9 Proven Ways To Get Clients Off The Gym Floor

If you're looking for proven ways for you to clients off the gym floor, then this article will help you learn how to do just that, through these topics:

• How to do a Personal Training Consultation to Boost Sales
• How to start a Freelance PT Business with no money
• How to Become an Online Personal Trainer

Before jumping in, why not double your income by adding the Level 4 Nutrition Qualification to your arsenal as a Personal Trainer, allowing you to start earning from two different demographics?

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TIP 1: Set up a Health Check Desk

The first way how to get more personal training clients is to set up a health check desk in a highly visible area of the gym, whether that’s on the gym floor itself or in the reception area where every member has to walk past you. 

Health checks appeal to all demographics, whether it’s someone looking to put on muscle, lose weight or get fit. 

Everyone likes to know their blood pressure and body fat percentage. 

Set up your desk with a clear poster advertising your free health check or health MOT, so members walking past know exactly what it is you’re giving, like the one in the image below:

Set up a few spare seats excluding yours for clients to sit and for a small queue to form as people sit in pairs and some will wait to get themselves measured as this is something of value to them. 

Once you have set up your desk, ask members as they walk past if they would like to know their body fat percentage or blood pressure. 

The reason health checks work so well in converting people into personal training clients is that you can build rapport with them whilst they sit with you, and find out all about their fitness goals, but the best part is their results can be the driving force to them buying your services. 

People buy non-essential items through emotion, whether that’s driven via positive or negative emotion, and this ticks both boxes. The negative is that their result might not be what they wanted to hear, but the positive is how they could look and feel with your help. 

For example, if a member’s results, come back as them having a high body fat percentage and their goal is looking to lose 3 stone for a holiday, this is a prime time to tell them about how you can help them get their body fat percentage down through 1-2-1 one training ready for that holiday. 

You aim to try and price present to as many people as possible. 

Another bonus is that a health check only takes about 10 minutes of your time, thus you can do 5 or 6 of them in an hour.

Additionally, you can even ask them for their email address when they sit down and whether they mind receiving workout tips from you and start building a gym-based email list that you can market to outside of the gym, but we’ll come to that tip later in this article. 

TIP 2: Incentivise Other Staff members for Referrals

Before I jump to this point, If your gym does not have a receptionist or sales staff, skip to tip 3 as this will not be relevant for you. 

The easiest tip for getting more personal training clients in a gym is by incentivising other staff members to do the hard work for you.

If you work at a gym where there are receptionists or sales staff on-site, like at David Lloyds, Virgin Active or Nuffield Health -  this is guaranteed for clients.

There are two key roles within these types of gyms that can make your life super easy:

Receptionists get more interaction with members than any other role, whether they have to swipe people into the gym through to people, actively approach them at the desk to enquire about personal training:

Equally, sales staff are the first people prospective new gym members meet, build rapport with, get toured around by and hand money over to. 

These two roles get asked weekly about personal training and which trainer is best to go to. You need to ensure that the only name they give is yours.

These types of leads are the best you are going to get. They are super easy to convert into new paying clients as they are coming recommended by someone else, the receptionist or sales advisor. 

This is how you do it…..

Two main things make people refer to:

With this in mind, you must first incentivise them financially and it has to be worth their while. 

I used to give £40 cash if anyone signed up for a PT package, which is just 1 hour's worth of my time, and I ensured I paid them on time, every time.

Secondly, you need to go out of your way to be extra friendly to these staff members, whether you like them or not. 

Making sure to say hello to them every morning, taking time out to find out about their week, what’s going on in their life or just making them a cup of coffee. 

These are the easiest sales as a Trainer and take little to no effort for huge rewards.

I used to get 4 or 5 clients a month from other staff and converted the members almost every time.

Use the Tannoy to get PT clients off the gym floor

During peak hours in a gym, there can be up to 5-600 hundred people working out in a decent-sized gym. Why not reach every single member with just one sentence? 

Whether you want to promote getting a PT consultation or a special promotion that you’re running, the tannoy is the ultimate weapon. Just tell members what action you want them to take you to take. 

It goes something like this.

Good evening,

My names Luke, I am one of the personal trainers here at David Lloyds. I am running a special offer until the end of the month where you can get an extra FREE pt session per week for your first 4 weeks of training. If you would like more details come and ask for me at reception. Thanks”

If you’re nervous simply write out what you want to say and read from the script, before you know it, it will become second nature. Make sure to do an announcement every hour and half or so as members leave and new members come in. 

Use the Gym's New Member List

Every month there are new gym members, in the average 5,000 member-based gym, there are between 200-300 new gym members every single month.

Ask your general manager or sales manager if you can access the opted-in, new joiner list of members who have started at the gym from the previous month.

The best time to ask for this list is at the start of the month as most members join at the end of a month when promotions are finishing and they have likely had their pay day. 

Send them a friendly email, welcoming them to the gym and offer them something of value like a free class that they can attend, a fitness workshop that you’re running, a nutrition seminar, a health check or just an induction. This is you offering free value and showing your friendly personality.

“Hi John,

My names Luke and I’m one of the personal trainers at David Lloyds. I wanted to be the first one to welcome you and let you know I’m actually running a free kettlebell workshop in the gym at 9am and 6pm tomorrow, just for new members. It would be great to see you there, let me know if you want me to reserve you a spot.

