The Fundamental Systems For Building
The Business Of Your Dreams!
By Eric Ruth
Even at the highest levels of professional sports, a good percentage of practice time is devoted towards drilling FUNDAMENTALS.
The best free throw shooters in the NBA spend hours each week just shooting and shooting and shooting free throws.
Having a rock-solid understanding of the fundamentals will serve you well, regardless of the endeavor.
So I want to drill some critical fundamentals with you, okay?
The foundational axiom you must understand is that…
YOU ARE NOT IN THE “PERSONAL TRAINING” BUSINESS!
That’s a pretty shocking statement, don’t you think?
Let me explain.
Most people believe that being successful in the fitness business means you must become the best fitness professional. Most believe that they should spend their limited time and money learning more about “personal training,” including getting as many degrees and certifications as possible.
Don’t misunderstand me. Being excellent at your trade is extremely important – as is your credibility – which is associated with your degrees and certifications. You obviously must know what you’re doing in order to deliver results.
But I can’t tell you how many trainers I’ve spoken to who have tremendous knowledge and skills…
…BUT NO MONEY!
Why are they struggling?
Because they bought into the “big lie” that says “if you are the best, clients will beat a path to your door.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is this: It’s not how much you know about personal training that matters. It’s how effective you are at MARKETING PERSONAL TRAINING SERVICES AND GENERATING A STEADY FLOW OF QUALITY, LOYAL CLIENTS that determines how much money you will make and therefore how much freedom you will have.
The fundamental idea I want you to “get” is that you are NOT in the “personal training” business. You are in the business of…
GENERATING AND KEEPING CLIENTS FOR THE LIFE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
You are a professional client generator. Like it or not, you’re a professional marketer. (The same holds true for anyone who runs a business or sells a product or service.)
The sooner this fundamental truth hits home with you, the sooner your bank account will begin growing.
When you make this mental shift and adopt this new paradigm, you will start to FOCUS your time and energies towards the areas that make the greatest impact on your business and your quality of life:
SMART MARKETING FOR CLIENT GENERATION AND RETENTION
And the great thing is that smart marketing can be learned.
Smart marketing is simply “salesmanship multiplied.”
Every piece of marketing you use should act as a “salesman” for you. It must be ACCOUNTABLE and deliver results. The elements of successful marketing are no different than the “sales” elements you would use in person.
Like it or not, we are all salespeople. And we are all always selling. Always. Selling is persuasion. To get what we want in life, we must be persuasive. And the most powerful way to persuade is to show whomever you are trying to persuade “what’s in it for them.”
Learning the techniques that persuade the human mind will greatly improve your marketing – your salesmanship multiplied.
What are those things?
They include capturing attention with a headline, connecting with your reader and telling your complete sales story, producing proof of your claims, giving prospects meaningful reasons why they should do business with you versus other options, handling objections, instilling urgency and most importantly…
MAKING IRRESISTIBLE OFFERS!
Smart marketing is “accountable” marketing.
Accountable marketing is the fuel that drives your business. Marketing and innovation produce profits in your business. Almost everything else is a cost or overhead that depletes your profits.
Accountable marketing makes selling easy and painless because prospects come to you 90% pre-sold. When you have marketing systems working to bring you qualified leads, you no longer have to speak with unmotivated clients or tire kickers. You no longer have to “hard sell” because your marketing is doing all the sorting and sifting for you, producing only motivated individuals who are eager for your solutions.
Accountable marketing minimizes your sales generation costs and maximizes your profitability.
And all your marketing has one goal:
POSITIONING YOU AS THE PROVIDER OF CHOICE WITHIN THE MARKETS YOU SERVE
Achieving that goal is DIRECTLY related to:
HOW MANY PEOPLE KNOW YOU PERSONALLY, OR KNOW OF YOU IN A POSITIVE LIGHT IN THE MARKETS YOU SERVE…
AND, WHO ARE REMINDED OF YOUR VALUE SO FREQUENTLY, THAT WHEN THEY ARE READY TO LOSE WEIGHT OR GET FIT OR RELIEVE PAIN OR GET HEALTHY OR RECOVER FROM AN INJURY OR TRAIN FOR A MARATHON (whatever market you serve)…
YOU ARE THEIR AUTOMATIC CHOICE!
I now want to describe for you the framework for how to do this. I want to describe how to create an effective “Sales Generation SYSTEM.”
Let’s talk about the FUNNEL.
The funnel is FUNDAMENTAL TO YOUR SUCCESS.
Picture a big funnel. Outside the top of the funnel exist all your prospective clients. Now, the biggest mistake fitness professionals make is thinking “anyone” can be your client, and the more people you hit with your marketing message, the more money you’ll make. This is erroneous thinking. Rather than spread yourself a mile wide and an inch deep, you want to select a few small, specific, HIGH POTENTIAL markets (or places) where you will FOCUS your energies into gaining market dominance.
Outside the top of the funnel is where those who don’t already know you or care about you exist. So your goal is to TARGET your prospects within specific niche markets using INFORMATION MARKETING. For example, you may be a former CPA, so you understand and can empathize with CPA’s and can therefore speak to them as one of them. You may have a few clients who are Realtors, so you can leverage their testimonials and referrals to attract more Realtors. You may know a great deal about golf, so you can market a program specifically for golfers. You may be a mother, so you can target new mothers who want to get back in shape. You may enjoy working with seniors, so you can speak to them in your marketing with empathy and understanding. Etc., etc.
