If you’re a personal trainer that has time free during the hours you’d rather be working, you’re probably wanting to find more clients to fill that time. After all, you’re not making money if you’re not training someone.
If that’s the case for you, then you can use that spare time looking for new clients. Here are a number of ways you can use your time to fill up your client book.
Exercise Correction
By extending the olive branch with potential clients, by providing them with some valuable information, you are able to begin a dialogue and potentially spark up a new relationship. It’s particularly effective when spotting someone doing an exercise drastically wrong, and being able to provide a lot of help.
Instead of being that person that films someone doing an exercise incorrectly and posting it on Facebook for some laughs, go and help them. It’s a great way to foster a new relationship and show the person how knowledgeable you are. Explain how to do something, demonstrate it, and explain what muscles are being used and why it’s so good, as well as some of the progressions and outcomes of the exercise.
When it comes to try and sell your services to them, it’s up to you how pushy you want to be. You might start by offering them a quick screening; i.e. finding out their goals and experience, then seeing if they’d be interested in a complementary training session. If you do all this well, they’ll be more inclined to become a new client.
Renew Past Relationships
A technique that can work really well is to give some of your old clients a call to see how they’re going. If they’ve fallen off the fitness treadmill, it might be fairly easy to persuade them to come back and train with you. Sweet talk them by telling them how motivated you thought they were when they were training with you. Give them a strong reason to come back and start training with you again. Oftentimes, people want to come back to their old trainer, but might feel bad after the initial ‘break up’. Ease their worries. No hard feelings, you just want to help them.
If they are still training hard, congratulate them, show some interest in them, ask a few questions and see if they might want a quick workout analysis, and maybe you can get a few more sessions out of them to refresh their approach and help them train better.
Use the gym’s database
This might not be available to all PTs, and many gyms might not have the database, but some gyms and health clubs will have records of which of their members used a PT . Use these records to find out which members have previously used a PT but no longer do—make sure that their old PT no longer works at the gym and if you’re allowed to access this data—but if all is okay, try to spark up a new relationship with these potential clients, using similar tactics to those above.
Engage in Other Activities
Taking some time to attend and lead educational workshops, member fitness competitions, community seminars and special demonstrations. This will give you extra credibility and allow people to see your knowledge.
Have an online presence
Finally, I would highly recommend having an online presence of some soft. Whether that be a website or Facebook page, having an easy way for people to find you, and share your details will pay dividends. There are plenty of ways to do this and it’s not too difficult. We have an Online Marketing Course that goes through the importance of all this, and goes through setting up a website. Find out more in our workshop page.
