Afraid to call that client who is still paying for a membership, but hasn’t been to your fitness club in a LONG time? You shouldn’t be and here’s why…..
The term “Don’t wake the sleeping giant” is used by fitness clubs to describe what happens if you call that fitness club member who hasn’t been into the facility to use their membership for months and even years but continues to pay for their membership.
The idea is that you don’t want to call them and ‘awaken the sleeping giant’ because it will cause many to realize that they are still paying and not using and decide to cancel their membership. So by not calling, a fitness club will continue to collect money and not have to service that member that doesn’t realize or hasn’t taken the time to call in and cancel their membership.
This is exactly opposite to how we do things at Northwest Personal Training. We call all of our clients on a monthly basis to ensure they are utilizing our services and experiencing fabulous results. And yes, it does sometimes initiate someone canceling or freezing our services until timing is better for them. However, our mission statement and vision is very clear that we are in business to help people adopt a healthy and fit lifestyle and collecting money from members who are not utilizing our services goes against our basic company foundation.
In fact, we have actually put someone on freeze even though he kept telling us he was going to get in for his appointments but never did. So we called him and said “Look, you are so busy right now and we feel bad that we are collecting money from you and you are not utilizing our services. We have both really tried hard to come up with a solution to help you get in and make fitness a priority in your life, but for whatever reason, you can’t do that right now. We don’t want our business to be an additional stressor in your life so we’ll just keep calling you every few weeks or so to find out when you are ready to restart your program.” He was so impressed with this act that he said he would never leave us as a client.
At Northwest Personal Training, we are focused on a client actually utilizing their fitness membership and getting great results. So the few clients that we lose because we alert them to the fact that they are paying and not using is worth it to us so we can stay true to our vision and mission as a business.
So run a report (we use MindBody Online Software) and find out who hasn’t been in to your fitness club in awhile. Call them up and see if you can start helping them reach their goals! You will be surprised at how many clients are motivated to come back in just from receiving that one phone call from YOU!
Yours in health, fitness & business,
Sherri McMillan
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