This is significant for 2 reasons: 1. ACAC has an existing medical referral program.  The program is designed to be a gentle intro to exercise, something that my clients are past, for the most part.  But every interaction I have with healthcare providers can serve to strengthen referrals to that program or weaken them. If I communicate poorly or my clients have less than favorable outcomes, I could unwittingly sabotage the medical referral program.  2. ACAC’s medical referral program can likewise influence healthcare providers’ perception of me as a practitioner.    Therefore, it is important that we all practice consistent communication with medical providers, and that both the trainers who work in the program and I are competent at what we do.

If you want to increase medical referral at your club, you need to monitor interactions and communicationswith health care providers.  Be sure trainers and other professionals know how to effectively and appropriately communicate with the medical community so that your club consistently looks good and is well-thought-of.

If you want to learn more about making medical referral a success in your club, please join me in the MFA webinar on February 10: “The Right Prescription: 7 Tips for Success in Medical Referrals.” For more information, go to this link: http://www.medicalfitness.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=224

Until next time, best of luck and happy connecting!

Amid these great conversations, my friend Wendy tells me she just received a text message from a physician friend of hers.  This physician was attending a medical conference on the other side of the country. She was in a lecture where the presenter was imploring his physician audience to find reputable fitness programs and refer their patients into them! How refreshing!

My point is that we are making headway, even if you are not feeling it right now where you live.  But don’t give up!  Go to those physicians who are referring and strengthen your relationships with them.  If you have no physicians referring yet, go to physicians who are members of your facility and get to know them.  Do what it takes to make in-roads into your local medical community. Get there before your competition does. Consistency is key.  The message is getting out to physicians all over the country through forward-thinking physicians like Dr. Eddie Phillips and the physician lecturer that Wendy’s friend heard.  So get back out there, build some relationships, and let’s get these people moving in our facilities!

These member docs are all-important allies.  Building a relationship with them is relatively easy if they are big fans of your club, and they are full of insight into the politics, preferences and peculiarities of the local medical community.  They can point you in the direction of physicians who may want to join your cause and give you advice on how to market to them successfully.  If your member physicians are well-respected in the local medical community, they can provide influence toward other physicians who may not know your club or your reputation as well.

Having identified whom to approach first, you need to have a strong but simple story ready to tell.  This story needs to “solve” both the physician’s and the patients’ problems.  In my last post, I mentioned that physicians have neither the time nor the depth of knowledge to counsel a patient on starting an exercise program.  Be sure that is part of your program and let them know it!  Physicians may be concerned that patients will get to the club and not know what to do; they could injure themselves or exacerbate a medical condition.  If your program provides quality instruction with some hand-holding, be sure to tell them! 

Ultimately, you will want to leave that physician thinking that “writing” your program is a no-brainer: it’s a small commitment for the patient (translation: the physician doesn’t have to sell memberships), the patient will receive plenty of competent help and instruction (translation: she won’t be left alone to hurt herself), and there is a good chance the patient could lower her risk of further illness, or even come off of certain medications (translation: the physician looks like a hero for referring her to your program!)

Once you have the story ready to tell, and the physician offices lined up to visit, it’s show-time!  You need a charismatic, passionate person to go knock on office doors and tell your compelling story.  Physicians are very busy people, so it is important that the story is short and the salesperson is most respectful to the physician’s staff and patients in the waiting area.

Like other busy professionals, physicians will need to hear your message over and over to keep it fresh in their minds and keep the referrals coming.  Your challenge will be to find as many creative and fun ways to make that happen.  This may seem like a lot of work for one program.  It is.  But if you could add another 10, 20 or 30 memberships to your club each month, wouldn’t it be worth it?  Just think of how many more lives your club could touch!

Business experts will tell you that the best way to survive or even thrive in a recession is to look for a significant problem and solve it.  Somewhere in that problem, you are bound to find a lucrative opportunity.  In this recession, I submit that our opportunity is the increasing incident of lifestyle-related disease.

If you’re thinking, “it can’t be that easy,” you’re right; it’s not.  People who suffer from these lifestyle-related illnesses didn’t get where they are by loving exercise and healthy foods. In fact, many probably waited until their symptoms were unbearable to seek treatment. They are a very tough group to woo into healthy habits.

We do, however have a willing and powerful ally on our side if we can just connect with it: the medical community. You may have already attempted to connect and partner with limited results.  But we can’t stop there.  We have to determine the right messages to take to that community and then deliver them over and over and over again.

