Pat Necerato on Marketing Your Personal Training

Here's an interview I did with Pat Necerato on Marketing a Personal Training Business

CM: Hey, Pat, can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

PN: Basically, I teach personal training business owners how to get new clients by way of client attraction and also by converting them from just the personal training sales presentation, or I guess you could say from getting in front of them, to giving the sales presentation, and then getting them in to book for a regular session. That’s basically what I do.

CM: When you say “client attraction,” can you get a little more into that?

PN: Yeah, sure. Most personal trainers, the number one thing on their mind is “how do I get clients?” And what I do, is I teach them how to prospect and market to attract qualified prospects, I guess you could say. And then I teach them how - which is really attracting clients, getting them in front of them, and teaching them how to sell those clients, talk about the benefits, and get them to overcome procrastination to make a decision to buy that day from that trainer. That’s about as pointed as I can get with it.

CM: How would you define prospecting?

PN: A prospect is anyone out there that is considering - I guess you could say there’s a hot prospect and a cold prospect. A cold prospect is anybody out there that needs to get into shape, that needs someone to assist them to get into shape. A hot prospect is somebody that is - where they are actively seeking a personal trainer, somebody that’s had in the back of their mind, “I really need somebody to walk me through a program,” or “I really need somebody to start me on a program, or motivate me,” or “I’d love to have someone come to my house.” That’s a hot prospect.

CM: How would you suggest trainers get themselves in front of these prospects?

PN: Well, one of the things that is really important for a personal trainer is to focus on getting the prospect to find them, as opposed to them finding the prospect. How you do that really depends on what your situation is as a trainer. If you’re working in a health club, for instance, and you’re on staff at a club, chances are you’re going to have to focus on the membership base. So, you’re going to want to market and advertise within that membership base. And you’re going to also want to have a system where you can see members on a regular basis and present your services.

You have trainers on the other end of that, that are not at a health club, they have their own studio, or they do in-home training, or they do something in between. What they need to do is actively promote themselves via marketing, which could be newspaper ads, fliers, seminars, talks, internet marketing, (pay-per-click ads, for an example, or search terms out like when people are searching Google or Yahoo for a trainer, your name comes up first, that kind of thing).

CM: What are some of the best ways, involving fitness internet marketing, that you’ve found? It is actually the organic search engines, the pay-per-click, are there any kind of listings?

PN: Well, the best way for internet marketing is to not necessarily get on the internet and try to get people off the internet so much. That works. You’ll get a small percentage of clients and prospects that way. The best way is to use the internet as a way to get clients to respond, as opposed to marketing on the internet.

Let me explain that. For instance, to collect email addresses off line via promotions. Let’s say you’re a personal trainer, and you go out to a corporate area, or an area you can give a talk or a seminar on weight loss, to collect those email address, then to send those people an email and drive them to a web page which educates them on why they need a trainer and you get them to say, “Yeah, I’d love to come in for a free consultation, or a session, or I’d love to buy a package from you.”

The other way is by way of marketing ads or fliers, niche marketing ads and fliers, getting a bridal shop flier made up and keying in, targeting people that are getting ready to get married and you have the pre-wedding fitness program that you can deliver to them. So, you would make up a flier and you would send them to a pre-wedding website, so to speak.

Of course, you could take that same content and take it online. Go online and registering in the search engine you were just saying, and targeting those people. The real trick is to target people in the area where you live. You don’t want to target people in Alaska, if you’re training in Florida. That’s really the trick with that, is to get people from that area.

CM: So, how would you distribute the fliers?

PN: How would you distribute the fliers?

CM: Would you put them on people’s doors? Cars?

PN: It all depends. Again, the most important thing when you talk about flier distribution is to target your market. You really want to get a specific niche. So, let’s say you take the example of the wedding. Or, let’s say you take the example of, let’s say home programs, where you have a secret process you can offer somebody that works out at home that can double their results. So, you would make a flier that would key just to that. “Want to work out at home? Are you unsatisfied with your results? Would you like to double your results without spending more time and more money on equipment? Go to HomeProgramSuccess.com and get a free report on how to double your results.” That’s what at the top of my head, but that’s what the flier would say.

