[vimeo 31258549]

Hey. What’s up guys? This is Zach Hunt here for Super-Trainer.com and I have some pretty cool tips I want to share with you and I’m pretty excited. This is the first video for the site and I’m even wearing my Superman shirt or Superman type thing because I know that’s something that Sam likes to have on. It’s his cartoon icon on his graphic, the cartoon graphic.

So I want to talk about your client experience. I know the focus is on getting new clients and marketing and sales and all that and that’s great. There’s also a huge part of something that we do that seems to really help. It’s when a client is wanting to quit – I know a lot of trainers where they – like a client will fire off an email. Hey, I’m done with this program. I’m quitting or hey, I want to take a rest or whatever and let’s take the email and cancel them out, their subscription.

Even if you’re on a 12-month contract, a lot of trainers just cancel out the contract and besides the fact if you stick – many people stick to their contract or not, something important I find is finding out why people are wanting to quit. We do a couple of things. Actually I’m bringing it with me. This is at my home so I just created a little analog. I put cancellation at the top and we have a little paper here. People actually have to come in to our studio to cancel. I got this idea from a tanning membership that my wife had and she had to actually go to the place to cancel so we ended up waiting about four months because we just didn’t want to go drive to the place.

So people actually have to come in to our office to cancel. They have to sign a cancellation request and other requests that say, “Hey, why are you wanting to cancel?” question one. Two, is there anything we could have done to keep you longer? And three, something else that I can’t remember off the top of my head but they’re super important questions because they give us some insight. Like hey, maybe they don’t like one of the trainers or something. Maybe it’s something we can fix.

So why are they quitting. Hey, my husband lost a job and I just can’t afford this level of membership anymore. So actually, when we get those membership cancellation requests – I have our sales team and admin in our back office where they take those once a week and they call them and try and convince them not to cancel.

We don’t just take cancellations at face value. We try to figure out why they’re canceling and get them to stay and if needed, if it’s for financial reasons, we down sell them to a lower program or I just get them excited more about referring people wherein they’re in our program back and we get about half the people or more to stick with their program even though they initially wanted to cancel.

Maybe we convince them just to freeze their account or something along those lines and then they initial and sign it on the bottom here. We get them [0:03:21] [Phonetic]. So that seemed to work really well and especially the financial ones. You can keep those very easily just by doing a down sell. Hey, say you have unlimited training for your free boot camp or whatever, you can just do something as simple as hey, we have a twice a week program and that’s such and such.

If your program rates are 147, hey, we have a twice a week program and that’s actually 87. You’re going to save about – a half rate and they’re going to get majority of the benefit but it seems like a different program or you can call it the Three Times a Week Program even if you want because most people don’t even come more than three or four times a week.

So those are some things you can do to kind of – I call it the exit interview or whatever, exit process for your clients. You don’t just take an email and say, “Hey, I’m going to quit here. I’m going to cancel your program,” or whatever because that’s very un-personal. With the in-person cancellations, like I mentioned as well, people always feel guilty about canceling so we get them several more months or obviously we want people to get results and we want them to like our program. Obviously there’s going to be a drop-off and attrition no matter how perfect you are.

So that’s something to expect as well is attrition in your business and as you grow bigger, that’s only going to increase. You only have a certain percentage. So if you have 500 clients and your attrition rate is five percent a month, that’s 25 clients that may potentially quit that month. So just don’t be alarmed if your numbers start to increase as you grow. So those are some things that I believe are important.

One other thing I feel is very worthwhile is making your 12 months actually a 12-month contract, not just making it a hypothetical month to month where people can get out of it anytime because then there’s no real benefit or there’s no reason to even have a 12-month program. You might as well just call it month to month because it’s going to be easier to settle anyway.

So if you have a 12-month, make it an actual 12-month contract, not just some fluff [0:05:46] [Indiscernible]. Not only does it help you with retention. If people notice they’re in it for 12 months, they’re going to be more mentally-focused. They’re actually going to come in because they know they have to.

So if you just let people quit anytime they want, you’re not doing them a favor. In our contracts, we actually do have a clause where if they move away or are seriously injured, any reason, any worthwhile reason that they’re going to quit, we do let them out but for any other reason like, “Hey, I’m busy,” which we all know means just they’re lazy. So keeping people to their contract will also help you predict your cash flow because essentially if you let anyone cancel anytime, everyone in your business is on a month to month and they could all quit by next month. So that’s not really reliable income.

So just some tips on contracts and exit interviews I think are pretty helpful and hopefully you find it helpful and we’ll talk to you again soon

Zach Hunt