A:
Closing rates will be different for different sales staff and different clubs. My best sales person closes 73 percent of all prospects. New sales staff with little experience can be lucky to close 30 percent. The average for all staff across all clubs is 53%. Clubs with highly trained sales staff and low staff turnover will maintain closing rates of over 70 percent.
Of course, you also need to look at total monthly sales. A sales person that does very little prospecting and only sees highly qualified walk-ins will tend to have a higher closing rate than a sales person who is actively involved in prospecting. In other words, selling 50 percent of 100 prospects is better than 80 percent of 20 walk-ins.
Also, clubs sometimes pick their closing rates out of the sky. The only way you can get accurate closing rates is if you have a 100 percent fail-safe system of recording all tours, walk-ins, and guests. I once looked at a club claiming 85 percent closing rates but they were not including guest passes. They were getting approximately 140 people on guest passes every month. When these were included their closing rates were only 36 percent.
A:
A membership consultant’s “hit rate” will never be as good as it could be as long as it is referred to as just that… a “hit rate”. Members aren’t units, points or numbers, they’re people and each has a story and a reason for coming to us and the best consultants assume every single guest has a need to fill and consequently has come to join. We change people lives every day through fitness and as consultants our job is to remove all barriers and causes for hesitation, more often than not in people who have already gone through several stages of consideration before visiting a club.
It’s a competitive world and true to say not everyone who visits will join your club. Many factors will influence their final decision, so the ultimate percentage of those who join can vary from club to club, however globally I can say we at Face2Face aim to average in the high 60’s. I see many clubs claim much higher but often investigation reveals not all guests are counted as “prospects,” skewing their true conversion and indeed limiting their success.