You would say to yourself, “Let me make a list of every single business and every single place that somebody that does a home program would visit. Where do people that work out at home go?” Well, they probably go, if you wanted to start at the broadest area, they all go food shopping. Write down the local food stores. They also, possibly, go to health food stores. Write that down. Then you would go down and probably wean all the way down to the hottest areas, such as sporting good stores, or equipment shops. Then, maybe, you would even go to that equipment shop and say, “Hey, let’s do a joint mailing to everybody that bought a home program, or a piece of home equipment from you over the past two years. Let’s work out a deal where I can send them a letter, then you can send them a letter. We can do a joint mailing.”

So, you really want to target it. You really want to target the advertising and the marketing materials to the market. Then you want to reach those people as effectively as possible by finding out where they are, or who else deals with them, so to speak.

CM: Nice. That’s good stuff. Let me ask you about the presentations you were talking about. How would a trainer go about getting himself booked to do presentations, and what are the best places for them to do that at?

PN: Just so I understand the question you’re asking. Where would a personal trainer do a sales presentation, or a seminar?

CM: Yeah.

PN: Well, that’s basically how I started out as a personal trainer. When I was 19 years old, I got myself involved in - I worked for a corporation in Princeton, NJ. They had a little corporate gym. I did work for the corporation. I was employed by the corporation to run their corporate gym. What I did was, I went in every morning and opened it up from 5 to 7 in the morning. We ended up getting five to ten people over that two hour period. What I did was, I ended up giving the same exercise advice to people every time somebody new came in.

So I said, “Once a month I’m going to have a little class on how to develop a workout for yourself and how to get good results.” I started getting five to ten people a month coming to this class, where I would just give them the demonstration I was giving a hundred times, and all the little key phrases and bits of motivation on how to get themselves the best chest workout, where to put your elbows, and all this little stuff.

So, that’s one way to do it. Go into a company or a corporation that has a gym, and really the key is to position yourself as an expert. You can’t just go in and say, “Hey, I’d love to talk to your people to teach them how to work out,” because they probably have people there that work in those gyms, or those corporations. But you go in and you talk to the person that’s running the corporate gym. You let them know what’s in it for them, that they’re going to increase membership base, they are going to increase retention, that people are going to be happier while working out, all this stuff. Make up a presentation. What do people want that work out in corporate gyms, or wherever you’re targeting? “How to get the best workout of your life, and still eat lunch on your lunch break.” Something like that. You go in, and give a 15-20 minute workshop.

The other thing is to do public seminars and to just rent a room, or even go to the library where they give you a free room, and just start doing a workshop, and start promoting it. If you have the money, place an ad in the newspaper. Market at the local health clubs if you have a way to do that, if they allow that. Just go out and promote yourself.

There’s a really good book out there called Speak and Grow Rich. I think it’s from - I can’t see it from here, who’s the author, but if you just type in Speak and Grow Rich, it’s a real popular book. It talks about how to set up these little public seminars. I would become a student of that if you enjoy speaking and you’re a personal trainer. It’s really a great way to build your clientele and to position yourself as an expert.

CM: Now should these seminars be informational based? Should we be teaching good quality information to people and really positioning yourself as the expert?

PN: Believe it or not, the content of the actual seminar is really least important. The most important is to get the people there. So - what I’m really going to get to - is the most important is the marketing aspect. You really want to - “how to exercise, how to get a good workout” is not what people want because they don’t like to work out. They don’t like to exercise and it’s not going to draw them in. But, “the secret to increasing your income,” or “the secret to making more sales on your next paycheck without seeing more clients,” wow. Now I’m going to pull sales people in for that. What’s the secret? It’s getting an exercise program, creating more time in your life, being more motivated, looking better, feeling better, and you can come up with a program and pull people in with that.

