Martial Arts Professional Magazine

When someone calls and inquires about your martial art fitness programming, how do you handle the call? I’ve found that this is probably the biggest challenge most school owners face, when selling their fitness programming. They’ll run an ad to make the phone ring, but have no idea what to say when they have a client on the other end.

There’s a huge amount of material available on how to answer a traditional martial arts call, but little to none on how to answer a fitness call. Many school owners and staff have the traditional martial arts school inquiry down pat, but are lost when it comes to calls about your fitness course.

There are many similarities between the traditional martial arts and fitness calls, but there are also some very important strategies that have proven to increase success, when it comes to martial arts fitness information calls. First, determine what you are selling. If you’re just offering a couple of aerobic style fitness classes a week, then you’re not offering many benefits; and benefits should be the focus of selling martial arts fitness.

From your prospects’ point-of-view, they need a complete picture of your benefits to be convinced to enroll, and you are the “artist” to paint it for them.

Let me explain this further by giving you an example of one of my UBC phone scripts. This is a very common call for my UBC program:

Caller: How much is your UBC program?

Staff member: Is this program for yourself or a family member?

Caller: For myself.

Staff member: How did you hear about the UBC? Do you know someone in the course?

Caller: I saw your ad in the local paper.

Staff member: The Ultimate Bodyshaping Course is a ten-week fitness journey that combines fitness kickboxing, resistance training, a sound nutritional program and flexibility training. The best part about the UBC is that you are not doing it alone. You’re put on a team and assigned coaches. The coaches are people just like yourself who have experienced great results from the UBC program, and are now volunteering to guide you through the course.

Our next start date is January 19th. On that day, you will meet your coaches and teammates and receive your fully illustrated manual that presents you the entire whole course. You start with a complete fitness evaluation, so we can determine your current fitness level - a level you will exceed during the next ten weeks.

Caller: I’m 50 years old and haven’t worked out in years. Can I do this?

Staff member: Anybody can do the UBC. We have had people take time from their marathons, people who’ve lost 40 to 50 pounds and people from 16 to 60 years of age. Anyone can do the UBC because all the classes are self-paced.

Caller: Sounds great. How much does it cost?

Staff member: The 10-week course is only $349 and that includes your gloves, hand wraps, a personal training session, coaches, fitness evaluation, everything. You can even win a cruise vacation with our bodyshaping course; and if you register now, then you can train to the start date at no additional cost.

I’ll stop the example phone script here. You should be able to recognize how the staff member painted a complete benefits picture for the prospect. After we explain the course completely and state the price, it’s not uncommon for prospects to ask, “Is that all?” It’s important to understand that you cannot just state the price, without first relating all of the benefits they’ll receive from your fitness program. You may have noticed that the staff member ignored the first question about the money, and diverted the conversation by asking a question.

This provides the staff member with the opportunity to paint the complete picture of all the benefits and services offered, before stating the price. After we’ve painted the picture, we then try to make an appointment to watch a class. We also try to instill a sense of urgency by letting them know that we have limited space available for the next start date, so if they are interested, then they need to act soon.

To be able to sell martial arts fitness successfully, you must have a program that is worth selling. As I stated before, if all you have to offer is a couple pf classes a week, then it becomes more difficult to impress the caller and charge more than $100 a month for your program.