THE DEATH OF SALES – A LIABILITY FOR MARTIAL ARTS BUSINESSES

When we hear of sales, most of us think of salesmen continuously pestering us to buy their products, and out of annoyance we collectively demand for the death of sales. But the death of sales might not necessarily be a good thing. In fact, it is quite bad for your martial arts school.

Eliminating the sales position inside of your martial arts business means you will be limiting the actual human interaction with your customers. Having a sales process allows you to dig into your potential customer’s life, their preferences, limitations, etc. and this further limits what you can do to help improve their life, and ultimately limits you on how much you can charge to change that person’s life.

The first factor is that when you do a proper sale, it’s the first step in the leadership process. Leadership is the ability to influence or motivate a person or group to act towards achieving a goal. You are leading the person towards the result that they need in order to transform their life. You are not just selling punches and kicks; you are selling your customer a transformation that’s going to occur in your program. So if you eliminate the sales part of the process, you are missing this mindset of service and leadership that you need to adapt. Only by adapting this mindset are you going to take responsibility to completely understand your customer. “What is it that they need? How can I help them to achieve it? How can I get to know them personally?” These are some of the questions you should know the answer to, about your students, in order to develop your relationship with them. As the Sales and system sensei Jennifer Waters says, “People don’t quit services, they quit relationships.” If you are not developing this relationship from day 1, you are going to have a harder time keeping this person active.

With the dawn of the covid-19 pandemic, tons of people started aiming to get active, get involved, start new activities, etc and this has led to a surge in martial arts businesses. However, now that things are starting to go back to “normal”, and especially with a recession coming up, a lot of those customers are starting to pull back from these activities. One effective way to recession-proof your martial arts business is to make sure that you have a very tight sales process, and the way to do that is to dig into your customer and build the relationship from day one.

Another drawback of eliminating the sales process is that you also eliminate preframing any additional programs you might have in the future. If you put into your student’s head from the beginning, during the sales period, that in the future they can be eligible for/opt for this other new program, it will cultivate their interest it in and increase your chances for recruiting students for future new programs.

A third important loss from eliminating sales is that it will limit your ability to include different pricing options or tiers, or to be flexible with payments. If some student is not able to afford your program, it’s important you have options to help them afford it. In that case you are not missing out on people and only getting the students for whom it is easy to hand over the money. And before you decide that those are the only people you want in your program, you might want to reconsider that stance. Someone who finds it easy to dispose their income in your services will find it equally easy to withdraw from your services, since it doesn’t mean as much to them as it would mean to someone who is sacrificing a significant portion of their income for their child to have martial arts training; that person will value your services at a totally different level. Therefore you need to have a healthy mix of both of those types of students in your school, you mustn’t eliminate those people that you can help figure out their personal financial situation in order for them to be able to afford your program. Eliminating the sales position will prohibit you from digging into the conversation with your customers about their personal finances. You as a leader need to be able to lead them through the process of figuring out a program that suits them financially.

So it is necessary to have a sales position in your school, someone who is looking into the health of the new students that are coming in, and is digging into why they want to start and helping them activate at certain milestones to ascertain that they’re achieving their desired results. This ultimately promotes having a healthy, vibrant sales process inside your school that is serving the community without any hard feelings from the customers about the finances and services.

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