Personal trainer success has almost as much to do with what you do outside the gym as what you do inside of it. Inside the gym your making sure you design the proper fitness plan for your client. You make sure they follow proper form and you measure their progress. Outside the gym you worry about things such as scheduling your clients. You look for ways to promote yourself and look for methods of increasing your business. In this post, I will offer you a quick key for personal training success outside of the gym.

Know your customer well…very well

The single most important part of any business, and personal training is a business, is to understand who your customers are. By knowing who your customers are, you are able to market your business specifically to them and dramatically improve your response rates.

The key to knowing your customer is to get data from your clients. Once you begin to analyze the characteristics of your clients you will begin to see trends which will help you create a customer profile. A customer profile will be a typical representation of who your client is and is not. Once you have a client profile, you will be able to tailor all of your marketing efforts: business cards, flyers, websites specifically to this customer. The result will be a dramatically improved response rate and an increase in your business.

So how do you get this data and find out who your customer is? The answer is simple, ask them. By asking them I mean give them a short survey with about 3-5 questions on it.  Ask them to fill it out and begin to analyze.

I have provided 5 questions you can include in your survey:

1. Tell me a little about yourself?

2. What’s your favorite part about personal training?

3. What’s your least favorite part about personal training?

4. What do you need the most help with in your training?

5. What do you struggle with the most?

Final thoughts

The key is to ask broad questions so that they can provide good responses. Yes and No questions will not work well here. Ask your clients these questions and get ready for an eye opeining experience.