Katie McManus sold memberships at Equinox, solar panels, and SaaS software. She built personal brands at each by geotagging social posts to local areas, turning TikTok videos into Instagram reels, and sharing day-in-the-life content instead of pitching directly.
Chapters
There are three companies that I want to acknowledge as I'm breaking down my entrepreneurial skills in a sales role. One was Equinox, a high end fitness club where people would pay for membership and buy packs of personal training. Another one was solar energy, where people were choosing to have solar panels put on their roofs to reduce energy costs. The last one was a SaaS company, Cisco, where they were selling software as a service to other businesses who needed their service. Let's start with Equinox, shall we? Let's acknowledge the limitations of the job, right? If you're a sales advisor at a fitness club, you're limited by geography. You're selling memberships for a club in San Francisco. It doesn't mean that you can sell to someone in Boise, Idaho. That's not going to happen. That's too long of a drive to go and work out. So one of the things that I would do is I would get on social media in a very intentional way where I was geotagging different places in the neighborhood. And actually, as I think through this, back when I worked at Equinox, Instagram didn't have reels. There was no such thing as TikTok. Let's assume that I worked at an Equinox in the here and now, where reels are a thing and TikToks are a thing. Here's how I would build my personal brand on those platforms to attract more people to buy gym memberships. I wouldn't do a hard sell. I would set up an account on TikTok and have things repurposed to Instagram where I was doing a lot of day in the life, day in the life of a membership advisor at a high end fitness club. I would talk through picking out my outfit for the day. But because how you pick out an outfit to work at a fitness club is you pick out an outfit that like halfway through the day part of it will work for your workout and then you change into another outfit. There was a costume change in the day. I would talk through the healthy and not so healthy things that I would eat. I would do a day in the life of. Here's where I go for my coffee in the morning. I'm allowing my followers on this hypothetical account to see the kinds of things that I like to get a sense of my personality, to see what my routine is a little bit.
