Do You Offer FREE PT Sessions?

Do you offer Free PT sessions?

Should you use free PT or complementary PT sessions to sell your service?

It’s a question that gets asked to us a lot. Should I use a complimentary session as part of my sales process? Are they effective? Are they potentially just a waste of time?

So, I want to give you a bit of a lowdown today on some rationale behind it and some ideas and why it might be a valuable thing to do or why not.

So first of all, what I want to do is give you my own personal experience. So, we were up with the build-out personal training business up to doing over two hundred hours of personal training every single week that was via forty-five-minute personal training sessions and with did that with pretty much eighty percent of all of our sessions done in a face-to-face sit-down consultation.

Why did I prefer sit-down face-to-face consultation?

Well, from my perspective I just felt like that gives me, gave me the best ability to connect with someone, to sit down with the person to person, to hear them, to understand them and then to take them through our whole sales process and if any of you don’t have a sales process in place, my recommendation is you do put in something in place.

So, I’d be able to take them through our whole process and then at the point in time, present them with some type of solution to help them out with what it is that they want to do. Be it body transformation, weight loss, gain muscle, and all the rest of it.

So that was about eighty percent of the circumstances and my thoughts were and this came early on. On the PT even before I started learning a bit about, you know, business development. But I was always a bit, sort of, anti, sort of, giving away a personal training session stuff. I felt like I was kind of giving away forty-five minutes of my time or an hour of my time. So that was where my rationale originally come from when I was very big on, you know, going, looking if I’m going, actually, turn up and train somebody. I’d prefer to physically, actually get compensated for it or get paid for it, hence the reason why I put that system into place.

Now having said that, that’s around about eighty percent of the circumstance for around about twenty percent of the time. I knew that there were certain clients who just, you know, really valued, giving this thing a go, having a trial-type session so we have that in place as well. I’m not sure but all of my thirteen personal trainers were fully prepared to be able to offer an introductory complimentary session to somebody to assist them in their decision-making process before someone made that decision, they can come and try it.

Now, if you’re currently offering an introductory complimentary session, I’m definitely not against it, but what I do say to you is you do need to have some sort of strategy behind it. So, if you’re just rocking up, hoping for the best, giving them this session and you know, just not, haven’t really got a process behind it, not even explaining to the people that this is part of the process sort of attempting to, you know, help me gain more clients. Then, you know, you’re really selling yourself short in terms of what you know what you can potentially do when you fit this business because, you know, without the strategy, without the process, then you’re just hoping for the best you’re hoping that someone, you know, has a go and likes it enough and they just, you know, want to reach out to you and say “Hey sign me up immediately”.

The same thing happens with triple packs. You know, we see it happening all around the country at the moment. We get to speak with thousands of personal trainers all around the country and you know, similar story where I get to chat with many of them where they tell me that you know, for the introductory kickstart packs, triple packs, all that sort of stuff that just doesn’t really have a system or process behind it and in many ways. They are just literally just hoping for the best and don’t really have a process behind it so you need to make sure that you do have a system or a process behind it.

On, back to the sit-down, face-to-face consultation, and why would you do it well, you know, from my perspective, I believe that people are, you know, they’ve taken time out of their busy schedule, to, first of all, contacts you or touch the face with you. If you’ve taken time, if they’ve taken out the time in their busy schedule to fill out your exercise screening questionnaire, your preliminary documents, all that sort of stuff, which would lead them to that sit-down, face-to-face conversation with you and they’ve actually physically turned up to your gym, your studio, your facility, the cafe, wherever it is you’re going to meet them.

They’ve voted with their feet. They’ve well invested already in this process and in my opinion, they’re pretty much, you know, ninety-five percent there that this thing’s going to go ahead. So, I would turn up to those meetings feeling very confident that it’s, you know, it’s not so much a matter of I’m hoping someone’s going to do something but alternatively, I’m pretty certain, they are going to do something I’m just not sure which program, which package, that they’re going to embark on and that’s what this sit-down conversation is about me to understand as much as I can understand about them. That’s part number one.

And part number two is for me to present them with some type of solution to the process or to what’s going on. The next part of course is to, you know, be able to effectively try and get some level of commitment, close the deal, get the direct debit forms signed and all the rest of it.

So, there you have it.