So, the content - any trainer can get up and talk about physical activity and exercise, fitness and all that. And that’s good, but you’ve got to make it appeal to people, and you’ve got to target that seminar and that message to a group of people that you’re going to be able to pull in.

CM: Let me ask you a question. Once you’ve got them in there, you’re giving the seminar, what’s the next step to, either getting emails, or getting people in to the gym to try one of your workouts? What’s the next step?

PN: Well, what you want to do is you have to be prepared for the seminar, obviously. And you have to give people an application and you have to give them a solution. And your whole entire seminar needs to be a sales presentation. It needs to, number one target a problem. Where’s the problem? Sales people want to sell more, but they don’t have time and they’re tired, they come home, they’ve starved themselves all day and they stuff their face at night, they just become more sluggish. That’s the problem. The other problem is, they know working out will help them, but they don’t have time to do it. Some of them don’t even have a lot of money to go out and work out. They don’t have a gym near their house.

So, you really want to develop a good sales presentation. Now, the solution. What is it? Well, the solution is exercise. The solution is getting someone to help you exercise, otherwise you’re going to be trying everything, a waste of time, and you’re going to burn out. Most people think you need to work out seven days a week. You don’t. I’m going to show you how to do it three days a week, 20 minutes a shot. At the end of the seminar, make an offer. And that offer should get those people in front of you one-on-one.

The offer should be something like this, specific to everybody at the seminar. “Typically I charge $80 a session. Everyone here in this seminar, if you sign up today with me for a free consultation, I will spend a half hour with you and you’ll leave that consultation with a workout you can do on your own, at the minimum. I’ll write it out for you. But you’ll also get an opportunity to workout with me at a discounted price three days a week. Whoever’s interested in it, fill out the form. Give me your name, your email address, and your telephone number, and I’ll call you.” And you have people fill out a form.

That’s an off the cuff offer, but you want to get everybody there who’s even remotely interested to fill out that form. Then you’ll have a list of people that you can call and set up appointments, give them your real sales presentation, the one-on-one sales presentation, they come in and you make the sale.

There’s other ways you can do it to. It depends really on what you’re doing as a trainer. Do you want to sell single sessions? Do you want to sell packages? Are you selling programming? Are you selling a membership to your studio? It all depends. You’ve got to cater to that.

CM: What about referral marketing?

PN: Referral marketing is, obviously, getting personal training referrals is a something yu want to do. You have to be skilled, to a certain extent, with referral marketing. What I mean by that is not skilled at anything but asking for referrals. That’s what you have to do. You have to know when to ask. There’s really about three or four different points in the relationship with your clients that you should ask that. The one time that you should ask everybody on your list for referrals, I don’t care if they’re your client or just on your marketing list, you want to ask them for referrals. The skill really is knowing how to ask.

You never want to say, “Hey, do you know anybody that wants to buy personal training?” You may get to that point with that client of yours that’s been a client for months and years and you’re just talk - you’re a psychologist so you can basically say whatever you want to him. But you really want to get people from finding out who needs personal training. It’s real simple. “Do you know anyone who needs something like this,” is an easy way to get a referral when you’re talking about fitness and personal training. And everybody knows people who need personal training. Not a lot of people know they want it, but they know who needs it. Then you give them a way to give that information.

Very important. If you’re asking someone for a referral and you ask them to write the name and number down, it works, but it’s a hard way to get referrals. The best way is to have a website. A referral website. What we do with our product, our instant personal training client attraction program, is we have a referral marketing system which has a “help a friend” website. And what it does is, we teach our trainers - it’s an automated program so they really don’t have to do anything. They just send the link to their clients, or their prospects, and it says, “Hey, do you want to be a hero? Send your friend an instant free personal training consultation. Go to our www.blahblahblah/help a friend.” They go there and it says, “Send your friend an instant free personal training consultation. If they ever decide to become a client, you get a free tee-shirt, or a free session, or $10 off, or whatever.” And they just put their friend’s name and email in. That friend gets an email that says something like, “Hey, John. Pat’s, a brand new client with us and he had an opportunity to invite one good friend down for a free consultation and he thought of you. How does it sound? Pretty good? Great! Click here to request your free consultation.”