As with anything we sell, we must approach the would-be customer with their needs in mind.  If we go into the relationship focused solely on increasing membership, we will likely come out empty-handed. If, however, we go in with the mind-set of solving problems for the physicians, we will have a much better outcome. So what are their greatest challenges?

The first and most obvious is time.  Most physicians go into medicine with helping people in mind.  By the time they get out of medical school and residency, they are seeing as many people per hour as possible and writing myriad prescriptions to cure their ills.  There is very little time left (if any) to counsel these people on lifestyle. 

Another significant problem is knowledge of exercise and nutrition.  Physicians get precious little instruction on exercise and nutrition in medical school.  Unless they personally practice living healthfully (and many do not) they don’t know how to counsel a patient effectively on changing her lifestyle.

As  health club owners/ operators, we are perfectly positioned to solve both of these challenges.    We have both the time and the knowledge to take care of physicians’ patients and show them the way.  We can help those patients save hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars on prescription drugs and medical visits each year,  just by showing them the way and helping them develop healthful habits.

Job one will be to convince the medical community that we are ready–armed with not just the knowledge, but the soft-skills/ emotional intelligence/ empathy to take care of this special population. We have to show them that we are their partners in making people better.   In my next post, we’ll discuss how to reach out to physicians effectively, develop trust and collaboration,  and broaden your club’s welcome mat to the population that needs our help the most.

I continue to push the idea of reinventing oneself to survive in this challenging economic climate, and this is a big part of it. People are less willing to part with their money because they like a trainer’s arms, or they think the trainer might be fun to work with. Fitness professionals need to learn how to actually sell now. But how?

One of our newer trainers took me through a session today. She’s certified, even has a sports medicine background. All in all, she’s very knowledgeable. She asked me what kind of workout I wanted. I told her I wanted a good overall body workout. While I warmed up on the bike, she asked me about injuries and what kind of exercise I did currently. I told her. Then we started the program.

It was a sports-conditioning type program. I personally hate those type of workouts, but she didn’t know that. She told me (when I was dying from my third set of squat-thrusts) that she figured I must have been an athlete to be in this business. What? Why? I told her my background in Fitness came mostly from teaching Group Exercise (we called it Aerobics back then) and Personal Training. Baffled. At the end of the session, she stretched me, then shook my hand. What a missed opportunity!

As the director and I debriefed the session, he remarked that his newer trainers really struggle with this. They focus so hard on teaching exercise -it’s what we emphasize, after all- that they miss all of the opportunities to get to know the member that they would like to sell to. Then, at the end of the session with a very tired person they know little about, they might – just might, mention that they’re a trainer and would love to train them (for a fee.) Wow!

What if that trainer had asked me things like, “why is exercise important to you?” She would have learned about my family history of heart disease, my struggles with weight when I was younger, and my stress management now. What if she had said, “tell me about your job – what’s it like?” She would have learned that I sit a lot – too much. I drive, type and spend too much time on the phone. Or how about, “is there anything you want to be sure we include in this workout?” She would have learned that I really want to strengthen my shoulders and I’d like to firm-up my arms. She would have learned so much more about me that she could have started using in sales-related conversations for the rest of the session. Then, when she asked me to train with her, or better yet, recommended I train with her, I wouldn’t have been shocked. But she did none of that; she just shook my hand and assumed I wouldn’t be interested.

The director was disappointed in her, but I think she’s pretty typical. For years, we have not taught real sales to trainers. Our hiding it with smoke and mirrors hasn’t really helped them at all. Many don’t think the relationship thing is important. But it is. It’s huge!

I submit that we have to teach trainers to sell just like we had to teach them how to perform functional movement screens, postural analyses and bike tests. We need to systematically give them the skills to survive. These trainers need to learn how to ask good questions- really good questions like, “Tell me a little more about what you want to accomplish with your program.” “Tell me about what you do for a living.” “Tell me what you do for fun.” “Why is fitness important to you?” All of those questions open up a dialogue, helping the trainer to understand what motivated that human being to show up for the appointment, what motivated them to spend $1000 on a club membership, and what may motivate them to hire that trainer for many sessions to come. We have to teach it. We have to be systematic and we have to be deliberate. We have to move the word “sale” away from being a four-letter word!

