40 Appointments, 32 Shows, 23 Sales: World-Class Gym Funnels

Most coaching gyms add just five clients a month—but the world’s best fitness facilities are consistently adding more than 20 with stellar sales systems.

In this episode of “Run a Profitable Gym,” Chris Cooper analyzes the data behind top-performing marketing funnels, and he reveals which tactics landed these owners on our Top 10 leaderboards, from instant lead follow-up to simplified booking procedures, consistent organic marketing, airtight lead nurture and sales practice reps.

You’ll also learn how mentors help gym owners identify weak spots in their funnels and tighten their systems so they can add large numbers of ideal clients month after month.

Tune in to discover exactly how elite gyms around the world are generating more leads, booking more appointments, increasing show rates and closing more high-value sales.

Get Coop’s “Generate 30 New Leads in 30 Days” guide in Gym Owners United, linked below.
 
Links

Gym Owners United

Book a Call

1:49 - Marketing and sales leaders

7:33 - Strong systems

10:37 - Lead nurture

11:49 - Events and niches

13:00 - Consistency and tracking metrics

Episode Transcript

Chris (00:02):
Here's the bad news.
Most big group gyms only addabout five clients a month.
Here's the good news.
I'm gonna tell you exactly howthe top two-brand gyms 5x that
number every month.
No joke, on average, our top 10gyms add 23 new clients per
month.
And these aren't $29.99 accessmemberships or free one-month

(00:22):
trials or any of that garbage.
These are coaching gyms.
One of our sales leaders postedan average revenue per member
of $309 and with 23 new members.
So if you're looking for thesecrets of adding high value
clients every month, you are inthe right place.
I'm TwoBrain Business FounderChris Cooper, and this is Run a
Profitable Gym.
Before I get into this, I wantto thank all of the listeners

(00:45):
who messaged me on Facebook overthe last couple of weeks
saying, Coop, how come thepodcast didn't sound like you?
Are you okay?
What's going on?
And the truth is that I had athroat cold for the last couple
of weeks.
I sounded a little bitdifferently.
And I want to reassure you, wedon't use AI to generate any of
our uh blogs or our podcast orour videos or anything.

(01:05):
We've been producing thisstuff, or I have since 2012.
In 2016, we startedprofessionalizing our content,
and we still have a lot ofhumans working behind the scenes
to produce this podcast, toedit this podcast, to publish
the podcast, to create oursocial media graphics, to write
our blogs.
And I'm I still write them andlike all I still write all the
books.
The stuff that you see from meon social media is not coming

(01:28):
from a robot.
And I hate it when influencers,influencers in our space try to
pass off robot or AI stuff asactual knowledge.
Today, what I'm here to do iswhat I've been doing for 15
years now, and that is to giveyou knowledge that's gonna help
you grow your gym by sharingwhat the best gyms in the world
are doing instead of just myopinion.

(01:48):
So we're gonna look at the bestgyms in the world for set rate,
show rate, and close ratetoday.
I'm gonna share our interviewquestions with them and tell you
exactly how you can improveyour gym too based on what
they're doing.
Now, before I give you thosespecific tactics, I want to show
you the data.
So, set rate is how many peoplebooked appointments during the
month that we tracked.

(02:09):
And so here's the leaderboardfor that.
Our 10th place gym booked 34appointments.
Our ninth place also booked 34,8th place, 37 appointments,
seventh place, 40 appointments.
This is a Canadian gym.
Woo.
Uh sixth place, 41appointments.
This is from a gym in Spain.
Fifth place, a gym in Australiabooked 41 appointments, fourth

(02:30):
place, a book a gym in the U.S.
booked 42 appointments.
Third place, a gym in theNetherlands booked 43
appointments, second place, agym in Sweden booked 45
appointments, and first place agym in Canada booked 47.
Amazing! Team Canada.
Here we go.
Show rate is how many peopleshowed up for their
appointments.
So of those, uh, a 10th placegym was from Belgium, they had

(02:52):
28 show up, ninth place, aCanadian gym had 28 show up, a
Spanish gym had 28 show up, agym in the Netherlands had 30
show up, a gym in the U.S.
had 31 show up, a gym in Spainhad 31 uh shows, Australia had
33, Canada had 35, the US had37, and a gym in Sweden takes
the top spot with 45 shows.