And that just works phenomenal. Because the whole entire element is born of interaction that scares people. “Am I going to expose my friend? Are they going to be mad if I give their name? Are they going to be mad if I give their phone number?” It eliminates all that, so it really increases a lot of activity.

CM: I’ve had good luck sending out a newsletter to clients and reminding them about referral and referral incentives and asking them to pass the newsletter on to their friends, sort of a vital marketing, if you will.

PN: That works great too. We have something kind of like that. We have a newsletter too and we send that newsletter to - our trainers send that to clients and it has a link there to send them to the website, which is almost the same concept, so I can see that working really well.

CM: Are there any other kinds of marketing that work really well for you, Pat, or that you recommend your trainers use?

PN: Yeah. Actually, we have a website, go to our website gettrainingclients.com/tellseminar5.html, we have over 5 or 6 hours of personal trainer marketing audios, for free, that people can download. One of them is 75 different marketing methods for personal trainers, where in the whole audio, an hour, where I go through 75 different ways they can attract personal training clients.

So there’s a lot, a lot of different things people can do. The core of it all is not so much of what to do, it’s having a system for everything that you do. Having a system for fliers. Having a system for lead boxes. Having a system for placing ads in the newspaper. Having a system for seminars. Having a system for pay-per-click advertising. Having a system for joint ventures and network marketing. So all of those are different things you can do.

What most trainers do, they’ll go out, they’ll do a marketing program, they’ll get a couple of clients and now they’re training those clients, and their marketing falls to the wayside. Then those clients stop renewing, then all they do is market again, and it’s a vicious circle. When you have a system, you have systems in place, then none of the points are spent without you doing anything.

CM: So, how do you suggest trainers systemize something once they’ve used something that works well? Just keep on doing it?

PN: Well, yeah, the thing is, you have said in the beginning before we even replied, that one of the important things for trainers is setting goals. Goal setting is very important when it comes to success in life. Obviously, we can all talk about focusing on our main goal, having smaller goals that lead to the main goal.

The most important goal in my opinion are daily goals. That Day-Timer that’s in front of you, okay? What is your list of to-do items today? Do you have a list of to-do items? And is that list of to-do items something that you just did today, or is it something that’s been in place that’s built up over the past month? Hopefully, it’s built up over the past month. That means you’re planning ahead.

So what you need to do, is you say to yourself, “I’m going to do fliers.” You don’t say, “Well, I’ve got to make a flier. I’m going to go print it out, and I’m going to go put them out today.” That’s not doing fliers; that’s whimsically doing fliers. If you’re going to do fliers, you have your list of places you’re going to hit, you have your script (what you’re going to say when you walk in), and you have your follow up (I’m going to go check on these fliers every two weeks). Then you open your book, and you write down on, let’s say, every other Monday you’re going to do fliers at 3:00. You write that down, “3:00 on Monday.” You turn two weeks ahead and you write down “3:00 Monday, fliers.” Now, guess what? You don’t book anybody in those slots. You don’t take time out for yourself during those times. Those are the solid, to-do items for you every two weeks. Then you do the same thing with your other marketing. Now you have a system in place. You know that every two weeks, on Monday, at 3:00, you’re out doing fliers for an hour.

Eventually, what happens is, you’ve got too many clients and you can’t do fliers anymore. So what do you do? You go hire somebody and you say, “Hey, your job is every Monday to do fliers.” Now you have that system in place, so you don’t have to worry about it. But they say, “But what do I say?” “Well, here you go, here’s the scripts that I use.” “But what do I leave?” “Well, here’s the fliers that I use.” There’s everything in place, so it’s building systems. It’s not shooting from the hip.

Unfortunately a lot of trainers, because they don’t like to market, they don’t like sales, they shy away from all this stuff. But if they would focus on it just for a little while, then they wouldn’t have to do it too much, and after a while they won’t have to do it at all because it will be on auto pilot.

