They don't care about the 20 pounds

I asked my Tuesday call a question I thought was easy.

Somebody on the phone answers one of your questions. What do you do next?

Two guys jumped in with the same answer. Validate. Both of them said it fast, both of them sounded certain, and both of them were wrong in the way that sounds most right.

Ask a follow-up question first. Let them answer THAT. Then validate.

The order is the whole thing, and here's why it matters more than it looks.

Nobody cares about losing twenty pounds.

They care about something they've quietly decided those twenty pounds will buy them. That's the actual product. The twenty pounds is a proxy they've been carrying around because it's the thing that's socially acceptable to say out loud to a stranger on the phone.

So when they say "I want to lose twenty pounds" and you say "that's a great goal, we can absolutely help with that," you just validated the surface. Congratulations, so did every other gym in town that called them this week. You sound exactly like all of them, because you said the same sentence they did.

Ask why first. "Why now?" or "what changes for you when that happens?" Then shut up.

What comes back is never what you'd have guessed. It's a wedding, or a photo somebody tagged them in, or a flight of stairs at work, or their kid, or a doctor's appointment that scared them. You will not guess it. You don't have to. They'll hand it to you if you leave the space.

THEN validate. Because now you're validating the thing they'll actually change their life over, and you're the only one on their call list who bothered to find it.

I got this wrong for a long time in a way that felt like being good at my job. I was warm, I was fast, I was affirming, and I was affirming a placeholder.

Same problem lives in the opening question, and one of the guys on the call walked right into it. He opens with "what's one fitness goal you want to hit this year." That is a genuinely great question for a member sitting down with you for a goal review. For a stranger who tapped an ad off the couch last night, it's terrible, because they don't have fitness goals yet. They have a situation they want out of.

"What made you reach out today?" gets you a real answer, every time, from a person who has never thought about a goal in their life.

Try the follow-up before the validation on your next call and just notice what they tell you. It's usually not close to the first thing they said.

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.