The best salespeople are enthusiastic, empathetic, and able to learn from deals won and deals lost. You know that, when your team is well-trained and motivated, you're guaranteed to convert more prospects into club members and retain more existing members.

But if your sales team is like those at most fitness clubs today, your reps are probably feeling stretched thin and on the verge of burnout. In fact, the average turnover rate for salespeople is a mind-blowing 35%. Compare that to the average turnover rate for all industries of 13%, and it’s clear that, to retain more of your sales reps, you need to give them tools and strategies to work smarter — not harder.

In this blog article, you’ll find five ways to optimize your sales team’s time and energy to boost motivation and your bottom line.

1. Define Your Club’s Buyer Personas

In theory, your sales team should devote its time to converting leads who will benefit the most from your club’s services. But more than a third (34%) of salespeople said that prospecting and lead qualification are their greatest challenges, according to Pipedrive.

 If your team is wasting valuable time chasing the wrong leads, they’re probably feeling demoralized. But there’s an easy way to avoid this pitfall: buyer personas. A buyer personas is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal club member based on real data about your current members.

 Your club should create two to four buyer personas that include demographic and psychographic information, as well as buyer challenges and pain points. The more detailed and accurate your buyer personas, the more efficient and successful your sales process will be.

For example, if your kickboxing studio primarily caters to suburban millennials with school-aged children but your sales reps are trying to convert urban-dwelling Gen Zers, something’s broken. Creating buyer personas will streamline the sales process to help your sales team focus on the highest-quality leads.

Read "Level Up B2C Membership Sales and Retention with 4 B2B Best Practices" for more tips on boosting productivity.

2. Create Content for Sales Enablement

Did you know that the average sales rep spends more than one-third of their day looking for or creating content to usher prospects through the sales funnel? Let’s give your sales team that valuable time back. How? Sales enablement content.

With clear buyer personas in tow, you can create content — or retool existing content — to enable your sales team to sell more effectively. Start by asking your salespeople what they need to sell more effectively. Then, marketing and/or sales can work together to create or curate that content. Finally, when the time is right, your salespeople can easily pull the content they need to turn a prospect into a member.

Giving your sales team a full arsenal of evergreen sales enablement content for all buyer personas at every stage of the sales cycle will help them convert leads faster and sell more enthusiastically. Here are a few examples of content you might want to stock up on:

• Blog content about the benefits of joining a gym
• Sales scripts for phone calls
• “Book a Tour” landing page
• On-demand video tour of your gym
• Email or text message templates
• “Free Day Pass” landing page
  
  

3. Create a Consistent Sales Process

The best way to optimize your sales team’s productivity and success is to create a consistent sales process. But before you can create a repeatable process that works, you have to ask some important questions about your existing process. Consider your sales goals, and then ask the following questions:

• What strategies or tactics are working right now?
• Are there any gaps or challenges in our sales process?
• Where do leads usually go cold or fall out of the sales cycle? Why?
• Are we missing any resources, whether people or technology?

Once you’ve retooled your sales process, be sure to reassess on a quarterly basis. Figure out what’s worked and what still needs tweaking, and make sure everyone is on board and following the same process.

4. Schedule Time for Responding to Emails

Chances are your sales team responds to every email as soon as it comes in because they’re chasing leads in order to hit goals. But it’s not a productive way to work, because you’re in a perpetual state of distraction.

We recommend maximizing your sales team’s productivity by following the path of Tim Ferriss, who recommends batching email replies into two times per day: 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. Batching will help your sales team take a more proactive — and less reactive — approach to email communications and lead engagement.

But if your salespeople cringe at the thought of only checking email twice per day when they need to get bodies in your club doors, remind them that they can rely on automation to keep the wheels turning. While they focus on calling hot leads and engaging face-to-face with prospects, automation ensures potential club members are still being pushed through the sales funnel.

5. Embrace Automation with a CRM

Speaking of automation, we know what you’re thinking: If I have such a small sales team and budget, why should I invest in automation or customer relationship management (CRM) software? Just imagine how much more effectively your sales team could sell if it devoted more time to personal touches with leads at the bottom of the sales funnel — and less time on top-of-the-funnel interactions that could be automated.

According to a LinkedIn survey of sales professionals, 65% say they use a CRM, and 97% consider sales technology “very important” or “important.” With the right sales automation software, you can set early outreach and follow-up on auto-pilot, freeing up your team to focus on personal engagements with leads who are closer to signing up.

 Here’s what your CRM software should let you do:

• Track leads from multiple sources in one place for easy follow-up.
• Automate text and email campaigns to deliver the right message at the right time.
• Give you deep insight into what sales efforts are working and which aren’t so you can do more of what works best.
  
  

Optimize Your Sales Team’s Success with Club OS

With these five sales strategies, you can help optimize your sales team’s productivity. But to maximize your team’s time and energy, you need to take the leap and implement an all-in-one CRM like Club OS. Let your sales team take the reins on high-touch, bottom-of-the-funnel interactions, and let your CRM do the rest.

Offering marketing automation and member engagement solutions, the Club OS CRM can help you attract more members, follow up faster, boost revenue, and more. CLICK HERE FOR A FREE DEMO — and help take your sales team to the next level.