym and he's gonna talk about his strategy in detail on the next episode of Runner Profitable Gym . Thanks Matt for letting us share your stats and in future your story. Here's what's crazy. Matt shared his stats.

We recorded a podcast with him, and the next day after that podcast was recorded another CrossFit gym near him shut down and Matt reached out to those members using the strategy that he is gonna share on the next episode and recruited a bunch of those to book appointments to . Congrats Matt. Like it , you know, it really does pay to be around for a long time.

Back to the, the gyms that made it to all three leaderboards for set rate , short rate , close rate, and their top tips. Now, if we look at close rates as a percentage, they're very high. So the gym in Mexico closed 79% of the people who booked an appointment. The US one gym from the US closed 79%, another one closed, 72% and the gym in Canada closed 83% of the people who booked an appointment.

That's crazy because they're getting so many appointments that that tells me that they're running paid ads . Usually the more paid ads that you run, the lower your close rate because some of these ads are attracting people who are kind of cold leads, right? But these people are getting those people to book appointments, getting 'em to show up and closing them . That's incredible way to go.

The number one thing that all of these gyms said, and I wanna share their top tips with you, the number one thing that they all said was consistency. So I don't know about you, but when I was inconsistent in my sales process, I was not signing a lot of people up.

If an athlete came in and I wanted to sell them one-on-one, I would pull out this binder and I'd explain linear periodization and I'd draw them a graph and I'd bore 'em to death until they bought . If somebody wanted to do CrossFit, I would like, I don't know , give 'em a tour of the gym. I would talk about constantly very functional movement performed at high intensity.

I would ask about their goals, I would talk about the coaches' credentials, I would show them the equipment, I would talk about our schedule. It was different every time. And of course you couldn't even measure how well I was doing because who knows, right? Like I wasn't even doing the same thing.

So all of these gyms say like when they started with Two Brain , the first thing that happened was that their sales process became consistent. They did it the same way every time. And when you do it the same way every time you get reps and you get better, when you do it differently every time, you never ever get better because you're not improving and you're not tracking that improvement.

It's just, you know, whatever feels right on the day, that means you're never successful. So these gyms highlighted consistency. Here's exactly what they said. The first gym said, now we have a real sales system for signing people up. We will grow our personal training in small group next because our group classes are doing well and we've got the reps in. Another one said, this is our new normal . We are consistent.

Anybody delivering a no sweat intro at our gym does it exactly the same way. And this one said, you know, we expect to continue like this because we've got a consistent process. We're not just flying by the seat of our pants, we're using a fitness marketing agency. I believe that's what they're called. And we are forecasting and setting KPI goals for that marketing agency.

And then they work backward to hit those goals and that's how we decide whether to keep employing them or not. Well, when you're consistent, when the machine is running the same way every time you can do that and it becomes this self-fulfilling machine. Great job. Another one said staff incentives. They said, we have the right team and we reward them. We have bonus schemes and opportunities.

We have a team that genuinely cares. Now look, you can't just incentivize sales unless you have a replicable system that you're using. It's not a matter of motivation if, if you're gonna give your people a bonus just to try harder at sales, that's not gonna improve anything.

What you do is first you systemize, you get a sales system, we give you that in two brain , then you optimize, you practice until you get good and then you automate, you delegate that to other people and you train them and mentor them on it.

It sounds complicated and some of you might even think it sounds a bit corporate, but even if you're the single owner of a gym, you cannot afford to waste leads, you can't afford to waste your time sitting down with people who are not signing up. And the best way to make sure that you're wasting your time is to not have a process that's , uh, repeatable and teachable to somebody else.

If you want to add incentives as a cherry on top, after you've got a system and you've optimized it and you've delegated it, fine, but just giving people a bonus incentive will not fix your sales problem. Fix your sales problem first.

This next gym said that we track our metrics, we break the funnel metrics set, show close and KPIs and you know, how many leads get in touch with us, how many book our intro, how many show, and how many pay. We have a percentage of who moves from each part of the funnel to the next.

And if somebody you know, comes in for an appointment and they don't sign up, then we're tracking that to see where we can improve, right? They're, they're doing it the same way so they can test and improve the machine. Now this next gym was very interesting. They said that we have a unique selling proposition. They said, we make sure that people know our gym is not for meatheads.

We target mature clients and people bring friends in because of that. They're not scared to expose their friends and family to the other people in our gym. Were an overnight success. 16 years in the making, what a great quote. The next gym said , uh, sales systems was the key to their success. We have excellent sales skills. We use a script. People know, like and trust us.

We've been here through the years, we're perfectionists and we're never done improving our sales process. Interesting that they're never done improving their business, not just trying to get better and better as a level 12 coach. The next person also said sales skills. He said the primary difference is how we were taught to sell right outta the gate. And then we shifted to doing sales on the phone.

We've been doing it this way now for five years. Wow. This next gym had some tips on paid ads. They said, we're spending a lot of money on Facebook and we found the quality wasn't always there. So we started focusing more on organic lead generation, business partnerships, giveaways, emails. Most of our leads are now word of mouth .

