How's Your Back-End?
Back-end offers, regardless of what type of training business you run, are what makes the difference between marginal profits and truly staggering profits. Working your back-end is a snap. You simply make regularly scheduled offers to your client base.
Look, if you've come anywhere close to delivering what you promised to your clients, you've established a tremendous amount of trust and goodwill among them. All it takes to harvest the rewards of this goodwill is an offer from you.
Let me give you a quick example:
Say you sign up a client to train with you or your staff twice a week. Let's assume that you do assessments every eight weeks or so.
Well, when their assessment comes up, you have an offer ready regardless of the progress that they've made. If I were trying to sell our Weight Management program on the back end I might approach it like this:
"Ms. Jones, you've done a great job! You're bodyfat has dropped by 3%, you've lost X number of inches in your waist, Y number of inches in your hips, etc. Now if you really want to keep the results coming at this rapid pace we probably need to really focus on tightening up your nutrition. I would strongly suggest that we enroll you in our 16 week nutritional coaching program to continue to maximize your progress. Would you rather join the morning or the evening class?"
Simple enough. But what if Ms. Jones' results were less than desirable. We might use this approach:
"Ms. Jones, I can see that you're disappointed in your progress. I understand. Well I can attest to the fact that you're doing a great job each time you come to the gym. Your workouts are great, you train hard and I see you performing your cardiovascular work and flexibility work religiously. That really only leaves one variable...your nutrition. I know you said that you try to eat right but what I suggest that we do is to enroll you in our 16 week nutritional coaching program to ensure that you'll start getting the results that you're working so hard for. Would you rather join the morning or the evening class?"
I'm sure that you can say it more eloquently than that, but you get the picture.
One other way (there are many) that you can ensure back-end profits is to lock clients into annual contracts or at least 6 month contracts - then you've built in back-end sales from day one. FYI - over 80% of our clients are on 12 month contracts...So it can be done. I'll elaborate on this underutilized strategy in another post soon.
Remember - acquiring the client is the tough part. Columbia House has made tons of money with their "get ten CD's for a penny" offer because of the back-end. Virtually every informercial you see is based on that same premise. You just have to consistently create enticing back-end offers for your happy clients. You'll quickly see their lifetime value jump. Probably even double or more.
So when you're looking for ways to make more money - start with your existing clients. I might even suggest allocating up to 50% of your marketing budget on internal marketing. I promise, you'll be happy you did.
Before I sign off for today - I want to tell you about my business partner Nick Berry's new blog. I would never say to it his face (I'll delete from this blog ASAP so there is no public record too) - but Nick is probably the sharpest guy I've run across in the fitness industry when it comes to retail and financing. He's been able to stay behind the scenes for the most part, (except when I badgered him into writing a chapter for Fitness Riches) content to allow our company to be the sole beneficiary of his "smarts" - but no more. After some pretty consistent pestering from me he finally launched his blog this week. You can (and need to) check it out at:
http://nickberryonline.blogspot.com/
Talk to you later.
Look, if you've come anywhere close to delivering what you promised to your clients, you've established a tremendous amount of trust and goodwill among them. All it takes to harvest the rewards of this goodwill is an offer from you.
Let me give you a quick example:
Say you sign up a client to train with you or your staff twice a week. Let's assume that you do assessments every eight weeks or so.
Well, when their assessment comes up, you have an offer ready regardless of the progress that they've made. If I were trying to sell our Weight Management program on the back end I might approach it like this:
"Ms. Jones, you've done a great job! You're bodyfat has dropped by 3%, you've lost X number of inches in your waist, Y number of inches in your hips, etc. Now if you really want to keep the results coming at this rapid pace we probably need to really focus on tightening up your nutrition. I would strongly suggest that we enroll you in our 16 week nutritional coaching program to continue to maximize your progress. Would you rather join the morning or the evening class?"
Simple enough. But what if Ms. Jones' results were less than desirable. We might use this approach:
"Ms. Jones, I can see that you're disappointed in your progress. I understand. Well I can attest to the fact that you're doing a great job each time you come to the gym. Your workouts are great, you train hard and I see you performing your cardiovascular work and flexibility work religiously. That really only leaves one variable...your nutrition. I know you said that you try to eat right but what I suggest that we do is to enroll you in our 16 week nutritional coaching program to ensure that you'll start getting the results that you're working so hard for. Would you rather join the morning or the evening class?"
I'm sure that you can say it more eloquently than that, but you get the picture.
One other way (there are many) that you can ensure back-end profits is to lock clients into annual contracts or at least 6 month contracts - then you've built in back-end sales from day one. FYI - over 80% of our clients are on 12 month contracts...So it can be done. I'll elaborate on this underutilized strategy in another post soon.
Remember - acquiring the client is the tough part. Columbia House has made tons of money with their "get ten CD's for a penny" offer because of the back-end. Virtually every informercial you see is based on that same premise. You just have to consistently create enticing back-end offers for your happy clients. You'll quickly see their lifetime value jump. Probably even double or more.
So when you're looking for ways to make more money - start with your existing clients. I might even suggest allocating up to 50% of your marketing budget on internal marketing. I promise, you'll be happy you did.
Before I sign off for today - I want to tell you about my business partner Nick Berry's new blog. I would never say to it his face (I'll delete from this blog ASAP so there is no public record too) - but Nick is probably the sharpest guy I've run across in the fitness industry when it comes to retail and financing. He's been able to stay behind the scenes for the most part, (except when I badgered him into writing a chapter for Fitness Riches) content to allow our company to be the sole beneficiary of his "smarts" - but no more. After some pretty consistent pestering from me he finally launched his blog this week. You can (and need to) check it out at:
http://nickberryonline.blogspot.com/
Talk to you later.
posted by Pat Rigsby at 1:45 PM
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