Sales Success: Overcome objections when selling personal training!

There is a saying in sales that every no gets you closer to a yes. But how can you turn those no's into an easy yes? The fitness industry has come along way in the last few years, we have gone away from the "old school" gyms and rusty weights that the public feared, to state of the art fitness facilities. During this time we have advanced our sales techniques tremendously as well. We now know that there are a specific series of steps necessary to guide people in their decision to buy our products. So what are these steps? How can you use them to build your business?

I call it leading the conversation, imagine now that you have already completed your free personal training session with the prospective client and have finished pitching your product to them.  If you are like me you will see that at this point you will generally run into an objection such as "I want to think about it" or "I don't have enough money". Since these are the two most common objections I will demonstrate how to easily over come them by leading the conversation. The way this begins is that you will need to ask them leading questions in such a way that they are forced to say yes. These questions are more of a statement than they are a question. Here are a some examples of leading questions:

1. You are interested in health and fitness right?
2. You already thought about it before you came in today, didn't you?
3. You can afford a few dollars each day to reach your health and fitness goals, cant you?

By structuring your questions with words at the beginning or end of the sentence like, right, didn't you, isn't it, etc, you cause the client to immediately agree with you and answer yes. If you just simply say are you interested in health and fitness, they have the option of saying no. The reason this is so important is that they are more likely to say yes to future questions later in the sales process, like your closing question. This process works even better if you are able to get them to say yes three times or more before you pitch or Re pitch you product.  Now that you are leading their thinking and you have them trained to say yes, you will switch gears to directly attack their objections. Here is how it works:

1. Repeat the objection back as a question
A. Just so its clear in my mind what is it that you need to think about?

2. Repeat there answer back to them
B. You think the product is too expensive.

3. Now you will directly challenge their thinking
C. The price of personal training is about the same cost as buying a cup of coffee each day, that's easily affordable isn't it?

4. At this point I will either ask a closing question, or I will offer a solution. This will depend on how they respond when you challenge their objection. A solution can come in the form of a discount, a smaller package or payment options. The next step is to ask the closing question.
D. Great lets get you started, or we do offer weekly payment plans here at the gym.

At this stage of the sales process information is the key to overcoming the objection. That is why we state the objections as a question and repeat it back to them. It forces them to give us extra information. Their first objection is usually a smoke screen covering up the real objection, and by getting more information we get the real objection and the information needed to effectively challenge it and close the sale. On average you will hear three objections before you close the sale, so don't ask the closing question to quickly go through each step repeating their objection back to them as many times as it takes until you feel that you have gotten the real objection. Once you are sure that you have the real objection attack it head on, I like to think of it as a negotiation process instead of trying to sell them. You have a product that they want, you are just trying to settle the terms of the deal. The final step is to ask a closing question, failing to ask for the sale is the number one reason people fail in sales. Come up with a couple lines that you are comfortable with, deploy them at the right time and you will amaze yourself with how easy the sales process will become.


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