(03:13):
That's amazing.
Imagine uh a one to two peopleshowing up for a no-sweat intro
appointment every single day atyour gym all month.
The close rate is how manypeople showed up and then
bought.
So these people were coached tostart their change in life.
They were coached to actuallypurchase something.
A gym in the UK had 19, a gymin Denmark had 19, a gym in

(03:34):
Canada had 19, a gym in Spainhad 20, a gym in the US had 20,
another gym in the US had 23signups, a gym in Spain had 23,
a gym in Sweden had 24, a gym inAustralia had 28, and a gym in
the UK takes the prize with 35new signups last month.
So let me give you the top 10average so you can see what a

(03:54):
world-class sales funnel lookslike in a gym.
Among these top 10, they had anaverage of 40 appointments set,
32 people show, and they signedup 23.
Now remember, these are highvalue clients.
These are not $99 a month orfree trial clients.
These are people with an ARMwell above $200 a month.
And in our state of theindustry report this year, we

(04:15):
saw that the median gym getsjust seven appointments a month.
So we're crushing that here,right?
The average of these top tenwas well over 20.
So gyms in general, in onaverage, add about five clients
per month, but then they alsolose three.
So they get this like net twogrowth.
Our leaders are adding 23 amonth and they're using

(04:36):
world-class retention to holdthem to for 24 months or more.
That is life-changing stuff.
And this month we had five gymsmake all three leaderboards set
rate, show rate, and closerate.
That's amazing.
And it tells me that theirmarketing is good, their lead
nurture is good, and so is theirsales process.
What makes that so remarkableis that it's very common for a
gym to have leaks in its funnel.

(04:56):
So maybe that gym gets a lot ofleads, but none of them book no
sweat intros.
Or maybe people book theno-sweat intros, but the gyms
just can't close sales.
Two-brain mentors help clientsbuild and analyze clog-free
funnels, and they teach gymowners to sell because selling
is the first act of coaching.
And if you you can't changesomebody's life with fitness

(05:17):
unless you can coach them toactually commit to joining your
gym.
And when a mentor helps you getyour sales and marketing
systems dialed in, that's whenthe magic actually happens.
One 300-member gym in Swedengot more leads than anybody
else.
Here's their actual funnelstatistics.
They had 45 leads, 45 of thoseleads showed up, which is
incredible.

(05:37):
And they closed 24 of them withan ARM of $165 a month.
Amazing.
Another gym, a 300-member gymin Australia, added more clients
than anybody else with the samefunnel.
They had 41 leads, 33 shows,and 28 closes with an ARM of
157.
One guy from an elite400-member gym in the US, uh,

(05:59):
who shows up on a lot of ourdifferent leaderboards, had
these statistics in his funnel.
He had 42 leads, 35 shows, and20 closes with an ARM of 309.
Now, if your gym is gettingfive leads, 10 leads a month,
this guy is doing four times asmany.
Of that, 35 of those actuallyshowed up and he signed up 20 of
them with an ARM of $300.

(06:19):
So not only is he getting likefour or five times the number of
leads you're getting, he'ssigning them up for twice the
price.
These gyms aren't just closingpeople at low rates and feeding
them into a room full oftreadmills or a 40-person class.
These are coaching gyms withimpressive ARM numbers.
And you'll note that all thedifferent flags on the
leaderboards, uh, they're fromdifferent nations all over the

(06:39):
world this month, right?
Great marketing is greatmarketing in Australia or in
Spain or in Belgium or in theNetherlands or in the US.
And we can teach gym ownersanywhere in the world to improve
their sales funnels.
Okay.
So we've done this 3,000 timeswith gyms around the world.
And sometimes we still hear oncalls like, ah, that's not going
to work for me.
I live in southern Louisiana,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

(07:01):
What's required there is nottactics or skills or scripts.
What's required there ismentorship to change your
perspective, change the way thatyou look at your clients,
change the way that you look atmarketing, change the way that
you look at sales.
And once you've done that, youcan apply the strategies and the
tactics that we give you in ourmentorship program and actually
make you more effective as agym owner for life.

(07:21):
So now I'm going to tell youhow the leaders posted these
numbers.
And I talked to their mentorsand I talked to the leaders, and
I know exactly what they'vebeen focusing on.
So I group them into categoriesfor you.
The first is systems.
This person said we've beenfocused on hiring and dialing in
our sales systems to get moreclients in the door and close
more sales.
As a result, frequency ofcontacting leads has improved,

(07:45):
which has directly resulted inmore sales, higher revenue, and
ultimately a greater net ownerbenefit.
So I want to pause there for asecond.
Instead of thinking, like,what's the next big marketing
funnel or how do I get better atTikTok?
What this gym owner did wascalled leads faster.
That's it.
And that put them on the top 10leaderboard.
Like that's the sole point ofimprovement.

