I am headed out of town to visit family for the weekend.
This trip will be an interesting challenge as I travel from sunny, humid Florida to Upstate NY where it is very cold and wintery. There is a particular gymnastics meet that has my interest and my heart as I watch a young family member compete.
I am also looking forward to checking out a couple of gyms in the area.
I am always interested to see how gyms and fitness centers are holding up, especially in the wake of the pandemic, and in some cases, I just need a good workout.
I like to experience the gym’s systems, especially marketing, and sales. Business owners always tell us what they want us to believe, but the experience they provide often varies from the description.
One huge variable is how often a gym follows up with me as a prospective customer. Most gyms do a very poor job in this area with little or no real follow-up. Not even to see if I planned to come back again.
I know what the industry is like and I do not know of any business that would not benefit from a better follow-through system.
One gym, which will remain nameless at this point, has the record for contacting me after my one visit. I don’t know precisely how many times they reached out, because I stopped counting at 25, and they continue. Interestingly, the workload was spread over four individuals, all well-trained and very skilled.
I was not leading them on in any way, but rather citing the reasons for my delayed decision-making and indecision. Exactly as I had heard those reasons over the years when I was on the other side of the phone.
This organization was persistent in keeping in contact with me. They were never offensive, never pushy, and always spoke to me in terms of things they would only know if they kept, and referred to, good notes. (There is another whole lesson regarding this skill set.)
How many times do you think they should have followed up? How many times do you routinely follow up? Is it different now, after the pandemic than it was before the pandemic?
The answer is that we never stop following through until the prospect asks us to. On a deeper level we need to have an orchestrated plan that makes sense. A routine canned script will only offend people, and very quickly.
In addition, we need to be more skilled now post-pandemic, than pre-pandemic. People are more cautious than a few years ago and they need more nurturing, a critical part of your overall marketing campaign.
At a minimum, your follow-up plan should outline twelve distinctive steps that you follow without varying, for each new prospect. Impecible notes need to be kept in a CRM to journal the prospect’s journey to becoming a customer.
Mining this data will empower you to explode your business.
Remember you get results if you take immediate action on your idea!
