How to automate your gym sales follow up and connect it to your membership software!

Why Automate your Sales Routine?

First off, WHY would you want to do this? First, the obvious is that it saves time and effort. I used to believe this was the #1 reason, but it’s actually #2. From our experience working with multiple gyms, the #1 reason is to automate your sales routine and turn it into a rock solid, repeatable process.

We measured the results for 15 of our clients over a 1 month period in 2018. When we started working with clients, we would ask about their follow up process. If they said – we’re fine, then we would focus on generating the leads first, then optimizing the conversion rate. This allowed us to test the effectiveness of a gym’s sales process by just adding “more leads” to a gym.

The Results:

80% of gyms had either a flat or negative ROI (ie – $1 in marketing, returned $1 or less)
20% of gyms grew by a 2:1 or greater ROI (ie – $2 for every $1 invested in marketing)

The sample size was about 453 leads.

The 20% of gyms that were successful had processes in place. As we worked with them, we found out that they follow up with leads while the 80% had a routine that was only executed sometimes and never on a specific schedule.

Conclusion:

Build an automated sales and follow up process if you want to maximize your marketing investment and grow your gym!

How to Turn your Sales Routine into an Automated Process

Now that you know, WHY, you’re probably wondering HOW do I do this and is there a way to connect this to my member management software?

Before I get into the HOW, let’s talk about member management software for a moment. Many of these software applications claim to be an all-in-one solution. However, in 2019, there isn’t really one application that can do EVERYTHING WELL. Period, end of story.

I did a review of many of the popular member management software solutions in terms of how well they could be automated in the sales process. You can check out that article here.

We build all our automated processes in a software called ActiveCampaign. It’s a great marketing automation system and CRM that will help you automate your sales process.

When you get a lead from your website or Facebook ads or anywhere you have a form collecting data, you can connect it to ActiveCampaign. Once the contact is dropped into ActiveCampaign, you can have that contact enter an automation. This is where you take your gym to the next level by turning your sales routine into an automated process.

It can go something like this…

New Website Lead → Enters autoresponder automation → instantly get an email and text message → Wait 2 hours → send “step 2” email asking them to schedule a session (unless already done) → wait 1 day → send email about your community → send an email and talk about their goals → wait 1 day…you get the idea…

Your goal is to have people move to the next step/stage in your sales process by communicating with them consistently.

You do this by automating the process in a way that focuses on:
Moving them to the next step automatically
Automatically creating inbound questions or objections as to why they aren’t moving to the next step (ie – I’m on vacation next week, I have a past injury, how much does it cost, etc)

We’ve found that by automating the sales process the gym owners KNOW that the process is working – some gyms have completely automated the sales process and get great results with ZERO MANUAL FOLLOW UP (basically, they don’t reach out to them manually until they walk into the gym. BOOM!)

So, what do you need to make this all work?

You need 3 main pieces of software:
ActiveCampaign – You can start with the lite package
Salesmsg – to automate the 2-way texting
Zapier – this software connects other software to make it all work automatically

Once you get this software, you can set up your own automated process.

If you’d like some help, we can help you in 3 ways.

Build your own GymEngine (DIY) – $197

• Setup your own automated sales process in about 1-2 hours with our short, instructional videos, email and text templates and automation share link.
• All you have to do is edit the emails and texts and follow the intuitive directions to set up your own machine.
• Download all info, build yourself

GymEngine Automated Sales Process – $997

• We build the process for you
• 2 strategy calls to optimize the process
• Turnkey solution

Custom GymEngine Automated Sales Process – from $1997

• Consult on a custom automated sales process
• We build and test process
• Fully custom, turnkey solution for YOUR GYM