For years, I thought I had a kind of split personality, or at least a split loyalty. On the one hand, I am passionate about growing personal training in all our clubs. On the other hand, I am a HUGE fan of our Physician’s Referred Exercise Program (PREP for short.) How could I reconcile the two? One is so clearly a profit center; the other a membership feeder that many trainers see as “competition” to their services. But today, I suddenly felt very differently.

This director wanted her team to give her their unique selling proposition: their “USP.” Most didn’t have one; they could speak only to personality traits and exercise preferences. But think about this for a minute: If Harvey Lauer says that 63% of the American population is considering exercise, knowing that it’s good for them, but for some reason unable to make it a habit, isn’t that the market we should be going for? In a down-economy, these are the people who need trainers’ skills the most. Wait: in a good economy, these are the people who need trainers’ skills the most. But many of our trainers want to work with only motivated people or athletes…

Do you feel the disconnect? in every industry, experts are suggesting that now is a great time for people to update or re-commit to education. Is it that time for your team? What could you do in-house for little money? Are there local health care profesionals that would enjoy the exposure in return for training your team? Have you had professionals eager to move up the ladder in what they charge, but not sure where to go next?

Now is the time to encourage education, train new skill sets, and help your team find their new, long-lasting clientele. This is a Darwin-like enviroment. Trainers must evolve or die.

Yesterday I found myself catching up with a former classmate that had become a successful financial advisor. She was telling me about how the recession had really affected her business, when she became curious about the business I was in. Surely I had experienced the same thing? When I told her that membership and sales remained very strong for our company, she seemed surprised. How did we do that? Surely club memberships were a luxury? I told her that we had committed to re-inventing ourselves. Our team had worked hard to help customers re-commit to the reasons they wanted to join and stay with our club. She then told me a wonderful story.

She said that she actually belongs to a club in Maryland, and that she had hired a personal trainer a few years ago. When the financial markets went south, she and her husband took a look at their expenses. What could be cut? One of her first thoughts was to cut the club membership and the trainer. But then she realized that in such a stressful time, she needed the support of that trainer and the upbeat environment of her club now more than ever. She needed to continue to be available both physically and emotionally for her kids. Now was no time to let go of her committment to health and wellness! What she did do, was switch from doing individual sessions to joining a small group with her same trainer. She said she absolutely loves it! She’s still getting great results, enjoys the time with the others in the group, feels she gets plenty of instruction and support, and pays only a fraction of what she used to. Translation: she ‘s getting incredible value from both her membership and her trainer!

I share this with you because I think it’s too easy to listen to the news and become pessimistic. Like my former classmate, you might think (at first blush) that we’re doomed in the club industry. But when you look a little deeper, as she did, you begin to realize that the demand is still there; our customers need us now more than ever. Many may not be as quick to understand that as my friend Betsy was, but that’s where we as managers come in. We have to help our trainers learn how to deliver that message to our customers on a consistent basis. Our trainers must remember that club members who do not currently pay for personal training are great prospects who just haven’t purchased training yet. We must encourage our trainers to re-invent themselves, dig deep and re-commit to the reason they got into this business in the first place. Their services must offer immense value to club members, regardless of their financial situation. Many of our club members are still going out to dinner, going to movies, taking short vacations, etc. It’s our job as managers to help trainers identify and improve upon the value of fee-based training, tweak our message and their service offerings, and lead the club’s customers to reconnect with the reason they joined in the first place. So re-commit yourself to success and help your fitness professionals re-invent themselves. It will re-invigorate your team and your customer-focused business!

But what kind of message would you be sending them?  The professionals that work for you paid good money for their education and experience.  Are you really going to tell your customers (albeit tacitly) that their services are worth less now?  Now, when they are more stressed, sleeping less, missing workouts and eating poorly, are you really going to tell your customers that your services are worth less?

Of course not!  Now is the time to look for opportunity!  If there were more millionaires per capita created in the Great Depression than in any other time in recent history, the odds are in your favor!  Start by considering what people want–or maybe even what they don’t want to lose – namely, their health, their peace of mind, and their ability to cope with stress.

Next, consider what you can offer that makes your service unique to the customer: maybe you offer creative packaging: 5-packs instead of 10-packs.   Maybe you offer small group training so that the customer can train one day a week in a group and another 1:1one on one.  Could you offer a combo pack of personal training and nutrition services or personal training and wellness coaching?  The possibilities are limited only by you and your team’s creativity.

Finally, be sure your team is prepared for the challenge of selling in this climate.  For more information, tune into my next post!