Businesses spend a lot of time, money, and energy capturing leads, and the fitness industry is no different. After all, if you can’t effectively reach strangers and transform them into paying gym members, then your club will never grow or even be able to sustain itself.

So, your fitness business has poured plenty of resources into lead generation and has a steady stream of prospects coming in — that’s great! But how many of those leads are actually becoming members? If you’re raking in leads but failing to convert, you’re wasting all those resources you’ve allocated toward gaining them in the first place.

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few of the top reasons prospects lose interest in your gym — and how tracking those unqualified leads will help you refine your sales and marketing process to accelerate growth.

Reason 1: Your follow-up isn’t quick enough.

Did you know that, according to InsideSales, if you wait more than 5 minutes to follow up after a lead-initiated contact, their conversion rate drops by 8X? In that same research, they determined that 57.1% of first call attempts (out of 400+ companies) don’t occur until after more than a week. Think about how much money that disparity is leaving on the table!

As soon as a lead shows interest — e.g., fills out a contact form, clicks on an ad, subscribes to a newsletter — your team should be following up. Why is this so important? Because every minute you wait is more time for them to become leads for your competitors.

If a prospect fills out a form to request more information about your club but doesn’t hear from you for a week, they’re likely going to turn to your competitors during that gap. For the best chance at conversion, you need to follow up with leads while they’re motivated to learn more about you. Setting up an automated follow-up strategy can be a game-changer for capitalizing on fresh leads.

Reason 2: You aren’t nurturing or engaging your leads.

You wouldn’t bring someone home to meet your mom on the first date, right? (We’d hope not). Similarly, you can’t go straight to the big sales pitch as soon as you capture a lead. It’ll come off the same way as a first date family introduction: desperate, pushy, and like you don’t care to get to know them before asking them to commit.

Lead nurturing is integral to the growth of your fitness business. When you spend time getting to know what your prospects want, need, and are striving for, you can gain their trust, personalize their offers, and sell more. You need to show them your gym membership has value before you try to persuade them to pay for it.

Reason 3: You aren’t keeping your leads organized.

When there’s no system in place to organize leads and move them through the sales funnel, prospects inevitably slip through the cracks. Your leads aren’t being nurtured well, and your sales team isn’t able to do their best work.

Not only that, but without a clear, step-by-step sales plan laid out for them, your employees won’t be on the same page about where to go next to convert a lead. They need to know, explicitly, when and how to contact a lead, the CTA for each contact, and so on. A consistent sales process will optimize sales team productivity and help capitalize on every prospect coming through.

Reason 4: You haven’t found the right balance of communication.

Determining the right cadence for communication with leads is pretty much a Goldilocks conundrum: too much or too little and you’ll lose them, but juuust right and you might have yourself a conversion.

Sending too many emails, texts, or other forms of messages will just annoy a prospect and make you appear unprofessional. With this approach, it won’t take long for you to drive them away. On the other hand, if you don’t follow up with them enough, they’ll likely forget about you and move on to a more attentive competitor. The key is to send the right messages at the right time based on where they’re at in their buyer’s journey.

Reason 5: You’re not using the right platforms to reach out.

Mastering the communication process is the key to a successful lead conversion, but don’t forget that the method of delivery is often just as crucial as the content you’re offering. If you’re looking for leads to round out your SilverSneakers program, for instance, Instagram might not be the place to funnel your ad money.

You need to meet your prospects where they are, which means you have to spend the time figuring out where that is. First, you must identify your target audiences. Then, you can find out which social media platforms they’re using, whether they’re more likely to open a text or an email, and so on, and channel your resources into sectors that are actually paying off.

How Data & Analytics Tracking Can Help You Gain Insights into Unqualified Leads

Even if you design the perfect lead generation and nurturing strategies and your team executes them flawlessly, your gym is going to have leads that become uninterested — it’s simply a fact of life. The mistake that many business owners make, however, is casting these unqualified leads aside without learning from them. Often, they’re making this mistake because they don’t have tools that would give them the insight they’d need for learning.

With analytics and reporting software that allows you to track data such as where leads are coming in and where and when they’re dropping off, you can more accurately determine why they’re becoming uninterested. From there, you can brainstorm and implement solutions to prevent future prospects in the funnel from bailing out at those same places. When you can see in hard numbers where, when, and how it’s most valuable for you to engage with leads, you can make better, more informed decisions about marketing spend and the sales process.

Minimize Uninterested Leads & Maximize Conversions with Club OS

Understanding why leads run cold can help you refine your strategies for working them through the sales funnel to ensure they make it to the bottom. But in order to gain that insight and identify and implement those strategies, you need to implement an all-in-one CRM to make it happen.

With Club OS, you’ll have marketing automation, data and analytics reporting, and lead and member engagement solutions at your fingertips. Our software also helps you improve insight into unqualified leads with a section for staff to select why a prospect is no longer interested. When you can automatically follow up with prospects and track unqualified leads, your team is free to focus on what matters most: nurturing qualified leads and engaging your members.

Get started with a free demo today.