The majority of health and fitness club sales revolve around memberships.

While there’s always an opportunity to upsell a current member on a new program or add-on, finding and converting prospects into new members is top priority for growing fitness clubs.

The sales funnel or sales process can vary based on individual clubs, however each process starts exactly the same—with prospecting.

In a broad sense, sales prospecting is the act of identifying and reaching out to qualified potential customers for a product or service. In the health and fitness world, prospects include anyone who may have a strong potential to join your club. The prospecting stage encompasses everything from exploring leads and referrals to researching prospects and reaching out to them for the first time. After that first point of contact, prospects are ideally ushered into the next part of the sales funnel and the prospecting portion of the sales process is complete.

Sales don’t happen overnight. Every closed sale must start somewhere, and unless you’re lucky enough to have someone reach out directly ready to buy, your sales will start with prospecting. Think of prospecting as an opportunity investment.

Prospecting is the lifeblood that keeps your sales team moving forward. Without prospecting, once your sales team exhausted its list of contacts, it’d be time to throw in the towel. With no one left to reach out to, your club membership would slowly dwindle until you could no longer afford to keep your doors open. Because fitness clubs need more and more members to stay successful and compete in the market, prospecting will always be the single most important mission to sales teams.

Prospecting isn’t an exact science. However, asking the right questions and knowing where to look can help make prospecting easier and more fruitful. Prospects can come from a million different sources. Some will cost your club money to obtain, while others you can get at almost no cost. When searching for prospects, it’s best to start with what you have. Use existing networks and contacts to multiply your sphere of influence. Every time you add someone new to your network, your prospecting potential grows exponentially. In addition to the individual, you gain access to a whole new set of contacts you can potentially tap into.

Here are some common places to find prospects:

• With Existing Members – Referrals are huge for prospecting. Give out guest passes to encourage members to bring friends to your club. Their friends will become your prospects. You can even give incentives or bonuses to members who successfully refer a new member to your club.

• With Former Members – One place you may not to think to look for prospects is with former members. Be sure to regularly check in with members who left your club. Maybe they left because their financial situation took a downturn but now it has improved. Or maybe they thought they could switch solely to at-home fitness but are realizing they miss the community at your club. Whatever their reason for leaving, they may be looking for an easy path back to your club. Your phone call could be that path.

• In Your Community – You’d be hard pressed to find a single person in a room of 10 who was completely satisfied with his or her overall health, wellness, and fitness. So, what does this mean for prospecting? It means that prospects are literally everywhere you turn. Tap into the communities you’re already a part of—whether that be parents and teachers at your kid’s school, your church, your family, or your neighborhood. You can take this one step further by prospecting at places and businesses you frequent. See if you doctor’s office, dentist’s office, dry cleaner, hair saloon, etc. would be willing to leave some free guest passes to your club on their front desk. Just make sure your contact information is included!

• Via Marketing Efforts – The opportunities for prospecting through marketing are vast. In the digital world, they include targeted advertising, social media ads and sponsored content, content marketing, and more. Event marketing is also a great way to uncover prospects. Attend a respected conference or sponsor an event where attendees are ideal prospects for your health club. Then, ramp up a strategy to stand out from the crowd, capture their attention, and get face time with them.

Once you’ve determined who your prospects are, it’s time to reach out to them. Give yourself a better chance for success by prioritizing positivity and preparedness. Here are three tips to level up your prospecting game

• Properly Prepare – Just like you wouldn’t attempt to take a test without studying or play in a big sports match without practicing, don’t enter a prospecting call without properly preparing. Enter the conversation with a framework for where you want the conversation to go; a club sales script can help with that. Become an expert on your market and your club, so you won’t be stumped by any questions they ask.

• Do Your Research – Make research a part of your pre-work. Find out as much information about your prospect as you can before you talk with him or her. The more you know about your prospect, the more individualized you can make the conversation. You’ll be able to speak directly to the pain points you know they’re hoping to solve and tell them how your club can help.

• Stay Organized – As your prospect list grows, it gets harder and harder to stay organized. Without a system and platform for lead management, it can be easy for prospects to fall through the cracks. Maybe that one prospect you forgot to call was ready to join and has now decided to go with a competitor. Or maybe you accidentally follow up with same prospect two days in a row, and now they’re annoyed and less likely to buy. A club management software can take the burden of organization from your plate, so you can focus on making connections with your prospects. With Club Automation’s member management platform, sales teams can add prospects directly to their member management database, then create a custom task-based sales process to funnel each prospect through the buying journey.

Ready to take your sales prospecting to the next level? Book a demo with Club Automation.