410 Qualified Leads in One Quarter: How Gold’s Gym Idaho Uses an AI Sales Agent to Save Every Missed Call
ABC AI Agents Case Study
Executive summary: AI deployment at a multi-location gym franchise
Gold’s Gym Idaho operates three clubs and roughly 12,000 members under Regional Director of Sales and Marketing Jodi Donoghue, who has spent 16 years with the brand. Her sales teams close 75% of the prospects who walk through the door in person, but the phone was where memberships were quietly slipping away, calls went unanswered, unqualified, and unfollowed. Jodi deployed ABC AI Agents across all three clubs to close that gap without touching her sales team.
- 410 qualified leads captured from 4,127 AI conversations handled in a single quarter (Q2 2026).
- Every inbound call answered instantly and correctly routed, member vs. prospect, without adding headcount.
- A measurable rise in member friendliness scores once front desk staff stopped juggling phone volume.
ABC AI Agents became both a lead-capture engine and a way to protect the in-person service quality Jodi’s team was already known for.
Background: 16 years at Gold’s Gym, a philosophy set before the first demo
Gold’s Gym Idaho’s three clubs employ a staff of about 300. Jodi and fellow regional manager Corey travel to each club weekly; club-level operations managers run the front desk and facilities teams, Corey oversees personal training, and Jodi oversees all three sales teams.
“Hiring employees is tough. Sometimes you’re lucky, and you get a rock star. I call them my heavy hitters. But those are few and far between. I wanted to start looking into AI to assist my employees with the things people lack nowadays. Phone skills. Never once did I look at replacing my sales team. What I wanted to do is see where their areas of weakness were and find something that could assist them.”
Jodi Donoghue
Regional Director of Sales and Marketing, Gold’s Gym IdahoThe problem: a great in-person team, stretched thin by the phone
“Let’s say they got a brand new front desk associate. Oh, shoot, I’m not sure. Let me put you on hold. Then they’d run back and ask their operations manager, how warm is the pool? Then they’d go back up to the front desk. You still there? Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, because some people are thinking, you can’t even
answer how warm your pool is.”
Jodi Donoghue
Even when the answer got delivered, the opportunity was already gone: no name, no contact information, no way to follow up, no tour.
“My sales team could never follow up. I didn’t know who was calling in. I didn’t know their name. I didn’t have any way to reach back out to them. That whole incoming call, I did not realize how much we were losing in
membership sales and conversions of a true lead.”
Jodi Donoghue
A rocky start, then ABC AI Agents
Jodi’s road to ABC AI Agents ran through seven frustrating months with a different AI vendor. The agent never launched, the platform could not connect to the club’s CRM or billing system, and the offered workaround was manual CSV uploads, which she refused. By the time that project stalled out, she understood how AI agents work better than most operators in the industry. She switched to ABC AI Agents on a referral from a fellow multi-location operator, and the difference was immediate. In fitness, operators trust operators, and that word of mouth carried more weight than any pitch.
Onboarding: three clubs, three agents, live in days
Gold’s Gym Idaho set up a separate AI agent for each club. Operations are similar across locations, but each club has its own quirks, and Jodi wanted every agent to know its own building inside and out.
“Setting it up with our phone provider was simple. It was a few emails, introductions, and gathering some really simple information, like what number we wanted to use. It was a couple of days and voila, it was done. Our inbound calls were being answered by Goldie, and immediately I was seeing incoming traffic and leads into our CRM, which was also very easy to link and set up.”
Jodi Donoghue
After seven months of spinning wheels elsewhere, the contrast in speed made an impression, one that has held up through onboarding new staff to the dashboard and the ongoing support behind it.
Meet Goldie: solving the qualifying-question problem
Every inbound call at all three clubs now goes straight to Goldie, the club’s ABC AI Agents receptionist and sales agent. Her first job is the one the front desk always struggled with: quickly identifying whether the caller is a member or a non-member, since those are two different conversations. A member asking about the pool gets an instant, accurate answer. A prospect asking the same question gets the answer plus the conversation the sales process was always supposed to start, and more often than not, Goldie books the tour on the spot, adding it to a Google Calendar and pushing a new lead alert into the CRM.
From there, the humans take over, and this is where Jodi’s team shines: once a prospect walks through the door, Gold’s Gym Idaho closes 75% of them. Billing calls follow the same logic, routed directly to trained billing representatives instead of tying up the front desk.
Results: measurable growth and a friendlier front desk
Gold’s Gym Idaho surveys members via Qualtrics, and since Goldie took over the phones, the club’s friendliness scores have risen, one of the first times a customer has shown quantified survey data confirming what most operators only sense: taking the phone off the front desk makes the front desk better at its real job.
“Our friendliness scores have improved on our Qualtrics surveys. We’ve got our front desk staff more available because they are not taking that inbound call volume. Your members want that greeting when they’re coming in to check in. A phone call is going to be, what, maybe two minutes? How many people can check in during those two minutes and never get acknowledged, because my front desk associate is on the phone?”
Jodi Donoghue
The platform data shows the scale behind those scores. Across April, May, and June 2026, Goldie handled 4,127 conversations, nearly all of them phone calls, captured 410 qualified leads, and live transferred 2,293 callers to staff. Just over half of all conversations end in a warm handoff to a human, and the rest are resolved by the AI, so every caller gets an instant answer or a person, whichever they need. With the third club’s agent ramping up in June, that month became the account’s biggest yet: 1,467 conversations, 189 qualified leads, up 57.5% from May, and 849 live transfers.
What’s next for Gold’s Gym Idaho
Outbound calling for speed to lead: website trial-pass leads arrive opted out of texting under current messaging laws, putting the first touch back on the phone, the exact task Jodi’s teams like least. Today only about 20% of those website leads ever walk through the door, so Jodi is launching outbound campaigns so Goldie calls each new lead the moment it arrives, welcomes them, and books the visit that activates the pass.
AI billing outreach: past-due follow-up is delicate enough that Jodi only trusts two trained people to do it. The AI handles the dialing and voicemails, and the moment a live person picks up, the call transfers to one of those trained humans.
An internal knowledge base for staff: like other multi-location operators who keep their AI agent open on the front desk computer around the clock, Jodi plans to give entry-level staff the same always-current resource callers get, so a new associate can answer the pool question as confidently as a ten-year veteran. She is also already bringing PT managers into the dashboard, with personal training next in line for the platform.
Advice for other operators
“When it comes to gym sales, we have our eyes constantly on growth, net positive members. When we’re relying on employees to help us reach our goals, we all know where our holes are. I looked at where my holes were and saw where AI could help fill the gaps my employees weren’t filling. I guarantee that where you’re not doing great, you can bring your AI agent in, and she’s going to do things exactly how you want them done, each and
every time. She will never drift the way a person does. It’s a ginormous win.”
Jodi Donoghue
The ABC AI Agents results at Gold’s Gym Idaho
| Metric | Result |
| Clubs covered | 3 |
| Members served | 12,000 |
| AI conversations handled | 4,127 |
| Qualified leads captured | 410 |
| Live transfers to staff | 2,293 |
| In-person tour close rate | 75% |
| Setup time vs. prior vendor | Days vs Stalled after 7 months |
Ready to see results like these?
If missed calls and a stretched front desk are costing you memberships, it’s time to see what ABC AI Agents can do for your gyms, studios, or health clubs.