1. Add Value Above & Beyond

Know who you are in competition with and what they offer to their clients. You don’t have to undercut their price; clients will often pay more for a premium service – which is something you could easily do.

Make sure that you regularly communicate with your entire client base, not just the ones you are seeing each week. Even if a client is not training with you right now, you can easily carry on your role of ‘education, motivation and support’ and they will soon come back to you. Examples could include a monthly news letter, a blog, and a weekly mail out of some great tips you found on YouTube.

Texting your clients a short message is also a great way to keep in touch. Research shows that 95% of SMS’ are opened within five seconds of being received – this is a great way to get your client’s attention as they may have hundreds of emails each day and yours might get left as they run out of time.

Show clients what they need to be doing, even when they are not with you. Give them access to their programme and therefore, even if they are not training with you, you will help them achieve their goals. This is always good for your business as a testimonial.

2. Ask A Client For A Testimonial

When you know a client is doing a really good job and they are getting great results from your programme, schedule an assessment. At the same time, ask your client to think of five friends that they would like to tell when they reach their target.

Perform the assessment and then when the client is delighted by their results (peak state) ask them to give you a short testimonial there and then. Write it down in front of them and ask them if their friends would be really proud of them or if they would like to ‘rub their achievements in their friends face’ (emotional charge is often more powerful when they know someone who would delight in their failings). Then get the names and email addresses of their friends and inform your client that you will email them with the testimonial and a short intro to your services.

3. Make It Easy For Your Clients To Be Able To Buy From You

Take a look at your present payment strategy – do you verbally tell clients how much a session costs (or via email). Then do they pay you whenever you remind them they are out of sessions or each time they come?

The challenge you may have with this is you will spend a lot of time writing down payments and keeping track of credits and then you spend the rest of your time chasing your clients to pay you. This is what I did for years and it was exhausting! I would be too busy to check each week and then forget from week to week. Next thing I knew it was a couple of months later and I was owed thousands of pounds.

Find a more scalable solution that helps you with this as cash flow is a key area of success for any business. Most businesses fail not for lack of a good idea but due to poor cash flow management. Setting up a direct debit for a fixed cost per sessions per month is the easiest solution, or use your phone to keep a note as you always have this at each session.

Being successful as a personal trainer is all about being able to relate to clients, communicating well, supporting clients without judgment and most importantly having the correct systems in place to make sure you manage your time, finances and services efficiently.

Rob Lander has been a personal trainer for the past two decades; building a 50-sessions per week PT business in Central London. He is a speaker for Fitness Professionals on his area of specialty, the business of personal training and is the founder of Fisikal.com an online business solution for personal trainers.