Why Hire a Membership Sales Coach When I Already Have a Sales Manager in My Health Club

By: Jim Thomas
Jim Thomas’ Fitness Management & Consulting

Most health clubs already have a membership sales manager or someone who is in charge of membership sales production in some capacity. So why hire a sales coach for the membership department? Many sales managers are not trained in the subtleties of effective health club sales training nor have they developed the necessary skills and tools to be effective sales leaders. The most common way to hire a health club sales manager is to simply promote your best sales person in the membership department. This logic suggests this person is the most qualified to lead the membership sales team based on their past membership sales achievements. This type of promotion by necessity is common, but not commonly successful. In the process you may even lose your top membership sales performer when their leadership abilities fail to match their sales ability.

The key reason being: Great health club sales people don’t often make great health club sales managers.

Why? This is largely due to the behaviors inherent to traditional individual health club salesmanship. At the risk of generalizing, these individuals can be highly competitive by nature and many can often be found running by their own set of rules when comes to making a membership sale. Many sales superstars can be described as egocentric, disorganized, manipulating, persuasive and let’s not forget charming. Often embodying the true entrepreneurial spirit, the sales superstar by nature will just get out there and make things happen. And yes of course, they may even cut a corner or two in the process. This poses an interesting but challenging dilemma for their health club sales managers or club General Manager.

To promote such individuals to a health club sales manager is to promote the same individual behaviors. More often than not, these behaviors are challenging to replicate successfully without ramification. The decision to do so will play a huge role in developing your health club sales culture. This is why so many health club sales teams operate by the 80/20 principle. With 80% of the membership sales being generated by 20% of the membership sales team and the rest merely making up the numbers. Usually the successful few are doing things very differently based on what they know or have learned in the role through their own positive and negative experiences in sales or in the health club industry. The normally enthusiastic but struggling majority is left to make up the numbers. Health Club sales models that demonstrate this type of unbalanced success are clearly lacking the right leadership, sales support and sales coaching structure in their health club.

A health club sales coach’s role in the above scenario would be to coach the membership sales manager and membership sales team members to demonstrate common habitual behaviors and skills across the entire team for optimum membership sales team performance in the health club membership sales department.

Now, go close a sale!