According to fitness industry statistics, the personal trainer industry has a turnover rate of approximately 80%. Hence, most of the people who train to become personal trainers quit at some point, meaning they don’t get to enjoy a successful personal trainer career.
The question is, how do you set yourself up for success in this field? Well, this guide has the answers. In this article, we share 8 expert secrets of how to become a successful personal trainer.
1. Provide Excellent Customer Service
Delivering outstanding customer service is key to becoming a successful personal trainer. Offering great customer service will help to boost sales, enhance your retention rates and increase your referral numbers.
Also, offering exceptional customer service will help to boost the reputation of your brand and increase the level of customer satisfaction. Simply put, it has the biggest impact to your bottom line.
And the good news is, you don’t need to move mountains, to deliver great customer service to your personal training clients. You simply need to make a few adjustments regarding how you handle your personal training clients. Some of the strategies that you can leverage to deliver exceptional customer service include:
- Responding promptly to questions or issues raised
- Solving issues as soon as possible
- Listening to your clients
- Appreciating your members
- Apologizing when you make mistakes
- Maintaining a positive attitude always
Apart from the above tips, you also need to go above and beyond to meet and surpass your client’s expectations. For instance, you can be sending them hand-written cards during their special days, awarding them free sessions, and adding value to the services you are already offering, just to name a few.
2. Maintain Professionalism Always
Lack of professionalism is one of the reasons why fitness clients abandon their personal trainers. And if you keep losing your personal training clients, you will eventually find yourself with no one to train. As a result, your earnings will dwindle, making it hard to pay your bills. Finally, you may end up feeling as if personal training is not the right career move for you.
Therefore, if you want to succeed in this industry, you must be willing to maintain professionalism at all times. So, how do you make sure that you maintain professionalism as a fitness coach?
Well, you can start with something as simple as arriving for your personal training sessions on time. By arriving early, you will have ample time to organize everything. And by the time your first clients arrive, everything will be set.
Also, make sure that you focus on your personal training clients at all times. If you are the type of personal trainer that spends the whole session conversing with others or constantly scrolling your phone, you can rest assured you will lose clients fast. So, regardless of whether a client is taking a break in between sets or they are jogging on the treadmill, you need to be by their side at all times.
Furthermore, ensure you dress appropriately. Also, maintain good personal hygiene and decent grooming. You also need to avoid inappropriate behaviors, which may make your clients feel uncomfortable.
3. Stay Up to Date
Another key thing that you need to become a successful personal trainer is to keep up to date with all the happenings in your industry. So, if you specialize in bodybuilding, you need to stay updated on everything happening in the bodybuilding industry. And if you are a Pilates instructor, you also need to stay abreast of everything happening in the Pilates world.
To update yourself, you can read the latest fitness magazines, watch YouTube videos, attend industry conferences and workshops, follow renowned fitness professionals on social media or subscribe to fitness newsletters.
Keeping updated with all the happenings in your fitness niche will enable you to adjust your training methods accordingly, thus ensuring you remain ahead of the competition at all times.
Also, staying updated with your niche will help you to correct your clients, in case they have been exposed to misinformation. As a result, their trust in you will increase and your credibility will soar.
4. Remain Flexible
You also need to be highly flexible to succeed as a personal trainer. And this will apply in terms of how you relate to your fitness clients as well as how you operate.
For example, a client may have booked an 8 am personal training session with you. Unfortunately, something unexpected may come up like an illness or a family emergency, forcing that client to cancel that session.
And, if you are not a flexible person, you may end up getting angry with that client and decide to charge them for the canceled session. As you may expect, such a client may decide to take their business elsewhere, based on this poor experience.
But instead of charging the client for the canceled session, you can instead allow them to reschedule to another time, free of charge. Based on this great experience, such a client will feel that you care about them. And, they will not only continue renewing their memberships with you but they may also keep sending some referral clients your way.
5. Handle Each Client Individually
While working as a fitness coach, you will encounter clients with varying levels of fitness. And while some clients may share similar fitness goals, what each client needs to achieve their fitness goals is different from the other client.
Hence, you will need to handle each client individually. To this end, you need to create specific workout programs and nutritional guides for each client that you sign up.
While this work may be time-consuming, creating specialized workout programs and nutritional guides will help your clients to achieve their fitness goals faster. And if your clients are achieving their fitness goals, the chances of them canceling their memberships are slim, meaning you will continue getting business from them.
Furthermore, satisfied clients will refer their friends, family, work colleagues and other close associates who may be looking for a fitness coach to you. As a result, your personal training business will keep growing.
6. Be Honest With Your Clients
Another important trait that you need to become a successful personal trainer is honesty. You need to be honest with all your personal training clients.
As you may expect, you will come across clients with all sorts of ambitions. For example, someone may approach you, saying that they want to build 10 pounds of pure muscle within a month
But with your experience, you know that it will probably take approximately three to six months to build this muscle. Therefore, you need to be honest with your client and tell them it won’t be realistic to achieve these results within their preferred period.
If you fail to be honest with your client and they don’t achieve these results within a month, they may end up claiming that your personal training methods don’t work and post negative reviews about you online. And, this will ruin your reputation, making it hard to attract clients in the future.
On the other, if you are honest with this client from the first day, you can help them to set realistic and attainable goals. And with this approach, you will be able to establish honest working relationships with all your clients, which is key to delivering long-term results.
7. Work on Your Analytical Skills
For your personal training clients to see results, they have to exercise consistently and follow the recommended diet. However, as much as they may follow this approach religiously, they may hit obstacles along the way, which may derail their progress.
For instance, a client’s strength may hit a wall or they may stop making any considerable improvements in their weight loss goals. And as their personal trainer, you need to evaluate everything about such a client and then isolate the issue.
And that’s why you need strong analytical skills. By identifying issues that may be preventing your clients from making progress, you will save them from a considerable amount of anxiety and stress. This stress and anxiety may arise from feeling as if they are doing everything possible but are not getting the results that they may have been expecting.
8. Market Yourself Aggressively
While retaining your existing clients is vital, you will also need a consistent stream of new clients to enjoy a successful personal training career. To this end, you need to be constantly marketing your personal training business.
Fortunately, marketing your personal training business is not as hard as you may think it is. Also, you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars marketing your personal training services. There are several affordable and effective strategies, which can help to land you clients.
They include establishing a strong presence on social media platforms, creating a blog with high-quality, SEO-optimized content, sending emails to prospective clients, distributing flyers and leaflets, partnering with complementary brands, distributing branded merchandise, and word-of-mouth marketing, just to name a few.
9. Wrapping It Up
Becoming a successful personal trainer is not as hard as it may seem. It’s something you can manage, with the right approach. And, the tips we’ve shared in this article can help to steer you in that direction.