A Dutch gym sells more by spotting buying signals in its members' behaviour

Coaches train members to reach results, but coaching and selling are different specialities, and someone who can do both is hard to find. A gym is still a business that has to earn its money, so selling the paid services is part of keeping it running, yet few gyms can pay for a salesperson at the desk. Selling well means knowing what members need, but with a thousand and more members, nobody can hold that in their head.

At this gym in the Netherlands, personal training and nutrition were sold over the phone. When quiet members answered check-ins, the team replied one by one, many with a polite offer to help if something came up. Staff spent many hours on the floor, so there was little time and focus to spot buying possibilities. Members were drawn to the free help, so the team asked itself how to send them on to the paid ones.

The audit showed that the check-in replies held more demand than the team expected. Of the members in the sample, 41% mentioned something personal training or nutrition could help with: an operation they were recovering from, a half marathon, a pregnancy, or a training schedule. Most of them did not ask for help.

For an operator with a thousand and more members, knowing who needs what is hard when people describe a problem and never ask.

A coach can only help a person well once they understand that person, and that requires having all the available information about them on hand. That's exactly the reason why our platform builds a personal profile of each member from everything the gym already knows about them. Think about that as a learning process. For this gym, we connected to Virtuagym and WhatsApp, so for each member it learns their goals, what they bought, how often they came, how often they cancelled, whether they finished onboarding, and how far they got toward their goal over the last six months. Remembering everything about each of several thousands of members is not feasible, so the platform does that work on the coach's behalf and suggests the service that fits the member, which leaves the coach to handle the human contact with all the context in front of them.

We built the platform around signal based selling, so it does not push a service at every member but waits for one to show, in their own words, that they need it. For this gym the signals are the goal the member names, a pain or an injury, the reason behind training, a question that shows a gap in their knowledge, an event with a deadline they are training for, and how they want to be kept on track. For each signal the platform finds, it maps the service the gym offers that fits that member's problem best, and it writes out the reasoning in plain words, so the coach who picks it up knows what they are dealing with before they write a message or do a call. This approach lets the team start the conversation at the right time and make the sale.

We took on the part of selling the coaches were never trained for, and set the platform to pick out the members who have a need the gym's extra services meet. The coach no longer has to spot the buying possibility, because the platform identifies the need and places a call task on the team's list, with the member's need in the member's words and the service that fits. That leaves the coach's part as coaching, so the call is about the member's goal, an injury, a race, or a plateau.

Turned out, the members were already telling the team what they needed, and just nobody had the time or the training to hear it as a sales conversation. The owner went through the initial list of possibilities the platform had highlighted in the first month after it went live in this gym, checked them against what members had written, and said the following:

Today, the team uses platform recommendations to offer relevant additional services to the members who show the need. Offering these extra services is now part of the daily work.

The profile tells coaches who to call and why, so they do not have to become salespeople, and conversations start from what members said they need. For the business, additional services reach members who describe the need.

We keep working with the owner to make the recommendations more precise, and he is adding new offers in the gym, which the platform allows for. Before, even the services he already had were not moving enough, so there was little reason to add more, but now that he can see them being sold to members who asked for them, a new offer is worth the effort.