How can we turn members into raving fans?
The best thing you can do for your members is to genuinely care about them! Sounds simple right?
Take yourself back to a time when you felt truly cared for, whether this is in a business setting or at home:
- What made that experience feel so caring?
- Did they promote some sort of emotional response out of you?
- Was it done through action rather than words?
- Or did they just remember something you had said in the past?
Feeling cared for is one of the most wholesome feelings a person can have. You feel you have a support system, someone in your corner and someone that makes you feel like you are not in this alone. Care can be shown in many ways, but showcasing ‘care’ in the fitness/health space can be hard for operators who sometimes don’t know how to express the fact that they really do care.
When you feel cared for the brain elicits a dopamine and a serotonin response to make you feel good, happy, safe. The dopamine response is also the reason why people keep going back to that nice restaurant, a place that generates fond memories and the serotonin response is what happens when you feel hopeful, satisfied and optimistic.
Both of these responses can be achieved through action but they can also be achieved verbally through meaningful conversations. This is what we can all excel at as fitness/health professionals. Having really meaningful goal setting conversations with your prospective members or even current members will drive both the serotonin and dopamine responses in the brain when done right and when we can get our members feeling this just by being with us then we will have RAVING FANS.
A meaningful goal setting conversation isn’t just finding out the surface level goal and moving on, it is about peeling back the layers and finding what the driving force is for that goal. For example, a member could come in and say that their goal is to be healthy and feel better. Ok, great! But what does that mean to them?
I had a client come to me once with this exact goal when I was a trainer myself but I didn’t leave it at that surface level goal as I knew there was more to this story. So I put on my life coaching hat and started asking deeper questions to understand this goal more. Turns out that this wasn’t the goal at all, this member had recently lost a parent and was still grieving from the loss. The member dealt with the loss through alcohol and food and was now about to be prescribed antidepressants after never having had to take any medication before this. It would not be uncommon for a coach to feel like they don’t have the right to dig into this kind of depth with someone that they are meeting for the first time, BUT this is exactly what the responsibility of a coach in our industry is.
If this member went to someone else the chances are they wouldn’t have opened up about this and probably would have joined but struggled to show up with everything else going on in their personal life. But, they came to me, I was able to have the right conversation and get into the real reason why they were signing up and through that conversation dopamine, and serotonin were released and they felt safe, hopeful and knew that they had somebody in their corner when they were at their lowest.
This member still trains 10 years on and has brought almost their entire family to this facility as well as some friends and work colleagues. This member became a raving fan and it all started with care and helping when it seemed hard!
We can all have impactful conversations like this and make our industry a little bit better every day.
Pictured above is Edward from One Arena who creates Raving fans of his brand every day and we can thankfully say he is a raving fan of ours at SAOR too. We care about him and he cares about his members.
There’s no easier “hack” that than, of course showcasing said care is where people can struggle but hey, that’s where we help 🙂
If you would like to find out how you can also have this impactful conversations and to better serve your member base both current and new let’s talk.
Article By Alex Goemans (Fitness Business Coach)