When F 45 and another gym closed, those people were already paying attention to us on Instagram. They were already part of our content funnel. Another gym said Niche excellence is key to our success. We're one of the best in town for strength and conditioning. We launched personal training in addition to small group and we have big group already. Uh, another said we use Kilo.

Uh, we create ongoing engagement and we automate that with software called Kilo. Um, this gym uses sales on the phone and they are working with fitness marketing agency to help them. They said if we get a hundred leads, we try to contact them and get a response from 50 via text or email. Once we're in touch, we do a one call close. We call them a consultation. We call 'em and we talk to 'em on the phone.

If they don't sign up, we put them into a long term drip campaign with emails once or twice a week based around our content. We might also bring them in if they don't convert on the phone. So they might do one in person. Very interesting. The next person said that they also do their no sweat intro over the phone. The way we market ourselves speaks really well to people on social media.

When people start following us, we DM them to try to get them on the phone. We might not be the best at getting them on the phone, but once we do, we have a 20 to 30 minute conversation. We're a smaller studio and we connect with them deeply right away. It's emotional. We really focused on the sales process for the last two years and that's why we're so good at it.

Over the phone we found that speed trumps booking an appointment and talking to 'em in person. Interesting tracking metrics gives you that kind of feedback and information that you can use to make decisions. Um, this person said that they do a paid trial plus a sales process. They said we make a prescription over the phone and we book them for a $20 paid first session.

This ensures they'll show up on the phone, we explain the memberships, and then after we get off the phone, we send them a text with the pricing. Then they do another intake that's about 15 minutes before the class and we already know a lot about them from the phone conversation so we can dig deeper. Did you look over the memberships? Do you have any injuries?

Then we hand them off to the coach and we introduce them to one person in class and then we hand them to the sales team. Amazing. This next person said we do a sweat intro. So in Tube Brain we teach two options. There's a no sweat intro where it's a consultative process, and then there's a sweat intro where you do a consultative process, you make a prescription and then you let them do a little workout with you.

Okay, that's cool. But it's different from a free trial because you've already framed what they want from your gym and sold them on the benefit. The the purchase has already basically been made. You're just giving them a little sample to leave with. So here's what , what this Jim said. They said we do a sweat intro and we track the closes by coach and front desk.

So if one coach is closing at 60%, another one's closing at 80%. We try to help those who are lagging and help 'em see what their teammates are doing. And our head of membership is in charge of this. Another gym , this was interesting. They said, we use AI and forward thinking. We're planning a big change this quarter. We will use AI to analyze our sales data.

We hope this will show us what is not obvious just from watching recordings. Every team member involved in the client journey is tasked with finding one project that they can outsource to AI that is forward thinking. You know, and , and we don't have data on whether this is working yet. So don't let this be a distraction. I just want you to see inside the mind of what the top gyms are doing.

They're always evolving and if AI improves their sales process, which they'll judge against their metrics, then they'll start using ai. They will not just jump to replacing stuff with AI because it's new and cool and some software guru on Facebook said that it's important.

Now, I said that on our next podcast we've got Matt Micho from ever proven coming in and he's gonna talk about how this stuff works in extraordinary circumstances like the gym down the road closing and you know, he admits, hey, our numbers were high this month because they were driven by the other places shutting down, but we were also doing paid ads and they joined my gym for a reason and not the other options out

there. It's because we've had these nurture processes in place. We've been doing affinity marketing plus the paid ads. We've been doing referrals. A lot of these people at the other gyms know somebody at my gym already. So it's really easy. We were also ready to make an offer. We're not just offering these people come in and get the same price as you were getting somewhere else because that's what killed the other gym.

They're still going through our process and that shows 'em that we're different and that sets 'em up for long-term success. We're not gonna change what got us here just because there's a big opportunity in front of us right now. Okay? So what Matt is doing, he'll break this all down in the podcast later this week. You're gonna love it. I hope you tune in and learn from Matt.

In the meantime though, there is a way that you can learn from other gym owners and that is to go to gym owners united.com. That's our free group for gym owners. And you, you get a lot of opinion in there, but the reality is that that opinion goes through a few filters. Even if not everybody in that group is in the two Brain Business mentorship program.

Even if we can't see their data first, they go through the filter of transparency. Nobody's lying in that group. If, if we catch somebody that's like lying or giving advice without experience, we just remove them. Second, nobody's a jerk. So there are no stupid questions.

If you ask a question and you're worried, oh , people will think this is a newbie question or it's dumb, don't worry, nobody is gonna make a sarcastic meme in response. Like those people, they're gone. We move them outta the group. Everybody in that group is supportive. They, they want to help you. They'll give you advice.

You can filter that advice on your own if you want to, but it's best to do that with a mentor and our mentors filter advice and data from 15,000 gyms every year and tell you here's exactly what works and here's exactly how to do it, and they do it with you if you need them to. That's what Two Brain Business is all about. This podcast is all about sharing what's actually working to help you grow your gym.

And that's why it's called Run a Profitable Gym . That's why I'm in this. I'm Chris Cooper and that's why I founded Two Brain Business. Thank you for helping people. Thank you for letting us help you.