KNOW YOUR COMPETITION

Who is your real competitor? You are not competing against another martial arts school. If your thoughts are along the lines of “The academy down the street is charging way too much money, I’m cheaper, I just don’t understand why people in my community don’t value the things I do, I have better quality, etc.”, then a change is due.

Your pricing does not need to match that of the other schools in your locality, because they are not your completion. What you are actually competing against is whether or not you have a process to change someone’s life through what you do. That is what is required, for there to be a transformation physically, mentally or emotionally.

How to make that happen, you ask? Take an adult for example. They come in and you help them lose twenty pounds, which is a transformation. Or maybe a kid, who is getting bullied, comes in and trains with you, and is no longer getting bullied. That is a transformation. When you can have such transformations inside your school, which helps change people’s lives, you can have a real service. A real product that actually accomplishes what you have advertised to accomplish in your marketing.

So instead of spending all your energy trying to compete against the business down the street, you need to go and create a system to actually do what you advertise in your marketing. When you have a system, then you are able to demonstrate the power of this transformation when someone comes in for their first lesson. When you can show the customer that given enough time, you will make that transformation happen, they will be more likely to continue with you. Rather than throwing them into a class with empty promises of what might or might not happen, you could map it out on day one for them, which leaves a lasting impression. Setting up a system – where a student is given the opportunity on day one to see the process from beginning to end of what you’re going to do to help get them to that next stage – helps them to put their faith in your program and its power of transformation. It will increase the chances that the customer will enroll in your school, and they will not need to check out other schools.

In the case that a customer wants to go check out another program with some other academy, you need to enquire with them about what exactly they’re looking for which the other school is able to provide and you do not. This way you can dig into what is the real problem.

The other important factor to keep in mind is: if people do not know that you exist or you offer these transformational programs, it will be difficult to divert traffic from other businesses to yours. When you have a major life transformation happening in your academy and people are being impacted so highly in a mental, emotional, or physical manner, then they can’t help but talk about it to everybody else. With people constantly talking about the fact that their life has been transformed and changed so drastically thanks to your program, it eventually leads to your business growing and exploding organically.

It is different from a customer just taking classes, because they are not being impacted by you. They are the ones causing any type of changes to themselves by taking the class, rather than being transformed because of the instructors and coaches at the school. You have to make sure that you are inspiring some type of real life change, not just talking about it during your marketing.

Jennifer Waters, the sales and systems sensei, runs a 7FIGUREDOJO ACADEMY where they use several ways to teach their clients how to do this. They instruct you on what changes you can make in your classes and programs so there is actual life transformation, what changes to make in your sales process so that you can see and chart your progress, and also dig into what is going on the floor during the lessons from the instructors, coaches and senseis. They ensure that there is a real transformation happening to the students and that the front end promise is being fulfilled on the back end, which is the key to actually transforming somebody’s life.

It’s so easy to get caught up in trying to be better than the school down the road, but in the process, we can forget about why we’re providing the service! Creating a system that allows you to provide a quality service that really serves the community should be the top-most priority.

Check out this Video!