A great brand is built, sustained, and supported by communication, marketing, and direct-response marketing. That’s the most fundamental premise of Iron Tribe. We have to be able to communicate our brand massage to our members and to the world in ways that can be efficiently managed and accurately tracked and evaluated for ROI.
We were at our first ever GKIC SuperConference in Chicago (2011), when Forrest and I heard about this CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software called Infusionsoft. Already frustrated with our CRM system and the client scheduling and billings software we were using to run our then two gyms, we knew we needed a technological solution that was more congruent with the high-level client experience we were planning to scale.
Our desire was to build an entire platform that I named The Bay Door (since we have a signature roll-up bay door in just about every Iron Tribe gym), which I was hoping to provide each franchisee as a “soup-to-nuts” platform with two user interfaces (UI). The vision was for one set of client UI’s (website, in-store iPad app for product purchasing, and an iPhone app) and one UI for staff (to run their Iron Tribe gym in all capacities). The goal was to automate as many activities as possible while making anything done manually much easier.
My previous business was a 2008 tech startup where I was constantly overseeing developers, and I had learned enough to know that you can build anything you want—if you have detailed specifications mapped out, lots of cash, and some serious patience. However, without these things, you’re in for a run you may not be able to sustain or outlast. Many have tried. Most have failed.
As we “spec’d out” the project, several development firms were quoting the project to cost as much as seven figures! There wasn’t one firm who thought the project would cost less than six figures.
However, there was a group of Iron Tribe member athletes who saw the same potential that I did, and we came together to produce something pretty special for a brand as young as ours, for a much lower front-end investment with invaluable back-end prosperity opportunities for everyone involved.
The big idea for The Bay Door was simple. Create an Iron Tribe-specific Application Program Interface (API) hub that could leverage pre-built intranet (Google Apps and Yammer) and CRM (Infusionsoft) technologies to integrate with a custom-built client experience engine.
All that means is that cloud-based “software as a service” (SaaS) platforms like Google Apps, Yammer, and Infusionsoft have created API plug-ins that allow you to “pipe it in” to your own custom software and essentially leverage their functionalities to look and feel like your brand.
As simple as it sounds, it can become very complex. As this build began, I also began to test and integrate Infusionsoft into our then two gyms. The process of integrating it into those gyms was an amazing education process for Forrest and me. It forced us to look at the entire sales, marketing, and operations life cycle that each client experiences on the front end, and then systematize it in a way for our staff to monitor and act on in the back end, unless that action can be automated, in which case you just DO NOTHING!
I coined the sales, marketing, and operations life cycle as The Perfect Athlete Life Cycle, and to this day, we are continuing to develop it more and more with automated and manual, external and internal marketing strategies. (See Figures 9.1A and B.)
FIGURE 9.1A: Iron Tribe Fitness Client Management
FIGURE 9.1B: Iron Tribe Perfect Athlete Life Cycle
While our developers began working away at the first version of The Bay Door technology, our Infusionsoft experiment was bearing a great deal of fruit. Our gym-specific Infusionsoft dashboards were keeping management much more organized about where each contact from their list was in respect to The Perfect Athlete Life Cycle stages, which was cuing gym staff to utilize specific systems that encourage acquisition and retention of member athletes.
In addition to this, a great deal of prospect nurturing and client on-ramp automation was in place to take the onus off of each gym’s staff, but still ensure that Iron Tribe engagement was being established and maintained for each contact in our database, no matter which stage of The Perfect Athlete Life Cycle they were in.
However, as helpful as these two preceding results were, the biggest result was the fact that we went from 83% of our leads “raising their hands of interest” offline in 2011 (phone calls and walk-ins) to 78% of them coming in through the internet (Infusionsoft web forms) in 2012!
This is the ultimate story of marketing becoming “sales in print.” Infusionsoft changed our entire conversion system and the rate at which we were converting prospects into new member athletes.
Because the majority of our prospects were being sent to the web, whether it was a direct-response ad or a referral, they were becoming educated with the “LIFE. Changed.” stories both on the website itself and, once they filled out a web form, via automated follow-up mail and email sequences.
Recommended Resource: Infusionsoft
Dan Kennedy endorses Infusionsoft, and GKIC and many of his clients’ business’s direct marketing, “no-fail” follow-up marketing, and CRM functions are powered by Infusionsoft. You can learn more and get an online demo of Infusionsoft at www.Infusionsoft.com. Many, many businesses, incidentally, utilize Infusionsoft “off the shelf” with no customization or integration into other platforms. Infusionsoft also provides marketing templates created by Dan Kennedy. A convenient place to meet with Infusionsoft representatives, learn about it, and meet and talk with users is the annual GKIC SuperConferenceSM or annual GKIC Info-SUMMITSM, to which you will automatically receive invitations if taking advantage of the FREE OFFER FROM DAN on page 261.
So instead of hearing about Iron Tribe and then calling or walking in to speak to a salesperson, prospects were getting educated about us on demand and on their terms, before the person-to-person sales process ever began.
Once they were convinced of Iron Tribe’s validity to transform them from the marketing process, they were cued to call and set up a consultation at the gym closest to them.
The result was a whopping 96% close rate at the consultation table because they come in presold to join the tribe!
Forrest and I thought this test was something special enough to at least apply for the Infusionsoft Ultimate Marketer of the Year award, even though we knew that more than 10,000 businesses around the world use the software, and it’d be tough to actually win the award. However, to our surprise, we not only were selected to present on stage in front of more than 2,000 people, as one of the four finalists for this award, but we were voted the winners!
Winning the award has had an ROI of its own for the franchise model because we were crowned as the winners on the very same day that we officially began franchising. Since then, the award has gotten us more PR and speaking opportunities to grow our expert status and credibility in just one year than most established brands have earned over a much longer time period, with a price tag that we couldn’t have afforded.
As for The Bay Door, our developers have knocked it out of the park, building tech that our franchisees can utilize to continue growing the Iron Tribe brand within their own tribes. So it is taking the results of this Infusionsoft test and cranking it up to an even higher standard.
The back-end staff UI streamlines staff processes that used to seem tedious to allow their jobs to be focused more on prospect and client engagement and much less on the creative external and internal marketing processes that they’d rather not think about.
The front-end client UIs provide constant brand imprints on the brains of each Iron Tribe athlete through the website, iPad, and iPhone applications. They not only continue to enhance retention but, once again, increase members’ ability to refer and help us grow faster than ever.
Oh, yeah, and it gives us a place and automated method to sell them further products and services on top of their monthly athlete membership subscriptions.
You may be able to accomplish a lot of this with basic Infusionsoft or with other technology. Maybe you’ll need to band together with other owners and operators of your kind of business to get a customized or semi-customized automated marketing system built. However you have to do it, you’ll find that automation of marketing and communications is a game-changer and a great competitive advantage.
Go to www.IronTribeFranchise.com/NoBS to watch Jim Cavale and Forrest Walden provide commentary on this chapter and see real Iron Tribe marketing samples along with a special look inside of The Bay Door software platform!