Your sales team has the expertise they need to convert leads, but do they have the right tools?

The way you handle member relationships directly impacts how effective your sales team can be. Your club’s CRM software plays a pivotal role in maintaining positive member relationships but misusing it can slow your sales team down.

Let’s look at three ways you can leverage your CRM software to make your sales team more efficient.

CRM means Customer Relationship Management. CRM software is a set of digital tools that allows health and fitness clubs to manage their member relationships, data, and engagement.

CRM software is often customizable based on your members, systems, and staff. The right CRM should support your sales team and members at every stage of their customer lifecycle.

Your leads are expecting a smooth experience when researching your club online. Any friction they experience with your digital touchpoints damages that experience and makes it harder for your sales team to do their job.

Eliminate the frustrating gaps in your customer journey by leveraging your CRM automations.

Start by creating a customer journey map to identify where your leads feel friction. A customer journey map is a visual representation of a customer’s journey from lead to member at your club. Your map should illustrate every touchpoint where a lead interacts with your club and tell the story of their overall experience.

After finishing your customer journey map, ask yourself:

1. Is there any important information we’re not sharing?
2. Are we missing out on any engagement opportunities?
3. If I were a lead, how would I feel at each touchpoint?
4. Which touchpoints are redundant, frustrating, or confusing?

Once you know where you’re falling short, look for opportunities to fill in the gaps with your CRM. Are there any redundant steps you can eliminate or automate? Can you set up talk tracks to better engage leads?

Whether you’re dealing with marketing campaigns or online lead forms, you can create a more user-friendly experience by leveraging all the tools your CRM has to offer. Focus on creating a seamless lead experience so they’re primed for a great conversation with your sales team.

When leads are scouting clubs online, they want information ASAP. 78% of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first, so slow responses will cost your business.

Set your sales team up for success by speeding up your response time.

Research conducted with more than 20 companies shows that leads called within the first minute have more than a 231% increase in conversion rate. Eliminate any delays in processing lead information so your sales team can stay agile.

Use your CRM’s automation tools to notify your sales team immediately when someone completes a lead form. The quicker your sales team can connect with a lead, the easier it will be to convert them into a member.

When you spread your member information, marketing campaigns, and sales data across different platforms, you open yourself up to inefficiencies.

Manually feeding data into multiple systems, carrying out tedious marketing tasks by hand, doing the same thing over and over again – wasting time on inefficiencies means your sales team isn’t operating at full capacity.  Their time is much better spent finding new leads and connecting with members.

Give them more time to focus on sales by integrating your CRM with your club management system. Swapping inefficient processes for automated systems gives your sales team more time to do what they do best.

Leverage your CRM automations to:

• Automate your sales task management
• Create automated drip campaigns to nurture leads
• Generate real-time reports so your sales team stays agile
• Feed your online lead forms directly into your member database

When your individual systems share lead information in real-time, your sales team will always have the time and information they need to convert a lead.

At the end of the day, your club’s success is based on your member experience and outreach. Leverage your CRM tools to support your members throughout their customer lifecycle and create systems that convert.

Article originally published September 2022 and updated February 2023.

Using your CRM to its fullest potential can increase retention by 14%. Learn how you can use your CRM to drive and engage leads from the Club Automation team.

Check out this webinar to learn:

• How to nurture prospects after a free trial
• Which tools you need to reach leads at the right time
• Why being the first to respond can convert more members