Best Luke”

This is a great way of getting in front of hundreds of new gym members every single month that you can build rapport with and try to convert into a new paying client. Additionally, you can try and email market them with promotions later down the line. 

Roll-up Banners, Leaflets, Posters & Business Cards

This tip for getting personal trainer clients from the gym floor is the only one that requires you to put in some initial investment.

Having reactive marketing spread throughout the gym is a must. This includes banners, posters leaflets and business cards. You only need to get one client from this method to pay off the initial costs of setting these up.

Here are costs to give you an idea:

Basic Roll-up Banner – get a basic banner from just £40 from Display Wizard

A4 Posters – 15 for £21 from alocalprinter.co.uk

Leaflets – 4,000 for £21 from Bizay.co.uk

Business Cards – £17.50 for 250 from VistaPrint

For Posters, leaflets and roll-up banners, make sure you put an offer that you intend to run all year round as you don’t want to be forking out to replace the banner every time you change an offer.

Make sure to put a clear call to action, whether that’s someone to scan a code, call you,  text you or ask for you at reception.  

To create urgency, you can simply put the offer ends “at the end of the month”, because remember new members are joining all the time so it will be the first time, they see you in marketing, even if other members have seen it before and you will be surprised the amount of enquiries you get. 

Put your roll-up banner in an area every member walks past and put your posters on the gym floor, reception area and in the changing rooms. Also, put your leaflets in every locker and on every table surface, I even used to leaflet the cars in the car park. 

This reactive marketing is working for you when you’re not in the gym, on your lunch or when you’re on holiday.  

Like this article? Here are some ones recommended just for you:

• Make Money As A Personal Trainer
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Use Inductions to Get Recruit Clients from the Gym Floor

You might find inductions a chore, but actually, they are the way to get PT clients in the gym. 

Inductions are no longer compulsory for members to take, thus the members booking inductions are people who genuinely need advice and assistance.

If your gym allows you to, try and book group-based inductions so you can target more people at the same time. 

You can filter out those who will probably not buy from you by simply asking the group, “put your hand up have you ever had a personal trainer or thought of having one” during your initial briefing. 

Wait for the hands to go up and those people are who you’re going to target for personal training. 

When you perform your induction, spend extra time with these people, build that rapport, find out about their needs and fitness goals and leave 10-15 minutes spare at the end to price present to them.

Targeting Previous-Members

Using a similar approach to the new members, you can target previous members. 

Again, ask your general manager or sales manager for the previous member list of GDPR opted-in email addresses. 

What you’re going to offer them is to pay for their first month back at the gym. 

Even if the standard monthly gym price is £50 a month.  To get this offer though, they must buy at minimum of 16 sessions of personal training, which if you charge at £30 an hour, is £480, which leaves you with that is 430 pounds in pure profit, making it worthwhile. 

Additionally, your club manager will love you for this as gaining new members is what they are ultimately targeted on. 

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Would you like to learn more about Personal Training? These articles will help:

• Selling Your Services As A Personal Training
• Essential Personal Training Resources
• How To Stand Out As A Personal Trainer

Build a Gym Email List

Building a gym email base and email marketing to existing gym members is a must! 

There are several ways you can build your email database outside of the ways we have already discussed.

• You can run free short nutrition seminars on the gym floor on a particular aspect of nutrition, such as “how to meal plan” and the price for admission is their email address 
• You can run short practical workshops on a particular type of training like kettlebell training and again the price to come in is their email address. 
• Run a group gym challenge like “how many press-ups in a minute”, this would get you a tone of email addresses. 
• Run a prize draw, to win a free PT session, this alone could get you a couple of hundred email addresses. 

There are dozens of ways. 

Just ensure to ask them if it's ok if you email them marketing material in line with GDPR.

Once you have got a load of email addresses, to send emails, store data and allow people to unsubscribe you need an email marketing platform like Get Response or my personal favourite, Mail Chimp.

With Mail Chimp you can sign up to a free account, where you get your first 2,000 contacts and can send your first 10,000 emails for free.

Next, you can start emailing them tips, guides, workout advice and promotions. When it comes to getting personal training in a gym, nothing got me more clients month in and month out than email marketing as you get your PT business in front of thousands of people with just a few words. 

Make more money by only presenting your higher packages. 

Instead of solely focusing on how to get more personal training clients, you should also think about how you can get clients onto your higher-end packages.

The best way to do this is to only present your 2 and 3-session per week options. This way you can make more money from fewer people.

Think of it this way, let’s say you get 25 clients all on 1 session per week of £30 per session. That equals £3,000 a month. But look at the difference if we convert clients into an average of 2 sessions per week into the equation.

For example, if you only had 20 clients, so 5 fewer, and even reduced the cost of the session to £25 an hour from £30 an hour for them buying more sessions per week, that works out at £4,000 a month. 

To push people onto higher-end packages of 2 and 3 sessions per week, simply only present your higher-end packages and then use your lower-end package of 1 session per week if someone price objects. 

Another couple of little benefits of having fewer clients is that it’s easier to manage communication for fewer people and clients are more likely to hit goals on multiple sessions per week, thus boosting your client retention. 

Before You Go!

Before you go, why not make yourself stand out as a personal trainer and add OriGym's Master Sports Nutrition Course to your arsenal?

For more information, feel free to download our FREE course prospectus here to see our full range of course options.