The point is, if you try to be all things to all people…
YOUR BUSINESS WILL NEVER BE AS PROFITABLE AS IT COULD BE.
You must target specific niche markets, develop Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) for each market, develop specific training packages for each market, and DRILL DOWN DEEP with your marketing into each market, rather than spreading yourself too thin trying to service anyone and everyone who wants to lose weight or get fit.
Information marketing is about developing automated response marketing systems for lead generation within your niche. You offer information that is SPECIFIC to the TARGET. Your information addresses the specific needs and wants of your niche market. It is meaningfully specific, as opposed to being vague and general.
Information marketing is where you offer information that appeals to your niche market’s self-serving interest in order to get your targeted prospect to raise their hand indicating an interest in what you offer.
It’s consumer awareness marketing and education-based marketing that positions you as a helpful, professional source of important information that meets their specific needs. There are literally hundreds of different ways to do this.
Lead generation is the first part of your sales generation system. You must constantly be developing leads, and the simplest, easiest, most productive way to do that is with the automated information-delivery systems.
As you systematically follow up with your leads, you get them to break through the “trust barrier” and make a decision to work with you.
The top of the funnel is the “trust barrier.” Once they break through and are in your funnel – you now have a client and you now have an enormous opportunity to COMPOUND your production by:
- WOWing your clients by over delivering value to them, and
- LEVERAGING off your new client to generate referrals, testimonials and additional leads.
This leverage is called COMPOUND PROSPECTING because you’re using your existing momentum in the marketplace to create more business. It’s like compound interest on your money, where you gain interest not just off your principal balance, but off all the accumulated interest as well. This is the second part of your sales generation system.
The third and final part of your sales generation system is by far the most important for building a long-term, consistently profitable, stable business that can bring you financial security.
Remember, the first part of your sales generation system is automated lead generation that gets your targeted prospects to break through the trust barrier at the top of your funnel. The second part is providing a unique service and leveraging off your clients to generate more leads using compound prospecting (the middle of the funnel). Now you need to do something that most people neglect: You need to CAPTURE, CULTIVATE and NURTURE your clients and sphere of influence (all the people who know you or know of you) for referrals, word of mouth and repeat business.
This is how you achieve CRITICAL MASS in your business. This is the most profitable and stabilizing part of your business. It’s the point where all of your marketing efforts create SYNERGY and result in an ever-growing source of new business via referrals, word of mouth and repeat business.
This does NOT take a lot of time to achieve, and you do NOT have to go through part one (lead generation) and part two (compounding) to get here.
However, you should think of these three parts as legs of a stool. Your stool will be much more stable and strong if you have all three legs in place.
You can begin building critical mass from the first day you start your business. When you start to build and nurture a network (sphere of influence) who know you or know of you (not just clients you’ve serviced, but everyone who knows you) as a SEPARATE AND DISTINCT (and your most important) MARKET, and when you market to them DEEPLY AND EFFECTIVELY you can hit critical mass in a matter of months.
This is when you begin capturing MARKET SHARE.
See, most Fitness Professionals rely on old, useless forms of locating and hard selling clients and they forsake parts two and three of the marketing triangle. They go from chasing one client to chasing the next client. They spend their entire careers working their tails off – and never generate any meaningful market share.
It’s all about what I discussed earlier as the main goal of your marketing, where you have captured a market of people (YOUR market – YOUR network – YOUR sphere of influence – it’s the MOST important MARKET you’ll ever have) who know you or know of you, and you have nurtured them so frequently and meaningfully and deeply, that when it comes time for them to get help (for themselves or friends and family), YOU are the automatic choice!
Are you getting this? If not, print this out and re-read it periodically until you do. This is FUNDAMENTAL stuff that you must “get” in order to really build the kind of business you want.
Now, your sales generation system for your personal training business will be an accumulation of SYSTEMS from each of the three parts:
- lead generation systems
- compound prospecting systems
- critical mass systems
Over time you will start using more and more marketing systems in your business, creating a SYNERGY that will explode your profits and give you the life you want.
I know that all this information can be overwhelming when you contemplate it in its entirety. Just don’t worry. As we progress, I’ll dissect the sales generation system and cover each step of the process in detail.
For now, I just want you to understand the big picture – the fundamental framework for building your ideal business.
Keep in mind that most businesspeople spend over 90% of their available marketing time prospecting for new business using outdated, ineffective, MANUAL prospecting methods while completely ignoring parts two and three. Interestingly, statistics show that it’s 16 times (that’s 1,600%) more profitable to market your services to someone who knows you or knows of you (parts two and three), than to market to someone who doesn’t know you.
That’s amazing, don’t you think? Now you have an understanding of why most fitness professionals never achieve the incomes they want and deserve. However, when you apply ALL 3 of the parts in your sales generation system, you’ll experience EXPONENTIAL growth in your income and an awesome sense of freedom and enjoyment.
33 Six & Seven Figure Fitness Professionals, Who Started With Nothing but a Dream, Reveal the STEP-BY-STEP Secrets, Systems & Strategies that Turned their Fitness PASSION Into Fast Fitness PROFITS!
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