(08:05):
And a lot of gym owners knowthey should do this and they
neglect it.
Some people don't call theirleads at all.
I mean, it's insane.
It's like being out in arowboat and seeing somebody
drowning, waving their hands,help me, help me, and you
ignoring them are saying, ah,you know, I'll call them back
tomorrow.
Come on.
That's really like what this isall about here.
And just having a system forfast callbacks makes a massive

(08:26):
difference.
I talked to another mentor whoworked with the gym on this
leaderboard, and they alsotalked about analysis and
systems.
So the mentor said, this gymhas tightened their organic and
affinity marketing, improvedwebsite clarity, simplified the
NSI booking and pricing flow,and built a consistent follow-up
process, especially aroundbring-a-friend events.
All these we identified duringour calls the past few months,

(08:48):
and they put it into rapidaction.
As a result, they're nowattracting more of the right
leads, which makes the salesprocess easier and way more
predictable.
The sale feels easier becausethe systems are doing the heavy
lifting long before theconversation even starts.
Another key habit that wasshared by a lot of people on the
leaderboard were advertisingskills and lead nurture.

(09:09):
So this mentor was talkingabout this gym, and he said his
metrics are a direct reflectionof the deep work we did on
improving his ads and teachinghim how to read his data in the
marketing office hours and ourone-on-ones.
We then got really granular onthe exact steps needed in his
lead nurture to make those leadsuh book and show up for their
NSIs.
So what we're talking aboutthere, office hours, every week

(09:32):
in the TwoBrain ecosystem, wehave this group call in the
growth program where ColumerRiley gets on and he talks about
advertising.
And it's not just like a lessonor here's what's new.
It's let's call up your adsmanager and troubleshoot your
ads, let's tweak them, let's fixit on the call.
And then we also haveone-on-one mentorship for every
single person in TwoBrain.

(09:53):
So they can do an analysis withsomebody who knows what they're
doing, who has an objectiveperspective on all their
marketing and can say, like,here's what you need to improve.
In this case, it was leadnurture.
And without that objectiveperspective of a mentor, the gym
owner probably would not havebeen able to say, like, yeah,
lead nurture is our problem.
So the mentor said, let's lookat your metrics.
They tore down all the metrics.

(10:14):
They said, here's exactly whatyou need to do, here's what you
need to uh the system that youneed, here's what exactly to
say, here's the text to send,and they improved it.
This is not just a matter oflike cut and paste this template
or automate this system in yourCRM.
This is where mentorship isactually critical in improving
your gym, just like yourcoaching is critical in

(10:34):
improving somebody's air squatbench press handstand.
Another common denominator onthis leaderboard is lead
nurture.
So this mentor I was talking tosaid this about the gym.
He said his total leads werealready high.
So we targeted his lead nurtureprocess and the no-sweat intro,
and that really helped improveshow and close rate.
Another mentor said that theclient did best by buying back

(10:57):
their time and reinvesting thattime into marketing.
They said one mistake that thegym owner made early on was
overbooking himself, whichlimited the available NSI time
slots, lim and also limited hisability to nurture the leads he
was getting, and limited hismindset on what was possible.
Once we optimized his funnelsand bought back his time in a
few areas, he was able togenerate more leads, call them

(11:19):
quickly, and ensure hisautomations were correct.
You know, one of the bigfailures that a lot of gym
owners have in marketing is theyjust don't carve out time to do
it.
It's kind of like the lastthing they do after everything
else is done.
And so they spend all theirtime on low-value roles that
other people could be doinginstead of blocking off time to
be deliberate about theirmarketing.
As a result, their marketingeither happens by accident or

(11:40):
not at all, and they always feellike they're in the back seat
of their business and theirbusiness just slowly fails, and
they say, I guess I was unlucky,or they blame somebody else.
Now here's a unique idea.
So this client did somethingcalled an open house.
And what they did was they theyran this like relaunch with a
new rebrand and an open housewhen they did it to generate a
bunch of leads.

(12:00):
Then they did a really good jobof booking those people into
NSIs, nurturing those leads andclosing those sales.
This comment from a mentor Ilove.
They talked about focusing onniches and networking.
And they were talking about thegym owner when they said she
has a great close rate as aresult of a project we've worked
on to reach out to localsinterested in her services.
We identified a niche in herlocal market for beginner

(12:23):
lifters, and she marketsdirectly to them, as well as
networking with localbusinesses, which provides her
with a pipeline of warm leadsthat are ready to sign up.
She also recently added Pilatesto her offerings and has gotten
many new members from that aswell.
So that leads us into the nextcomment, which is knowing your
avatar and getting lots of reps.
This gym owner has vastlyimproved his close rate by

(12:45):
defining who he serves andspeaking directly with them.
He regularly does practice repswith his team and audits his
sales pipeline.
Are you doing practice repswith your team?
Are you auditing your pipeline?
Are you looking at yournumbers?
If not, get a mentor to helpyou right away.
And this leads us toconsistency.
Every single person on themarketing leaderboards are
consistent.

