Ep3: The 4 Secrets to Having a 80%+ Conversion Rate

Matt Dart shares how he hits 80-85% conversion rates with personal training clients. The four moves: a simple 60-minute assessment, asking open-ended questions to get prospects emotional, bundling high-value perks like data tracking and guarantees, and a four-step objection handler that acknowledges, isolates, educates, and overcomes.
Foreign welcome to another podcast episode. This is the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. I'm your host Matt Dart. I'm coming to you for another bit of value team. We're going to be talking about sales today, so let's talk about how to have an 80% or higher conversion rate in your business. So I've got a couple of notes here, but let's just quickly discuss what that could even look like for your business because most personal trainers generally have 20 to 30% conversion. So what would it actually look like in your business if you were converting 8 out of 10 people that you sat down with for a consultation? How would that actually transform your business? I can tell you right now you'd be growing a lot faster than you are right now. So let's get stuck in. So there's a couple of, couple of points that I've got here. So I'm just going to look down at my notes just to make sure I've got, got everything covered. But there's four main things that I want to talk about today in terms of getting a 80% plus conversion rate. So during my time as a PT, which has been, you know, this would be my fourth year now, pretty consistently over the four years I've had roughly around 80 to 85% conversion on, on new clients signing up from consultations. And that's not single handedly, but that's one of the, the big reasons as to why I was able to go from zero to 250 sessions per week in under two years. Six locations, 12 trainers. You know, you guys can figure out the income from there. But it came down to a couple of things. So the first thing is having a super simple sales process. So a lot of personal trainers and, and to be fair, some of the clubs force this on personal trainers which is a whole another podcast episode. But a lot of the time they do like a third three sessions as an introduction. And in my experience a lot of pts will literally give the member everything that they need to succeed. But why would they need to stay with you and start paying you for a service if, if you've already given them everything that they need. So a lot of the time they do like one session for goal setting, one session for, or one session for goal setting, one session for, you know, foundations in the gym and then one session for, you know, what they need or I give them a program and then tell them exactly how to do it. So after three sessions are like cool, no, I don't need your help anymore. Cash a letter. So Personally, I find that you need to simplify that sales process. That's a very long sales process. And then you're only selling to someone at the last session, whereas some people don't even show up for the second and third session. So you're just completely wasting your time. You have no opportunity to, you know, sell the service or make an offer on your service. So I mean, some clubs, some people, some clubs force PT to do three sessions. So this is the ideal scenario for me. And when I look through for clubs for my clients or if I'm looking for another location, I want to have a bit more control over what I offer. Because a lot of the time you're doing this for free. People don't understand, like the trainer's not getting paid for this. It's all free for their business. So what I find is I, I generally just do one session for free. And when I say a session, it's not a PC session. I call them, I call them a health assessment, you can call them a mind and body session, you can call them a consultation, you can call it a goal setting session, whatever you want to call it. Basically it's all the same thing. But essentially what I suggest doing is the first 15 minutes should be talking about their goals, getting their pain point, like why they haven't achieved their goals so far, like what's been holding them back, what do they need help with, what have you tried so far, why hasn't that worked? What, what's happened previously, what's your current routine, what's your nutrition life, et cetera, et cetera. About 15, 20 minutes for that. Then as an optional extra, you can do a technique session. Now, the technique session, I suggest just being three exercises. And this is not to fatigue them at all, this is just to test their technique to see where they're at. But realistically, you're trying to see if they actually need help. Some people don't need help, which is fine. Like you can't help everyone and you shouldn't be helping everyone any. So choose three exercises. I used to choose a back squat, push ups and the lunges, because most people do them incorrectly. And you can generally show people some value and some variations that they can do. So you just do one set, a set of like five or six, just like super lightweight, just a touch of technique. Most people do it incorrectly, but you correct their form, show them some other things that they can do. That should take 15 to 20 minutes. Remember you're learning one set of each exercise, so you know how long three sets take not that long. That should be about 15 minutes and then you've got 10, 15 minutes on your close. So your offer should take about five minutes to present and then you've got about 10 minutes to, objection, handle and kind of get all the paperwork done for the sign up. So that's the first thing. Have a super, super simple process and I suggested all being done on the first session. Second thing, get people in an emotional state and create impulse. So how do you do that? Easier said than done. So it all comes down to the types of questions that you're asking. So you need to firstly ask open ended questions, not closed questions. Closed questions are yes or no answers. Open questions are tell me, tell me the reason why you haven't achieved the goal. Can you explain this to me? So when