Chris Reed is the Director of Program Design at Tatum Human Performance in Scottsdale, Arizona.
When beginning any new golf fitness business, building your customer base is vital to a successful start and continued growth. This is often initiated by getting to know the golf professionals in your area. Over the years, I have created this engagement by going out to work on my own game at local driving ranges and courses.
When fostering these important relationships, you can’t just show up and expect to tap into their client base – you have to use their business and become a customer of theirs, as well. Through conversation over time, your knowledge and expertise can be communicated and, eventually, you will have a mutually-beneficial collaborative endeavor, through which golfers can gain from the services of all parties involved.
As a result, I enjoy the referrals of local pros with students who need fitness services. In turn, as my clients ask for referrals to a PGA Professional, I have options based on where they live and any preferences they may have. This collaboration extends to other fitness pros as well, like individuals who may have clients at their facility who enjoy the general health and wellness amenities offered, but are not privy to golf-specific fitness mentorship.
We also have more formal ways of growing our client roster. For instance, I’ll ask my current contacts for names of individuals in similar positions to theirs, like other professionals whose students may benefit from my services. Through these “warm calls,” as I refer to them, I’m building my contacts, more so than my client list. As my network of professionals grows, so does my customer base. When starting out, you can also place “cold calls,” reaching out to all the pros in your area to introduce yourself and the services you provide.
It often takes more persuasion in these situations, sometime warranting an invitation to have the pro’s own assessment conducted in our facility free of charge. By getting them in our doors to see what we offer, a connection is created that often leads to them sending their students our way. When they see us at work, they value our input more and feel comfortable sharing clients with us. After all, where there’s a golfer, there’s a golfer who needs fitness – the better I am at communicating or demonstrating what I do and the impact I can make, the larger our business will grow.
Business to business collaboration is all about how you can benefit each other and the people each of you serve. We all have our own areas of expertise – sharing that knowledge and not stepping over the line or outside of that realm is an important component of these efforts.
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