(13:05):
So here's the quote from amentor.
This gym owner's set rate isthe result of several two-brain
best practices, consistentsocial media marketing to help
build brand awareness and trust,calling and texting leads
immediately, and offering plentyof availability for
appointments.
Consistency across all threehas helped ensure leads already
know like and trust is gym andhas reduced friction in taking

(13:28):
the next step of signing up fora no-sweat intro.
Look, you could work with amentor for the next 10 years
just on these three things yourmarketing, your lead nurture,
and your sales.
And when you get really, reallygood at one, you start working
on the next one.
And when you get great at that,you start working on the third
thing.
And then you come back and youimprove the top of the funnel
even more.

(13:48):
If you had a mentor who justdid that with you for the next
10 years, you'd be unstoppable.
Nothing could stop the growthof your gym.
We work with on a lot of otherthings because there are things
that are stopping your growth intwo-brain mentorship.
But eventually you get to apoint where you just need to get
better and better and better atmarketing.
And that takes a lot of reps,it takes a lot of practice, and

(14:10):
it takes an objective eye to seewhat your big opportunities
are.
The last comment, and the thingthat these marketing leaders
all have in common is they tracktheir metrics.
I've said this a few times inthis podcast, but this mentor
said our first focus was toreview metrics weekly.
So from this, he could see howclose he was to a lifetime
revenue PR.
By monitoring his metrics, itwas easy for him to increase the

(14:30):
volume of his outbound leadnurture via phone calls,
WhatsApp, and emails.
So they used the two-braindashboard, and the mentor said,
I identified his set to showrate was low from the amount of
leads that he was getting in thetwo-brain dashboard.
Then I used two-brain's leadnurture resources to help him
improve his nurture process andincrease his show rate.
This led to improved revenuefor the gym.

(14:53):
Another mentor also mentionedthe two-brain dashboard.
He said this gym owner is verymetrics driven and pays
attention every month to trendsin his dashboard.
He didn't use any dramatictactics.
He was just consistent withapplying them.
Look, nobody starts off beingmetrics driven or passionate
about looking at the two-braindashboard or looking at the
spreadsheets or pulling numbers.

(15:13):
That is a skill that you haveto build.
But I promise you, once you doit a few times, you go, oh, I
get it.
And immediately your bigopportunities in the gym become
obvious.
The reason that your gym isprobably not growing and you're
listening to this podcast isbecause you're not having those
epiphanies.
You're not seeing what'sstopping you.
Learning to read the dashboardis what mentorship is all about.

(15:35):
It's not forcing you to put inyour metrics just so that we can
track your progress.
It's about teaching you to usemetrics to identify
opportunities and then solveyour own problems in the future.
Right?
So sound marketing is based onsystems consistently doing the
important stuff, metrics,knowing where the weak links
are, and then targetedimprovement with the help of a
mentor, having an objectiveperspective, say here's what you

(15:56):
need to improve.
So you build systems, you trackyour metrics every month, you
ID your weak spots with anexpert's help, and then you take
swift action to improve yoursystem and repeat and repeat
again and repeat forever andretire wealthy.
The gym owners on ourleaderboard are following that
plan.
They're not using secretmarketing tactics, they're using
the right marketing tacticsconsistently over and over and

(16:19):
getting better and better andbetter at them.
One of them used it to add 20new clients at $309 per month.
That's $6,000 in new recurringrevenue, not one-time bait and
switch offers.
I'd like to help you earn moreclients too.
So do one of these two thingsright now.
First, use the link below toget to our Gym Owners United
group.
When you're in there, send me aDM to request my guide to

(16:41):
generating 30 leads in 30 dayswithout using paid ads.
I'll just send it right over toyou.
Or go big.
Let's talk about building adetailed marketing plan for your
unique business.
A mentor can analyze yourfunnels and give you the exact
steps you need to take to addmore high value members every
month.
To talk about working together,book a call via the link below.
I'm Chris Cooper.

(17:02):
Thanks for checking out thisepisode of Runner Profitable.
Jim, please hit subscribe onyour way out the door.