How do you sell more gym memberships? That’s the question on every gym owner and operator’s mind.

A cohesive sales strategy helps ensure a constant flow of members to any gym. By taking a 360-degree approach to planning a sales strategy, you can ensure your entire team is well-equipped to optimize sales and help any gym thrive.

But what does that really mean?

In this helpful guide, you’ll learn about actionable steps any gym can take to accelerate gym membership growth.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” And when you’re trying to say the right thing to the right person in the right place at just the right time, all while breaking through the noise that people face every day…you’re going to need a plan.

To make sure your efforts run smoothly, you need to craft a cohesive marketing and sales strategy to ensure everyone’s working together to find new leads.

A solid sales plan is critical to consistently selling more gym memberships. While marketing brings people in, the sales process closes the deal. A good sales plan should focus on both structure and strategy, providing a roadmap your team can follow to convert leads into members.

A sales plan can include key information like target audience details, a value proposition, key benefits, as well as market trends and a competitive analysis to get a full understanding of what you’re competing with. If the sales team has information about what they consider a “qualified lead,” this is the place to include it.

Here are the key components that should be included in an effective gym sales plan:

1. Implement a Lead Management Process: Capturing and managing leads is the first step. Use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system to track interactions with potential members from initial contact to conversion.
2. Optimize Sales Funnel Stages: Map out the stages a potential member takes, from inquiry to sign up. You can even walk through the steps they’d take to understand their full journey. Identify any barriers they may face, then streamline the journey prospects can move smoothly through the sales funnel.
3. Train Your Sales Team: Equip your team with strong relationship-building and techniques to handle objections. Make sure your team asks the right questions and highlights the real value of membership.
4. Keep Membership Options Simple: Avoid overwhelming your prospects with too many membership choices. Simplicity helps prospects make quicker decisions and prevents analysis paralysis.
5. Build a Strong Follow-Up Strategy: Many memberships are won after the first club visit. Implement a follow-up system where your sales team reaches out to leads within 24 hours of their first visit.
6. Master Objection Handling and Closing: Train your team to address concerns, ensuring a smooth closing process that’s confident yet respectful, guiding the prospect to a decision without pushing too hard.

Most importantly, a sales team needs to define what “success” looks like. What are the specific key performance indicators (KPIs) that determine success? This looks different for every fitness business. These KPIs could be sales and marketing metrics including (but not limited to) social media followers, new leads, new members, referrals, and of course, more revenue generated.

Once your KPIs have been clearly established, you’ll also need to measure KPI performance. That means identifying the tools required to measure everything, particularly the underlying technology you’ll be using (we’ll get to that). Once you’ve done the considerable task of getting your sales and marketing foundation set up, marketing planning can truly begin.

By including these elements in your gym’s sales plan, you’ll have a structured process that effectively converts leads into paying members. Combine this with a smart marketing strategy to ensure no opportunity is wasted and your sales team can work efficiently.

People are bombarded with messages every day. From emails to phone calls, website banners, and even radio ads, consumers have learned to tune out things that aren’t interesting to them. So how do you reach the right prospects where they’re at?

With targeted marketing, of course. The real goal for a gym is community awareness demonstrating the value of a membership. To do that, meet your audience where they’re at.

First, set your goals. “Selling more memberships” is not a good goal. Go deeper than that and provide your team with more structure by setting a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. Know the deadline you’re working towards, the metrics you’re using to measure success, and the targets you need to hit.

For example, a SMART goal could be “increase memberships by 10% in the next three months.” With that goal, you give yourself a metric you can measure success against and a deadline to work towards. The more specific the goal criteria, the more clarity your sales team has.

Next, identify your target audience. Marketing tools now offer robust services to identify audiences, target specific customer types, and even isolate efforts to a specific region. So why not use them? Digital ad platforms, like Google Ads, allow you to isolate specific job titles or interests. Social media platforms allow you to geo-target marketing content to provide offers and incentives to potential leads within your gym’s community.

Then choose your tactics to action on. On average, it takes 8 touchpoints to convert a lead to a member. Which digital platforms will you use to convert members? Your website , social media, digital ads, and more are all excellent opportunities to connect with prospects online.

Local outreach efforts, like offering free fitness classes, can be a great way to show how your gym can help community members in their wellness journey. You could even partner with local fitness businesses to identify cross-promotional opportunities.

With various tactics at your disposal, you’ll be positioned to engage with a prospect in a meaningful way.

Take time to get to know customers through surveys or questionnaires and measure the data you have to identify a lead’s interests. What brought them to the gym in the first place? Are there any classes they signed up for? Were there particular emails they responded to?

This type of data will be essential to effectively communicating with a potential member — once you know a lead’s interests, you can tailor your communications to them. By appealing to their interests or goals, you can present offers like discounts and free trials to encourage conversion.

By truly understanding a lead’s interests and health goals, you can present them with solution-based materials that actually help them overcome challenges they’re trying to solve. Discounts could be used to reduce cost concerns. What if you knew a lead wanted to improve their mobility, strength, or cardio health? You could introduce them to yoga classes, physical trainers, or other programs to fit their specific needs.

With that undeniable level of high service and tailored offers, it helps convince a lead to take the leap and officially become a paying member.

To provide the type of service any gym strives for, you need more than just data. You need insights, recommendations, and quick, simple actions to keep your sales efforts moving.

That’s what technology like customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing automation tools can help with.

CRM and marketing tools are designed to collect and store customer data in a centralized location, tracking core data for leads and current members. That critical information is what unlocks all capabilities like customized communications, exclusive offers, and more.

Modern CRM and marketing technologies often have functionality, like targeted marketing, baked into the system, but more importantly, many of these technologies also include automation features to ensure correct actions are performed at precisely the right time. If that’s not enough, marketing automation can also identify qualified leads, and help a sales representative quickly follow-up.

With lead and customer data stored in one place, you have an extensive archive to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Customer data also helps guide your gym towards improvements and new services that help with customer engagement efforts and lead to better retention rates.

Creating a smart strategy to grow gym memberships is no small task. Although a comprehensive strategy requires an integrated plan of multiple components working together, options are available to make sure everything is seamlessly working together.

When you have the right tools as a part of the foundation of a marketing and sales strategy, like Club Automation, every process becomes very manageable. Our gym management software provides the tools you need to engage your members, streamline processes, and win over leads. Schedule a demo to learn how your gym can grow with Club Automation.