How Your Current Students Can Translate into Effective Referral Campaigns

By Pete Mills

The hunt for members, month after month can, at times, become monotonous. Occasionally we can forget to include the basic but key areas we should be consistently tapping into to produce the Sales result we crave.
While it is vital to ensure that marketing campaigns are sufficiently powerful to produce a high volume of enquiries, when you need that large injection of leads and ultimately Sales, maintaining an ongoing presence in the market place is just as important.
There are a number of ways to do this. Daily activity, to create consistent local awareness of your facility, ensures a constant flow of enquiries. This is vital to avoid or reduce those scary dips in Sales that we all experience throughout the year. This awareness can be achieved by tapping in to 5 key areas which can be found pretty much on your doorstep:

  • (Internal) Your members,
  • (Prospecting External) Your Ex-members
  • Local companies,
  • (Outreach) Local Community Network
  •  Residential

All of which must all be combined into each monthly plan you implement throughout the year.

All of the above are pretty standard, however it’s the consistency month after month which makes all the difference.

Take your members for example. You spend a lot of time with these people from the time they enquire and throughout the life of their membership. Why not encourage them to advertise the club for you? There are two ways of generating leads through your members:

1. Existing member referral campaigns and
2. Point of Sale referrals

Point of Sale referrals is a basic, but essential, part of generating good leads daily, and often, the part which is left out or forgotten. Sales people sometimes find it hard to do this, but could that be purely because of the way they are looking at the task they are faced with? Is it possible that, if they were to look at this task from a slightly different perspective, it could actually make it a lot easier and more enjoyable process?

Most people assume that in order to acquire ‘referral’ leads at the point of a sale they will have to ask the customer for them. Now this is done at a time when the customer has just parted with some money to join your club and so, quite rightly, you may feel slightly uncomfortable that now you’re going to ask them for something more! (Usually, names of people they think may want to join the club). Instead of directly appealing for names, phone numbers and addresses you could give them a gift instead. A gift is an enjoyable experience and establishes the foundations for a healthy rapport between student and teacher.

To get point of sale referrals without seeming like asking for too much is to offer the customer 5 VIP passes to the club. These passes allow their friends, family members or colleagues to come and enjoy the club with them (and as we know it is more fun and the customer will stay longer if they exercise with a friend). These passes are valid for the first 30 days of their membership and should have a dollar amount on it indicating the value incentive of the gift. Now, instead of giving the passes to the member there and then, you offer to distribute the passes for them. In this way, you ensure that those passes are not forgotten, left on the students desk at school or work, and you get a few high-quality leads that have a far higher chance of being converted than someone who calls you from a Yellow Page ad.

As a professional you would ask the customer to jot down on your referral sheet the names and contact details of the people they’d like to receive the passes. Now, as you go off to process your new member’s payment, you simply leave them to complete the referral sheet, letting your customer know, should any of their friends use the passes, like the club and decide to become a member, they themselves will receive a gift. You can help your customer to think of who they would like to nominate by narrowing down specific areas for them to consider, for example: – ‘most people check through their mobile phones’, or ‘you mentioned you had just joined a local dance club, how about someone from there?’, ‘what about your work colleagues?’. When your customer has completed the referral sheet, ask them to let their friends or colleagues know you will be calling to invite them down and activate their pass. This will make your call much easier.

Hopefully, by the time your new member walks away, you will have 5 good leads to follow up with. In a worst case scenario, you may only have 1. Based on only 10 sales per week, that gives you 40 extra good leads per month to follow up with and convert to sales.

Always keep the new members referral information on file. Let them know that if they have thought of only 1 person, or they would prefer to check with their friends first before they give you the names, they have 30 days to take advantage of this new member’s gift. Create a sense of urgency as well as the feeling that it is a privilege only for them as a new member. Always follow up with a call, or talk to your new members in the club and tie this in with the 30 day pass expiry date. Call them after 20 days to remind them they have 10 days left.

By this time they will be settled into the club and probably very happy to give you details of people they want to bring with them.