you say that, what does that mean? So asking open questions. So I generally like to ask, why do people want to achieve a certain goal? What's their why? Why they want to lose the 10 kilos? It's not as, it's not just as simple as I just want to feel better. It's like, oh, maybe they want to run around with their kids a bit more. Maybe they're super exhausted all the time and they can't keep up with their kids. That's a huge wife for someone. So you get them, that's how they get. That's how you get them in the emotional state. You create impulse when you get them in the emotional state and you provide a solution for their problem immediately, that creates impulse that they want to buy right now. Until you get people to buy life on the spot. Do you create the emotion and you create the solution, like an irresistible offer, which I'll get to in a second. That's how you're going to do it. So there's a number of questions like as I said, open questions. Why do you want to achieve the result? Why haven't you achieved the result that you're looking for? Like you still want to ask some closed questions. A good closed question you can ask. I'll give you a quick tip here. A good closed question you can ask if you keep doing what you're doing at the moment. So your current routine and current nutrition, do you think you're guaranteed to get the results that you want? Most people, 90% of people will say no to that because otherwise they wouldn't be sitting in front of you doing a consultation with you. So that's a good question to ask. My next point, have an irresistible offer that makes people feel stupid by Saying no. And what I mean by that is you can have a guarantee of, of results. So when you're coming up with your offer, is it just that you're saying I out, I'll train you twice a week. It's not an irresistible offer. Why don't you say something like maybe two sessions per week. We're going to do a variety of different exercises with strength, high intensity, Pilates, whatever. We're also going to do the first session is going to be a free 60 minute setup session to set you up for success. So we're going to talk about your goal, we're going to talk about your, oh, we're going to your measurements, we're going to fitness testing, we're going to do a body scan. And with your body scans, we're doing body scans every four to six weeks. We're going to collect a lot of data to make sure you're on track every four to six weeks as well. What we're also going to do is a goal setting and reassessment session. In that session, we're going to reassess your fitness testing, we're going to redo your body scan. As I said, we're going to redo your measurements. We want to make sure that you're 100% on track with your goal. Now, on top of that, you're going to get access to our VIP group for community and support. You're going to get 24, 7 access to me as well if you need the extra assistance. You're also going to get access to our apps, for example. How much better does that sound? Now, on top of that, Sally, Karen, John, whoever, on top of that, we guarantee you get results in the first 12 weeks. You don't get results in the first 12 weeks, I'm going to give you an extra session free until you get the results or I'm going to give you your money back, whatever it is, build up the perceived value. And then when you're actually telling them the price, the shocks because it's so cheap. So that's the first thing, the last thing you need an objection handling process. Objection handling. So you know, sometimes people will just go here, I'll just do the two sessions a week or I'll just do the platinum package, I'll do the gold package, whatever. Some people are like, can I just think about it, can I talk to my partner? Or whatever. You need an objection handling process. And I won't go through that in super detail today. But I'll tell you the process. The four Step process. You need to acknowledge the objection. So acknowledge that they have an objection. Isolate the objection. So confirm that it's actually the correct objection. A lot of people will say they need to or it's money or it's their partner, but it's actually something else. I just don't want to tell you. They might not just see the value in the program or offer that you have offered or the service that you've offered them. They just might be too scared to tell you. They might just think they don't have the time to train. Two sessions a week. So they might, they might just want one, but they don't know there's a one session a week option. You need to isolate the objection then. So you acknowledge, then you isolate, then you educate and then you overcome. Education is more. You educate them by offering them a different solution that's in their budget order it's going to provide or that solves the problem for that objection. So you educate them, then you over time. So you just ask again, hey, why don't we just do this option instead? That's it. So this is how you have an 80% conversion rate. So simple sales process. Get people in an emotional state and create impulse. Have an irresistible offer that makes people feel stupid when they don't do it. And then an objection handling process. I can go through objection handling in a lot more detail in a separate episode. I can give you live examples of what that looks like, but that's essentially how how you do it, team. So I hope you hope you enjoyed this episode. If you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to whatever channel you're listening to this on. Follow us and if you can, if you do get some value out of this episode, please share it with a friend. That's the only way that this podcast can grow until we can get more guests on here. So I'm going to get some guests on here as well so we can have a bit more of a conversation around different experiences and what people are, what people have done in the industry. So keep an eye out for that. But apart from that, the episode is done. Hopefully you enjoyed and I will see you in the next podcast episode. Have an awesome day.
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