CM: Yeah, I find marketing to actually be so, so important when it comes to running a successful training business. It doesn’t really matter how many certifications a trainer has, or how good looking they are, or how good a trainer they are. If they can’t get people in front of them, to sell to and train, they are not going to succeed, and marketing just really runs that engine.

PN: That’s so true.

CM: You talked about - with the systemizing the different processes - I find a lot of trainers are stuck working in their business and not on their business. They’re stuck just training their clients and they’re not thinking about all these other little pieces that put everything together.

PN: So true. What a trainer must remember - I should say, why they should remember what you just said is because they have to understand that there’s only a certain amount of time in the day. They are not going to be able to train more people than there is time. They just can’t. So they have to build their business and put themselves in a place to multiply themselves without trying to multiply time. Whether that’s hiring other trainers, or creating products to sell to trainers, or creating products to sell to people, he has to think of that. If you’re stuck working in your business, you’re never going to be able to create those things and be able to create those business building systems.

CM: I agree - completely agree with you. Let me switch over the subject to sales. How important is it to be a good salesman?

PN: Well, I would say, being a good salesman is probably just as important as marketing, because one can not live without the other. I shouldn’t say that. Marketing is probably a little more important. If you’re a good looking guy or girl, and you know how to talk to people, and you have not even the slightest ability how to sell. Chances are, if you have a good marketing system, you’re going to get people in front of you. You’re going to miss a lot of sales, but some people are just going to buy because they like you.

So, marketing is probably a little more important, but selling is second to marketing. The reason is because there is nothing more frustrating than getting somebody that you know is interested, that you know needs your product, that you know needs to buy personal training, that they are ready to buy it, but you just can’t get them to say “yes.” They just say, “I need to think about it,” or they give you all the typical objections. Selling is very important and the key to selling is to have a sales presentation, and be well rehearsed and scripted in that presentation.

CM: So let me ask you a question. If you were to take a guy, a brand new personal trainer, and spend 5 or 10 minutes teaching him as much as you could about sales, what would tell him - and regarding the sales presentation?

PN: The first lesson I would tell him would be the most important lesson, and that is every single prospect, every single potential client that sits in front of you is a procrastinator. They are going to justify and rationalize and convince themselves - regardless of how much they know they need to buy today - that they need to think about it, and that there’s other reasons that they should not buy today. That’s the most important lesson any personal trainer can learn from the sales perspective is that every single person they look at is uncomfortable with buying and making a decision today. Even if they walk in ready to buy, they are still looking for a reason not to. Every single one of them.

CM: So, with that information, what can a trainer do?

PN: What a trainer needs to do, is they need to be able to say what I just said to the prospect. That’s the way that you overcome procrastination. What I mean by that is, you need to get the prospect in front of you. You need to build a rapport with that prospect, that way, within the next 5 or 10 minutes of you talking with them, you can sit them down and say “You know what, Mary, you know what, John? I know that this is something you really want to do. I know you want to get yourself in shape. And I know you want to lose 10 pounds in the next 5 weeks like you just told me. However, there is one problem. And that problem is that when it comes down for you to make a decision to do this, you’re going to say to yourself ‘I want to think about this. I want to make sure all the lights are on green before I make the commitment. I want to make sure that everything is perfect.’ And I have to tell you Mary, that before I can even help you - before I can even explain how I can help you - you need to be ready to make that commitment. You need to be beyond any type of procrastination. Do you think you’re at that point right now? If you can say to yourself ‘Yes, I’m at that point,’ then I know that I can help you.” That’s they way a trainer needs to talk to a client if they to sell. The ones that talk to them that way are going to sell 7 out of 10 people that they talk to - that day.

CM: Nice. That’s really good stuff. How should a trainer go about - you said scripting a presentation, having a well thought out and scripted presentation. Can you tell us a little more about that?

PN: Yeah, sure. I have a script that we sell, UltimatePersonalTrainingSalesTool.com. We have this whole selling process that trainers can use. It’s basically like this. Before you can talk the way I just gave you that little snippet, you need to gather information from the prospect.

