The COVID-19 pandemic has upset nearly every aspect of life, from how people live to how companies interact with their customers. The pandemic has caused significant negative impact to the fitness industry. Gyms are faced with changing consumer sentiment and financial losses due to shutdowns. During this time, gyms, like many businesses, were presented with a choice: stay idle or transform.
At National Fitness Partners, a Planet Fitness franchisee based in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, we decided to transform. We decided to prioritize innovation in order to grow post-crisis.
Our team spent time rethinking the member experience, investing in safe reopening protocols, keeping employees engaged and brainstorming creative ways to grow. We spent this time thinking about how to transform because our members’ physical and mental health is important to us.
Back in January 2020, National Fitness Partners decided to test whether corporate sales could help drive revenue and member growth. Within three months, we determined it was an effective marketing and sales method to help our clubs grow. During this time, our sales engine and processes were built and began producing qualified leads, which resulted in new corporate customers and Planet Fitness members. However, shutdowns brought our sales engine to a screeching halt.
As the shutdowns continued, we kept asking, “How can we make up for the lost time and pause to the sales engine?”
Our solution was to accelerate the lead generation process. Our theory was that if we could add an accelerant to generating new business opportunities, we could bypass the time lost and help clubs grow in the third and fourth quarters.
We tested this theory by launching the Corporate Sales Lead Competition with our 78 clubs. The primary goal of the competition was to generate more business opportunities near our clubs. The secondary goal was to increase employee engagement.
Regional managers and their teams competed against each other to see who could generate the most leads during a two-week period. We incentivized participation by offering cash prizes to the top regional managers and general managers. We used HubSpot to create a landing page to help collect and count leads. A resource guide was created that outlined how RMs and clubs could find local business leads.
Most importantly, all teams were required to submit leads with a good email of someone who worked at the business or organization. This made finding leads more challenging but increased the likelihood of converting the lead into a corporate customer. We also required the business name, full name of contact person and phone number. Lastly, daily leaderboard updates were sent to regional managers and clubs to encourage engagement.
The competition was a massive success.
Our clubs collectively submitted more than 10,000 business leads. For two weeks, our regional managers, general managers and front desk staff worked tirelessly to find new opportunities near their clubs. Participation was extremely high. All of our 15 regional managers participated and 70 out of 78 clubs participated (90 percent). Employees were engaged and excited throughout the entire competition. Our employees engaged in friendly smack talk and inspired their teams to go above and beyond what was expected. The competition provided a needed distraction from shutdowns, cancellations and freezes to an initiative that focused on growth and opportunity. The competition also proved that our team perseveres through any challenge.
As our team continues to reach out to the new leads and onboard corporate customers, there are two takeaways worth sharing from this exercise:
- Innovating is more critical than ever. Consumer behavior has changed. We can choose to stay idle or transform our businesses to meet the needs of our members.
- Test and iterate. Work with your teams to be more comfortable testing and iterating on strategies, tactics and new ideas. Exercise your creativity by practicing with your teams. Your goal isn’t to go all in on every idea. Your goal is to go through the brainstorming process to determine how your businesses can adapt to change and create value for members.
We were able to find success in the Corporate Sales Competition because our entire company decided to use the crisis to transform. By choosing to transform and prioritize innovation, we opened the possibility for new ideas and ways of growing our business. We embraced the possibility that the competition could fail because it was more important to try and fail than to stay idle.
If you would like to discuss corporate sales or the competition in more details, please email me at [email protected].
BIO
JohnPaul Bennett is the corporate and group sales manager at National Fitness Partners. National Fitness Partners is a Planet Fitness franchisee that operates 78 clubs in Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina and South Carolina.