Introduction
The world of sports has changed a lot in recent years. At the moment talking about sport is talking about the media, communication, events and capital movements. However, there are other aspects: that of sports for oneself, and that of the professional, the manager and professional of the sports facilities. Physical activity seen from the perspective of the person who wants to make this environment their work activity, that of the sports professional who wants to improve and invest in their training or even the sports facility that requires a series of improvements and an evaluation of processes that -on occasions- are totally unknown to him.
In a short time we have observed that sports trends have been changing, I would say progressing towards a higher stage. Physical activity was transformed a long time ago and went from being gymnastics to being Fitness… now we have absorbed certain concepts related to health, a healthy lifestyle and suddenly we are Wellness professionals. Our world has progressed and as the consumer has been trained in this exciting world of sport, it has also become a consumer not only more educated but also more demanding. This turning point has opened our eyes and has shown us that the rules of ten years ago are no longer valid. The sports practitioner has become a potential client, someone who must be convinced and must be loyal, and above all someone who must be kept… happy.
The fusion and adaptation of concepts from traditional Marketing, business management, Coaching and group management, to give a few examples, has now become essential. The potential client now has a great capacity for judgment, knows more and more and is more demanding. We are in a highly motivating moment as the experience is now strong enough to pose an interesting challenge. Training has thus become the workhorse for all those professionals who wish to remain standing on the battlefield in which the world of sports and health has become.
This evolution in the sector has been truly fantastic, it has created new and richer areas of work, it has shown that the potential of the world of sport goes beyond physical fitness and entertainment, entering the world of the company from the selection of leaders, Outdoor Training or Corporate Wellness. Athletes and trainers have a lot to say also in the field of health and prevention. New pathologies have been identified, some created by our own life and work rhythm, others have always existed but their importance and real incidence were unknown. What was our small club has grown to become a company that demands special attention: group management, Marketing, positioning, leadership… without forgetting Personalized Training,the latest trend in excellence and service, a marvelous evolution that opens up new doors, new possibilities and especially new illusions.
The new sports professional must adapt new management tools to their work methodologies that allow them to control aspects beyond what was necessary until now in order to increase their levels of competitiveness and learn about new strategies that directly influence in the survival and positioning of your company or service, tools that will base their effectiveness precisely on how efficient we are in applying and readapting them to our work environment.
The formula we use to "speak the client's language", how fast we are to segment our partners and offer them personalized services for particular needs, is ultimately what will make the private sector a more competitive sector in the face of the enormous amalgam public sector services.
This is the only formula for competitiveness and total quality.
Chapter I
Introduction to the current situation of sports facilities
Currently the sports and health sector is undergoing profound changes. The sports offer has become in a majority way an offer promoted by large surfaces dedicated to physical care, sports and leisure. This has meant that both the sports professional and the employer have had to adapt both from a training point of view and from the point of view of the diversification and quality of their offer of activities.
The world of sports has become a mass phenomenon that in provinces like Barcelona have marked important milestones in terms of the number of licenses and subscribers to sports facilities. All this has created a significant demand for professionals and there are now several companies that offer the most diverse sports qualifications. We are also in a constantly evolving market for which sports marketing and management training respond with various tools both to those who wish to maintain a good level of professional quality and to those companies and institutions that create and devise services; services to seek and even better: find their position in a tough field of competition and above all in the mind of the consumer.
When a few years ago we talked about Branding or Sports Marketing, we used to refer basically to brands in the sports environment and a little further to sponsorship or organization of events, they were, however, aspects controlled by companies closer to the Sport Business, to the advertising and the "media" environment than directly to the sports environment. The current expansion of the sector has led to an improvement in processes and also in the training of entrepreneurs and professionals of sports companies. Some of these companies have quickly grasped a basic idea in Marketing but little used in the sport environment, although at present all trends point towards it: Health as a concept and culture.
The Fitness consumer in Spain is a highly trained customer, a consumer capable of differentiating and valuing even the lowest levels of quality in the sports offer. He is a "wise" consumer, hardened in the many years of sporting progression that our country has suffered. The market in which we operate demands therefore more than acceptable levels in its offer of sports and health services and we must not forget that the services are developed by people and it is from there where we must start working: the worker is ours first customer as a satisfied worker is a guarantee to create satisfied customers.
The current Fitness client has also had to adapt to different concepts in the same sport offer: we have gone from the neighborhood club with more enthusiasm than media, to the new club concepts: multinationals, franchises of training systems and also facilities, etc.. and above all due to position and identify in sports models created to diversify and increase the profitability of sports brands and institutions. A clear example of this has been the gradual decrease in trends related to the world of bodybuilding: a world not very versatile in economic terms with a very specific market and less and less evolved in our country.
