Join guest host Ben Snedeker and Sean Greeley, the CEO of Net Profit Explosion, as we chat about how to market your business problems that come along with a marketing and growth focused mind set.
Transcript
Ben Snedeker: Hello listeners, and welcome back to another episode of the Small Business Success podcast. I'm your host Ben Snedeker filling in for Dusey. He's out hiking the Grand Canyon right now, so I'll be taking you on a journey today with my guest Sean Greeley. [00:00:30] Sean, welcome to the podcast.
Sean Greeley: Hey, thanks. Great to be here today. I'm excited to talk to everybody, and hopefully we can help some people grow from this call.
Ben Snedeker: That's right. Sean, yeah, give us a little bit of a background on who you are, and what you do, and we'd love to hear it.
Sean Greeley: Yeah. Thanks. So, it's great to be here with Infusionsoft. I've been a Infusionsoft friend and family member for a long time.
Ben Snedeker: Awesome.
Sean Greeley: My company's called NPE. We've been around since July of [00:01:00] '06, so 11 years now. We've been working with fitness businesses around the world, helping them grow their business and create the life they want for themselves and their families. We've done a lot of work with InfusionSoft over the years. Really, our company focuses on everything to serve small business owners from the startup phase to the growth phase to really the scale phase, we call it, and everything that supports that journey in helping to grow a company, grow revenue, grow profit, and [00:01:30] create more freedom and opportunity for the business owners.
Like I said, we've been doing this 11 years. So, the last period of time, we've served over 36,000 fitness businesses in 96 countries. NPE today has a staff of about 50 people. Our main headquarters are based in Orlando, Florida in the U.S. Then we have an office in London, and we have an office in Sydney. It's just been an awesome run really supporting small business success around the world in our vertical. Without a doubt, we wouldn't be able to do what we do or [00:02:00] help our customers do what they want to do were it not for InfusionSoft as part of powering that solution. I'm excited to be here today and hopefully share some great takeaways for all the listeners on the call.
Ben Snedeker: Oh, that's great. That's really great. Yeah, let's get a little bit deep in here. We're talking about your vertical, which is the Fitness Industry. What are some challenges that are unique to that industry? I can sort of think of one, which is that you've got [00:02:30] people who are excited about growing, working out, and whatnot, and you've got to deal with the fall-off that happens every year, that January 1 commitment to change and improve and then sort of lack of excitement somewhere around March. What other challenges are there?
Sean Greeley: Yeah. Well globally, the Fitness Industry has been growing tremendously in the past several [00:03:00] years. It's not slowing down. We've seen growth every year. So, the demand for health, and fitness, and wellness, and the investment that goes into that globally continues to increase every year. I think as part of that growth, the industry continues to find itself in terms of there are in some areas low barrier to entry, so you can get a lot of people coming in. You can get low qualifications and standards for really delivering services, and you get more competition. [00:03:30] So, that creates an ... well, both a challenge in the marketplace but also tremendous opportunity.
Certainly when it comes to professional services and health and wellness services, you're dealing with a very sensitive, important issue in someone's life what they're looking to solve. When you're talking about your health, your wellness or being able to address an injury or pain, these are things that we're very emotionally invested in. [00:04:00] When it comes to wanting solutions, everybody wants the best. You never hear anybody say, "I want to find the cheapest option," they want to find the best option, because when it comes to something so serious and so impactful on your quality of life and your emotional health and wellbeing, not just your physical health, we want the best.
So, what we really do is helping our clients, the fitness professionals, businesses we serve, how do they continue [00:04:30] to position themselves as the best, how they continue to communicate the best, and how can they lead the market and differentiate appropriately so that they can serve more people in a better way and continue to do so as they grow through the stages of their entrepreneurial journey and their story as a business owner. We're all working to solve the problems in the market that we serves. As we do, we get the opportunity to continue to solve our own problems and achieve our goals as entrepreneurs [00:05:00] and business owners.
Fitness is like every other space in that. I think given the intensity of the problems that we're solving, how people feel about their body, how they feel about their health, how they're dealing with pain, how they're extending their life or quality of life, if they've got an injury or out of shape, these are very sensitive issues that demand a lot of care and a lot of focus to serve the market well.
Ben Snedeker: That's really interesting. It does seem like [00:05:30] this is a very competitive space. How do business owners stand out in this kind of arena? It seems like there would be a lot of white noise and there would be a challenge with making your brand stand out. Is there anything that these business owners, the successful ones, have been able to do in order to stand out?
Sean Greeley: Yeah. It's a great question. It really varies at every stage of what you've got to do to grow to the next level. For sure it all starts with delivering a great client experience. [00:06:00] Are you really clear about the market you're serving? You can't just say, "Anybody who wants to be healthy, or lose weight, or be fit," because that's too broad. How do we get clarity around the market we're really service? How do we make sure we provide the best solution and the best client experience that's going to actually deliver results, over-deliver on the value proposition that we make to the market, captured rates, success stories, and have customers just fall in love with us? Right?
When [00:06:30] we do that, that's how we just continue to gain more traction. We extend customer lifetime value. We are allowed to serve people better and longer and helping them and create value in their lives. It all starts with that. I think so many people that maybe are naturally attracted to sales and marketing and wanting to learn more about growth don't often take enough time making sure that we've got a great experience. Are we really serving customers in the best [00:07:00] way possible? Are they getting tremendous value? Do we have a good onboarding experience? Do we have a good ongoing service experience? Are we able to share that and really improve that?
