Four rounds to get a price out of the owner

We finished my Tuesday call with a live roleplay. One of the guys played the lead and went straight for the thing that makes every one of us flinch.

Just tell me what it costs.

I never answered him. I also never dodged it, and the whole lesson sits in that gap.

In the roleplay he wanted forty pounds of muscle in six months. To actually deliver that you're looking at personal training two or three times a week, classes on top of it, and nutrition. Call it nine hundred a month.

So if I quote him a hundred seventy-five for group classes, one of two things happens. Either he joins and doesn't get close to what he asked for, or he finds out in month two that the real number was nine hundred and now I'm the guy who low-balled him. Any number I say at the front of that conversation is a number I'm being dishonest with.

Then I did something slightly mean, live, with no warning.

I turned to another owner on the call and asked him what his gym costs.

It took FOUR ROUNDS of back and forth before he got to an answer. And he owns the place. He sets the prices. He eventually landed on something like: group classes start around a hundred fifty, personal training packages run up to a thousand, you're somewhere in between, and we'd have to sit down to know where.

That's a completely correct answer. It also took four rounds to pull out of the man who owns the building.

So what exactly were you planning to say in eight seconds, on the phone, to a stranger who thinks a gym costs ten dollars a month?

You can't quote a price you don't have. Not because you're hiding it. Because you genuinely do not have it yet. You don't know what they need.

When they won't let it go, and some of them won't, give them the honest range. Tell them why the real number needs a conversation. Then keep going. Nothing is being concealed. You told them the truth, which is that you don't have enough information about them yet to be accurate, and being accurate matters more to you than being fast.

The line I keep coming back to, and the one that took the pressure off this whole thing for me:

I'm not selling you on joining my gym yet. I'm selling you on bringing your ass into the building, so I can find out whether this is even a good fit.

The visit is the only thing that gets sold over the phone. Everything else gets sold in a chair, in your gym, with a human being sitting across from you.

Nick

Nick Habich owns Shark Bite Fitness in Cape Coral, Florida, and coaches gym owners in Pathfinder Collective. These notes go out to his email list on Tuesdays and Thursdays.