You can’t make any money when you’re selling to nobody.
Simple, right?
Except not really, because I see a lot of fitness professionals make this mistake over and over.
Who are your clients? Who are your past, present, and future clients? Who is looking at your ads? Who is opening and reading your emails? Who aren’t your clients?
If you can’t give exact, detailed answers to all of those questions, you aren’t going to make any money because you’re selling to nobody. In fact, if you’re broke right now this is probably the reason why.
Let’s try an easier question: who are you?
No problem there, right? I know some of you could talk for days answering this question. Even if you’re more the quiet and humble type, you could probably think of a nice long answer in your head.
So here’s what you need to do if you want to massively increase your income: you need to be able to answer all those questions about your client as thoroughly as you can answer questions about yourself.
And I’m going to help you do that right here.
And by the way, these are questions you should be able to answer for both your client avatar and for the client sitting right in front of you in any given presentation.
Get Specific
There’s a legendary tool in the sales world called the “Mackay 66.” It was created by a guy named Harvey Mackay, an absolutely incredible salesman who instructed his team to fill out the Mackay 66 for every single prospect the company contacted.
So what is the Mackay 66?
Simple: it’s a list of 66 questions about the customer’s work life, personal life, personality, past, and more.
Basically, if you go through and fill out that entire sheet for someone, you know EXACTLY who they are by the end of it. And that’s the point.
Now the true Mackay 66 may not work perfectly for your fitness business, since it was designed more for business to business marketing. (Although if you’re curious, you can find it with a quick Google search.)
So instead, let’s try making up our own list of questions. And to keep things interesting, let’s skip the name and age stuff and go right for the specifics.
Off the top of my head…
Did your client graduate high school? Which one?
Did your client graduate college? Which one? What degree?
Did your client drop out of college? If so, why?
How does your client feel about their educational background?
Is your client married?
What is their spouse’s level of education?
Do they have similar educational backgrounds? If they don’t, is that an issue?
Does your client have children? How many?
What level of education does your client expect for their children?
What does your client like to eat? Why?
What did your client grow up eating?
Does your client cook for themselves? If so, when did they start cooking for themselves?
What does your client like to do in their spare time?
How many friends does your client have?
How does your client keep in touch with their friends?
Does your client have a military background? How do they feel about it?
Does your client’s family have a military background? How do they feel about it?
Is your client religious? If so, which religion? How often do they go to their place of worship?
Does your client have any phobias?
What smells does your client like?
What smells does your client dislike?
What is your client’s favorite kind of music?
I could go on…but let’s stop here for now.
As you’ve probably already noticed, these questions have mostly nothing to do with fitness. There’s a reason for that. In fact, if you go and look at the Mackay 66, you’ll never guess which industry Mackay was working in at the time.
The point of these questions is not to get info that will pump up your service or pump up you as a trainer. The point is to gather up all those little personal details that you can work into a sales presentation (or ANY interaction) to show your clients that you know and care about them.
Of course, you’re probably wondering how to get all this information, right?
Meet Your Market
The method I most recommend is getting out into the community and finding your client avatar in person. Stop and chat with them. Let them know about what you do and ask them what they are looking for when it comes to fitness.
And don’t worry about making any offers here. Leave it open ended. That way, you can hear your prospects taking about their lives, their pain points, and their fitness using THEIR words, which are the exact words you want to be able speak back to them while selling.
In fact, you can even double up on this technique to get some sales practice in while you’re at it.
Working on some sales copy? Meet some of your prospects in a coffee shop and offer to pay for their drinks if they’ll let you read the copy aloud. If they find anything confusing or boring about the copy, you’ll find out quickly.
AND, if your prospects start asking about your service, you know you’re on the right track!
Need to practice your presentation skills? Same basic idea: ask one of your prospects to do a role-play session with you.
Again, the point of all of this is to hear how your prospects talk about fitness. One of the most powerful things you can do as a fitness marketer is to address your clients’ needs and wants using the same words they use.
And don’t ever forget the power of “nose to nose marketing,” as I like to call it. When you want to sell fitness you need people to trust you. Showing up around town and proving that you are a real person is a great way to earn trust.
Do Your Own Research
Obviously, it’s not always practical to go research your clients “out in the wild,” but luckily there’s still plenty of research you can do on your own.
The best place to start is by consuming the same media that your clients do. Websites, magazines, newspapers, TV channels, even local businesses. On a surface level, this will show you their interests and give you plenty of conversation material.
But it goes even deeper than that.
Remember, the media creators out there are all playing a game very similar to yours: they need to get inside their heads and produce content that will get them excited on a gut level. If their work is popular, that means they’ve succeeded.
So study the magazines and stuff to see what kinds of personalities they are appealing to. Do they think their audience is adventurous? Careful? Outgoing? Social? Private? Optimistic? Pessimistic? Nurturing? See if you can picture who they’re talking to. This is important info for you too.
Committed to your success,
Bedros