Review of the “No Discount” Guide to Fitness Marketing

 

Before I started running CriticalBench.com full-time, in previous lives I have worked both as a gym membership sales consultant and as a personal trainer. And though I was successful, continually selling new memberships and securing new clients was always a never-ending challenge.

After reading The No Discount Guide to Fitness Marketing, I really wish I had run across this resource back in the days when I was selling gym memberships and marketing my services as a personal trainer. The No Discount guide is written by Brian Cannone and he's developed what he calls the five-part Ultimate Health Club Profits FormulaT. If you're a gym owner, this is definitely a worthwhile read.

The book is divided into 11 chapters outlining Brian's complete strategy in detail. Chapter 1 introduces us to the "formula." Before getting into the formula, Brian talks about the importance of switching from an owner-focused perspective to one that's customer-focused. In this new organizational design, the customer is on top and marketing and sales take on new importance while the role of the CEO is moved off to the side, charged with the task of leading the company in the new customer-focused direction.

Once that's covered, Brian moves on to discussing the formula,
which includes these 5 parts:

1. Increase the number of promotions;
   

1. Increase the number of times you charge your members; and
   
2. Increase the number of purchases (other than members' fees) to your current members.

In the rest of this chapter Brian goes on to provide more in-depth information about each of these components.

The next chapter gives us an overview of Brian's thoughts about creating systems (think McDonald's) to keep your gym on "autopilot." This means that the gym's success is not overly dependent on any one person-including you.

The idea is to establish consistent systems that produce the same results regardless of the person performing them.

Chapter 3 is focused on positioning your club in the marketplace and the steps involved in doing so. He includes a good discussion about surveys and even includes a sample. This chapter is followed up by an overview of effective do-it-yourself advertising strategies. Here, Brian provides some easy-to-implement ideas for promoting your gym. The section on how to present your website is top-notch and I also like the fact that he provides examples and resources.

 Chapters 5-8 are dedicated to an in-depth explanation of Brian's 7-step system to successfully walk your prospects through the sales cycle. He presents the system in an easy-to-follow format that outlines everything you need to do to successfully implement the system. He also spends some time going over some of the qualities that you should look for in your salespeople before laying out the rest of the steps in the system. And again, like the other chapters Brian uses real-life examples and provides useful tools and resources.

Chapter 7 starts out with some great suggestions for customizing and making the most of gym tours. He closes out this section with an overview of the different types of memberships you should consider. In chapter 8 Brian leads with strategies for overcoming most of the typical objections you're likely to hear from prospects. There's a lot of useful information presented in this chapter-I especially like his thoughts about personal training and how it should be managed.

Brian gives us his thoughts about using the telephone as a sales tool to bring in prospects and sell memberships in chapter 9. Like the other parts of his formula, he lays out a strategy for using the phone as lead-generating and sales closing tool. This is followed up by an excellent presentation about putting it all into action. He really covers everything-laying out the gym, equipment selection, figuring out how many members/memberships you need to turn each month, and more. This section is jam-packed with great examples and lots of resources.

Overall, I'd say that whether you're an experienced gym owner or just starting out this book is a must-have. The concepts and ideas he presents are practical, realistic and doable. By that I mean that the strategies he offers up don't require extraordinary resources that are beyond the reach of ordinary gym owners. I especially like the fact that the book is based on practical experiences that have shown to work. If you're looking to pump up the sales volume at your gym I definitely recommend this book.

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