You need to, first off, spend at least 5 or 10 minutes with a prospect before you even show them your services, explain to them even what you do, or even show them your facility. You need to say to that prospect when they sit in front of you and say, “Hi, can I have some information about you?” Or, “Hi, I’m interested in possibly joining your studio,” or “I’m interested in getting a personal training session,” or “I want a free consultation,” or whatever.

You have to say to them, “No problem. Fill out this form.” And that form that you give them should gather all the information about them that you can: their needs, how old they are, where they’ve worked out before, what their goals are. Then you need to sit down with them and go through it.

They say to you, “Wait a minute. Why are you sitting down me, I just want prices.”

You say, “Mary listen. The only way I’m going to be able to help you, is if I find out exactly what you need and what you’re looking for. This little interview, Mary, is going to give you a good indication if this facility and my services are going to be right for you and if your goals are going to be right for me. If we go through this, at the end you say to me, ‘Yeah, I think we can work together,’ then we’ll go through the prices packages that we offer. But first I just need to spend about 5 or 10 minutes with you and ask you some questions.” And you say that in the beginning. You take control and then you start asking your questions. “What is your most important goal, Mary? Why is it important to you? What will be different in your life when you achieve it? How long have you been thinking about it? Why have you been putting it off? What’s different now?”

You say all these questions and you get them to really overcome their own procrastination, because they’re going to tell you, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about for six months.”

“What’s been preventing you?”

“Time and money.”

“Well, what’s different now?”

“I have the time and I have the money.”

“Okay, great, Mary. The reason I’m asking you is because everybody that wants to get in shape tells themselves they’ll do it, and they get more money and they get more time. But guess what? There was never a good time and there was never enough money. What comes down to is overcoming procrastination and making the commitment. Do you consider yourself beyond that point of procrastination?”

“Well, yeah, I do.”

“Great, Mary, because that’s the only way I’ll be able to help you today is if you’re ready to make the commitment. You may not want to commit with me, Mary, but you need to make the commitment, regardless if it’s me or somebody else. With that said, let me explain to you how I can help you.”

Now all the excuses are gone and it’s only 5 or 10 minutes. Now they’re gone, they’re eliminated, they’re crushed and I can go and I can get that deal today. I don’t wait until they check with everybody, talk to their husband, check their bank account. They know all that stuff already. They know what their husband’s going to say, and so forth.

CM: That’s good stuff. Where would you take it from there?

PN: From that point I would take it to either showing my facility, or if I’m not at my facility I would explain to them my program and what I do.

For instance, I’d say, “Okay, Mary. With that said, let me explain to you what I do.”

Let’s say I’m sitting in her kitchen. I would pull out a piece of paper and a pen and I’d start to educate them really quickly on fitness. See, now for me personally, I would say - when I used to be a personal trainer, when I was actively training people, I used to train in high-intensity workouts. Even if you were a 50 year old woman, I would train you high-intensity for you. I wouldn’t wrap your knees and make you squat, but I would give you - my niche was 15-20 minute workouts. So, what I did was I sat there and said, “Mary, before I show you the equipment, let me explain to you my philosophy of working out.” Then I’d pull out a piece of paper and I’d explain to her why most people over-train, and why you really only need 20 minutes 4 times a week.

Then I would say to her, “Show me where we’re going to be working out. Let’s go down to your basement.”

We’d go down to her basement and she’d show me her equipment. I’d say, “See, Mary, let me just sit down here.” I’d put her through a couple movements, maybe a chest fly or some curls or something. And I’d say, “Oh, look, see how you’re doing this wrong? I can show you how to do that.” Get her into it, you know? Then, I’d say to her, “Did I answer all your questions? Do you have an idea of how we would work out together?”

“Yeah, Pat.”

