What kind of data should you be tracking, and what kind of information will ultimately help drive sales? Your data-capture method should ideally enable you to log everything you need to know to about each individual prospect so you can customise your approach to meet each person’s needs. So, in addition to basic data such as the prospect’s name and contact information, you should also find out details such as how they heard about you, the reason they are looking to join a gym, and which products/services are they interested in. All this information will help steer your interactions with the prospect, making them more effective. Carefully consider what kinds of information are going to help you and your team down the line, and then design your channels for data capture around this.

In order to deliver a consistently outstanding experience for new prospects, it’s important to have an effective customer relationship management (CRM) tool in place. Your CRM solution should integrate with other tools your club uses as touchpoints with new prospects, like your website and mobile app. Importantly, an effective CRM tool can record and organise these interactions and make automatic updates to your prospect database, so you know exactly where each prospect is in your sales process at all times.

For example, having an effective CRM tool for your club equips you to automatically record queries received through your website, creating a new entry for each query in your list of prospects and assigning some actions for you to complete in club, such as placing an introduction call to the prospect or make a booking for a club tour. The CRM system should also significantly reduce admin by automating a large portion of all your club’s communications and keeping a record of this against your prospect profiles. These records should also be easily measurable, and you should be able to accurately report on this data and to analyse it for strategic insight in the future.

In ClubWise, we refer to any prospect who does not have any future communication scheduled as a ‘prospect with no future date’. These should be kept to a minimum, and if possible, every single prospect on your system should have future communication set if they still have legitimate interest in joining. Conversely, if you’ve determined that they no longer have legitimate interest, they should be re-categorised to reflect this and ensure communication is appropriately stopped. Managing your prospects with no future date, to either schedule future contact or stop further communication, should ensure that you are focusing on the right prospects and that you are continuously moving forwards with the ones most likely to convert to a sale.

An important question for clubs to ask themselves is ‘How do we deliver effective prospect tours that will get our value proposition across to drive sales and hit targets?’ Although it may be tempting to adopt a formulaic approach to your club tours, essentially delivering the same rehearsed tour experience to all prospects, a more tailored approach to the prospect needs is more likely to result in a sale. By determining the exact products and services a prospect is particularly interested in early on, you should be able to steer your club tours and focus on your prospect’s interests. Personalising the tour experience can make the prospect feel more welcomed and valued, and when you combine this approach with creating a sense of community from the get-go, you can set your club up to retain members for longer as well.

In cases where the prospect does not have much sense of what they’re interested in, nurturing their interests is key. Tours for these kinds of personalities are more difficult to direct, and you’ll need to draw on your knowledge of your products and services, as well as your competitors’, to express your value proposition effectively. Judge the prospect’s reactions to this and use your best judgement to recommend the best option for them.