Why Is Prospect Management So Important?
Back in the 1950’s, the average customer needed to come into contact with your brand or product 5 times before they were likely to buy. These kind of interactions with your customer are known as “hits”.
These days, it’s as high as 12 hits before a customer will consider purchasing what you have to offer.
With so many options available to the modern consumer, customers are becoming harder and harder to sell to, and when you’re in the fitness business, with so many options for how members can improve their health and lifestyle, customers need even more convincing.
You can see now why it’s more important than ever to stay in a prospect’s field of view. You need to be in their attention more than ever.
Prospect management allows you to keep a record of anyone who’s ever showed an interest in your business and have the ability to get in touch with them when you need, to keep offering them the small hits, which will eventually cause them to convert to a paying member.
If you don’t keep an open channel of communication with your prospects, then you simply leave it up to random chance that they will stumble upon you again and eventually form an interest in your health club or gym.
Prospect management is all about removing that randomness from the equation.
It’s about making sure that you can continue to get in touch with potentially interested prospects and turn them into paying members.
How Does Prospect Management Work?
Prospect management is the method that you can go about sorting and storing individuals who have showed an interest in your business. There are 3 key things that any prospect management system needs to achieve if it’s going to help you grow your fitness business:
1. You need to have a way to reliably contact your prospect
2. You need to be able to categorise prospects based on levels of interest
3. You need to be able to discover the perfect proposition for your prospect
In order to achieve this, you’re going to need a database that allows you to store, sort and contact prospects using their contact information. To start, you’ll some basic details about your prospect, which would include their name, email address and a mobile number if possible.
As long as you have this information, you’ll then be able to regularly send marketing emails or SMS messages to update prospects with news, tips, hints and promotions for your gym.
And then finally, your prospect management system should allow you to keep track of how prospects are reacting to your communications, so you can the categorise them based on their interests and therefore, better sell to them.
How A Prospect Management System WILL Grow Your Fitness Business
Any good prospect management system will give you information and details for things such as open rates and click rates from your communications. That way you can keep track on not only what communications you’re sending to your prospects, but how interested they are in what you’re sending.
For example, imagine you send out an email for a free trial and only 10% of your prospects open it and 1% click on links within the email to sign up.
Instead of taking random guesses on what promotions are working, you have actual data on how many of your prospects are interested in this kind of promotion. And although that particular promotion wasn’t especially popular, you don’t have to scrap it completely. You can take those 10% who were interested and categorise them as “customers interested in free trials”.
In future, you now know to send this group free trial promotions, whilst keeping the rest of the prospects away from emails that don’t interest them and they will simply ignore.
That’s the power of a prospect management system and how it works. From one database, you can build a list of prospects and try out different communications on them, and change your approach based on how your customers react in real time.
This is the heart of why a prospect management system is so powerful for growing your fitness business.
Can I Use Social Media For Prospect Management?
This is a very interesting grey area and we should probably cover it quickly here. In short, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good form of prospect management.
While social media is a great way for contacting your members and even storing a list of contacts if they follow your page, it has some big downfalls, especially when you view it through our 3 rules of what a prospect management system needs to be able to do.
Rule 1: You need to have a way to reliably contact your prospect.
The Problem: Social media is a great way to tell the world what’s on your mind, but that’s exactly the problem, you can tell the world, not individuals. It’s a scatter gun approach and because of that, you can never be sure if prospects are reliably seeing what you’re posting, because you’re always at the mercy of the social media platform’s algorithm not showing you up on their feed.
Rule 2: You need to be able to categorise prospects based on level of interest.
The Problem: No social media platform has this functionality. Your prospects are either followers or not, there’s no way to categorise them in any way beyond this.
Rule 3: You need to discover the perfect proposition for your prospect.
The Problem: You can always try different promos and propositions, but they will always be en masse to everyone, since you have no way of categorising and contacting your prospects in isolated groups. And of course, you are also unable to see who has actually seen your posts, so you can never be sure if a promo simply isn’t landing with your prospects, or if they haven’t seen it at all
While social media is often talked about as the future of marketing, emails still lead the race in terms of customer engagement, so they’re your best bet to securing prospects and potential members.
But of course, you should never turn away the chance to get in touch with a prospect, so having a strong social media is a good thing for your business and prospect management as a whole, since you can always move potential customers off your social media feeds to your true prospect management system. We’ve even got 11 great ways to drastically improve and grow your fitness business social media, which you can download here.
How Can I Get A Prospect Management Service For My Fitness Business?
At Ashbourne, we’ve custom built and designed our own Lead Prospect Management modules that have been created with one purpose in mind: To help clubs sign-up more new members.
As we’ve seen throughout this article, the power of an effective prospect management system cannot be underestimated. We understand the core power of what your prospect management system could offer your fitness business and our own system is designed to harness that potential.
Our Lead Management module gives you the platform you need to ensure that you’re continually able to generate new leads. We also build customised landing pages that allow you to engage and capture your potential customers’ information, so we can help grow your prospect list quickly and give you prospects to convert right away.
If you’re interested in growing your fitness business and reaching more customers with powerful prospect management tools, then contact one of our team and they’ll be happy to walk you through all of our prospect management services, to help you grow your health club membership today!