“Good. Well,” this is what I say, “Mary, I don’t want you to commit to a big package. I think you start out with a 10 session package. That will give us 3 times a week over the next 3 weeks, and then from there, if you still want to continue, we can upgrade to our 40 session package and I’ll apply the money to that. But before we even talk about prices, Mary, is there anything that would prevent you from signing up with me as your trainer? Other than money, would there be anything stopping you?”

“Well, no, Pat. Nothing would stop me. How much do you cost?”

“Great, well I’m going to go through the packages with you. Let’s go back up to your kitchen table and sit down. Before we go up there, Mary, by the way, if you do decide to get started with me today, how would you pay for that? Would you use a check or would you use a credit card?”

“I would give you a credit card.”

“Okay, great.”

Walk upstairs, sit down, pull out my paper and pen again and I would show her 3 different packages. I would put the packages that was just explained in the middle.

I’d show the packages then say, “Now, Mary, which one of these is best for you? Package A, Package B, or is Package C better?”

“Well, Pat, I’d probably want to start with Package B like you recommended.”

“Great, Mary,” shaking her hand, “welcome aboard. Just do me a favor. Here’s my contract. Fill this out real quick. Here’s our agreement,” or whatever you do. “As you’re doing that, Mary, I’m going to run out to the car and get you a receipt. You said you’re paying with a credit card?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.” She’s getting out the card, I’m going to the car.

I come back in, sit down with her. “Hey, Mary, here’s your receipt. And by the way, Mary, as you’re filling that out let me ask you this: you work right?”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anyone at your work you think could use something like this too?”

“Oh, yeah, I can think of a couple people.”

“Great. Listen, I’m actually a very busy person Mary, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to call your friends or the people that I’m about to present to you here, but if you just put down their name and their email right here on this piece of paper, I’ll send them a free consultation with me, compliments of you. Again, if you put their number down I may be able to give them a call, but like I said, I’m very busy and it’s much easier for me just to send them an email. Plus, for you it’s much better so they don’t get a call from me and they think you’re trying to sic your trainer on them.”

“Oh, yeah, no problem.”

“Here you can fill that out too. I’ll be right back, Mary, I’m going to run out to my car again.”

Now I’m leaving her in there with everything, filling out all that stuff until I come back in. When I come back in, 9 times out of 10 there’s 2 names or 3 names on the referral sheet, the contract’s filled out, the credit card slip is filled out, and I’m done. Now I’m post-closing. Now I’m making her feel great and I’m getting her excited, looking forward to the workout.

CM: Quick question. Why do you run out to the car?

PN: I run out to the car because it gives them an opportunity to fill out the referral form, that’s number one. Number two, it breaks the tenseness of - that sales tenseness that’s sitting there when you’re filling out the contract and all that. It almost gives them a feeling of “Okay, I’ve done it. I’m filling out the contract.” It’s not a necessary thing, but it’s something that I always used to do because my real goal is to get them to fill out the contract quickly, smoothly, and effectively without asking a lot of questions, without stopping.

By me being gone, I’m out of their mind and they’re also filling out the referral sheet. With me sitting there, they’re not going to fill the referral sheet out. They are going to say, “I can’t think of anyone right now, can I give this back to you?” Most trainers are like, “Yeah, all right, no problem. Give it back to me next time I come.” I want it that day because I want to email those people that day because that’s when Mary’s calling everyone saying, “You’ll never believe what I just did!” So you want to get them that day.

CM: That is great stuff and it sounds like you just flowed through that presentation gracefully, Pat.

PN: It is something that I have literally done thousands of times. I haven’t done it in years, but it’s something I’ve done thousands of times, saying the same thing every time, regardless of who you are, saying the same thing.

CM: That is awesome, Pat. We really appreciate your time today. How can trainers get a hold of you, find your website, your products, that stuff?

PN: I appreciate that. We really have two products. We have GetTrainingClients.com, which is a fully automated marketing system, kind of like everything I was talking about done for the trainer at a really, really affordable price. We also have the sales process that I kind of went through at UltimateTrainingSalesTool.com. Of course, people can call me anytime at toll free (866) 468-2832.

CM: Awesome.

This has been a personal training marketing interview