So, that's number one. Until you've got that, then really nothing can really happen. As we get really a great experience that we're serving the market in a powerful way, and we're getting results, and we're getting over-delivery on the value proposition we've made to the market, then it's all about shifting to sales and marketing and [00:07:30] how do we communicate that message about who we are, and how we serve people, and how we differentiate from other options, and how we create just great results and value for those we serve to the market. That's when we get into sales and marketing, branding, messaging, certainly automation is going to support connecting and engaging with customers in the sales and marketing lifecycle. All the fun stuff that the InfusionSoft platform comes in and serves is what we get to go do [00:08:00] once we've got that foundation in place.
Ben Snedeker: That's awesome. Getting that messaging correct and having it be consistent all the way through discovery to purchase, or at least subscription I guess in this case, and then all the way through to the entire life of that membership, that's actually a big challenge. At least in the Fitness Industry, how do they manage to come up with that entire journey? What are some strategies for doing that?
Sean Greeley: [00:08:30] Well, it's a process. Right? I think we have some different exercises we support our clients with in really getting clarity around that messaging. Then once we've got that framework and things like ... we've got to know, "Who is the customer really serving? What benefits do we provide them? What's the problem that we solve? What category are we place ourselves in?" For instance in fitness, there's many [00:09:00] different categories we could be. Are we a gym? Are we a personal trainer? Are we a coach? What really are we? How do we compare ourselves and what type of segment when people think about fitness? You can't just say fitness, it's too broad. So, getting clarity on that. Then, how do we differentiate? How are we different within that category? If it's a new category, how are we positioning that category as a new or better solution to the problem the market's trying to solve?
Other important points are, what's our purpose. [00:09:30] What do we care about and what are our values that really inspire and attract others to us? Why should people believe the claims that we make or what we have to say? What makes us an expert? What makes us someone who's a trusted authority that should be respected as legitimate? As we can get answers to those questions, really define them well, that determines the framework of our messaging and really kind of the [00:10:00] core architecture of how we talk about our business and how we teach our clients to talk about their businesses.
Then we're just learning how to really place that at the right place at the right time given which stage we're at in the marketing lifecycle. Right? Are we just attracting people to us? Are we in the capture stage where we're getting them to opt-in to our web pages or capture details on the phone or at an event? Are we in the nurture sequence? Are we really building that trust in an ongoing way and giving [00:10:30] great information to build reciprocity? Are we in the conversion stage? Are we at the point where now we're making an offer, we're letting people people take advantage of it, and now we're converting that interest into a paying client for the business really and helping that prospective client commit to their goals, commit to the path forward to the solution they want for themselves, and then leading them, leading the conversation, leading them in that direction to be successful?
That's all part of the fun. [00:11:00] I think it all starts, first and foremost, in how to have ... We teach the sales process really next. As the sales process, we have a sales system we've taught here for 11 years now called the Auto-Closer Fitness Sales System. There's seven and a half steps to the process. It's really a communication model for face-to-face communication and driving someone who's interested into a paying client for the business. So, as we get that process down, then the marketing [00:11:30] to feed into that sales process is where the fun starts to really happen in scaling the business.
Ben Snedeker: Awesome. It sounds like the biggest challenge to having a complete sales process through into a complete customer experience is being organized around your ability to deliver all of those points at all the right times. It seems like if you didn't have something to help you that it would actually get [00:12:00] pretty chaotic pretty fast in terms of just some of these ... managing each of these customers, managing each of their journeys through the marketing funnel and down into their life as a member of a fitness center, or gym, or whatever. It sounds like it would be pretty chaotic.
Sean Greeley: Yeah, absolutely. That's where the InfusionSoft Technology Stack [00:12:30] has been critical to support our clients in growing their business. We were actually one of the first companies in the early days many, many years ago to create a co-branded version of content with InfusionSoft. We've upgraded that every year since, but we have really built out some great process and systems that allow our clients to not just try to figure this out but to ... not trying to do creative, and be a web developer, [00:13:00] and figuring how this all should be structured and built, but really just to be an operator, to make it very easy, have the right things in front of you at the right time, and let the system just do the work for you.
That organization is key and, really, that ability to focus is key because it does take time if you're trying to do all of those things at once, trying to figure out, "What do I say? What's the order of which I should structure my communication? How do I build that technology, and then how do I run it?" We really want our clients [00:13:30] in NPE, and really anybody in fitness who's looking to grow, to be able to have that solution and really just be an operator. "Here's the system. Here's how you use it. Go," and not having to reinvent the wheel.
Ben Snedeker: Well, that's fantastic, Sean. I really thank you for joining us on the podcast today. I really think this is something that every business can identify with, just pulling together each aspect of the journey and making it a consistent one across the way. So, [00:14:00] I really want to thank you for your time. Thanks for joining us today.
Sean Greeley: My pleasure guys.
Ben Snedeker: Well, thanks again for joining us on the Small Business Success podcast. It was a pleasure to have Sean Greeley on with us today. I just want to offer also ... and Sean talked a lot about the power of InfusionSoft for small businesses in any sector, but specifically the fitness sector. We actually have a free trial going on right now. So, you can sign up for two [00:14:30] weeks of campaign tools and coaching without spending a dime. It's all free. I recommend if you've been thinking about how to organize your sales and marketing but you aren't sure you're ready to take the plunge, check this out. You'll quickly see the value. You can just go to bit.ly/sbsfreetrial. That's bit.ly/sbsfreetrial, sbsfreetrial.