Brands and sports companies have chosen to address the great social mass and "make it their own" by directing offers increasingly adapted to all tastes and increasingly attractive. The average athlete can now identify with a concept more linked to Fitness aesthetics and the Spinning-type endurance sport or can relieve their stress with systems such as AeroBox or similar. Aerobics has also undergone various transformations in search of adaptability to each specific sector: older people, young people, etc. and very recently we have also contemplated the evolution of the aquatic environment as one of the queen tools of therapies and prevention sports.
Sport à la carte for all tastes, for all sectors and… for all budgets. We have reached the "Taylorization" (1) of sport; However, by creating an à la carte sport based on the re-education of the current consumer, we have ultimately created a consumer model for our sports offer.
The offer has also been adapted to new population groups and lifestyles: people with high purchasing power, sick people or those suffering from various pathologies. The fusion between the world of sports and health is magnified with the arrival of new professionals who combine knowledge not only in sports but also in trends close to preventive medicine and physiotherapy. Always in constant search of evolution, adaptation to demand and the readaptation of the client to the offer.
Various studies are showing us two things: firstly that the level of knowledge of the consumer or user is increasing and secondly that there is a growing demand for more personalized services and above all more didactic, since the consumer demands more and more more often "learn" what you are doing.
Some trends, however, go towards the personalization of sport against the "Taylorist" conception of "sport for everyone and at all hours" imposed by large surfaces, currently personalized activities are prioritizing for specific clients with very defined needs: that is: ability to offer concrete answers to clear and defined needs, usually related to health and physical appearance. All this in a particular and personalized way.
Sport as a mass phenomenon
Nowadays, sports have reached the whole world, becoming a social culture. This effect does not go unnoticed in the eyes of Marketing since around this phenomenon new business possibilities, new interests and a new perspective of economic exploitation have been born.
The elite athlete is also currently an object of production, and we can perfectly understand this "production" as an approach to the potential consumer. All mass phenomenon is induced by a behavior that the social mass tends to follow or imitate in the continuous search for the need to identify with certain aesthetics, tendencies or groups. This model is transmitted through events and shows and around these hundreds of businesses are born that involve athletes, brands and of course consumers.
Due to its great diffusion and connection to economic activities, sport is an area of public interest since it generates employment from any of its aspects. From the point of view of the sports professional, it is valid to say that this contributes greatly to not only economic but also social development, since sport is in itself an excellent means of individual improvement with all the values that this entails.
Sport "for the consumer" has also generated a perfect symbiosis between Marketing, entertainment, sport and industry. The elite athlete creates models of imitation and monitoring, this generates trends that Marketing deals with transforming in the form of needs according to the public of these trends.
Sport as a mass phenomenon therefore constitutes a rich source of income with a common denominator, an increasingly large market and more sensitive to the new values implicitly carried by physical activity: image, belonging to a group, leisure, sociability, success and of course health.
In recent years, this concept of “sport for all” has gained great relevance and this fact is a very positive symptom in any society: sport means culture, nutritional culture, culture in healthy habits and culture in quality of life. This sector that does not stop growing has known to offer new and varied alternatives to the health consumer, and not only from infrastructures and sports facilities but also by promoting concepts belonging to this physical culture at the public level: cities are increasingly configured as spaces open the practice of outdoor sports, the bike path, the spaces enabled for jogging, the public transport facilities to access these spaces, etc.The facilities are now many and so is the popular vision of sports that has abandoned its gentrified connotations to access all types of audiences, targets and social segments.
Marketing and Communication
We have all realized that sport is one of the best and most effective ways to create aesthetic trends. Every sport today has its representative brands, automatically it is easy to associate certain sports with certain logos or distinctive brands and also with certain aesthetics.
Marketing has been used to convey certain messages to the consumer that have been decisive in strengthening the image of certain sports in different market sectors.
But Marketing is not simply a communication tool, it is also a powerful tool that contributes to the correct execution of management processes. Although Marketing is still unevenly used at the sports level as a means of differentiation, identification of the market and the needs of the environment and even adding added value and brand image to our services and therefore contributing to customer satisfaction, fundamental objective of any Marketing strategy.
In the sports field, Marketing must be placed in a relevant position within the strategic management process of any entity since the use of Marketing automatically implies an exhaustive knowledge of the consumer and our target audience and only by knowing our market will we be able to define and most importantly: improve our services. Any sports professional who works outside of this principle will always work and get clients depending on the trends with which their micro-market moves. When your micro-market is attracted by another trend, by another fashion or by another system… it may be too late.
Sports companies evolve and develop along with the market and according to its demands. It is true that the consumer also reacts to retroactive stimuli, that is, they are sensitive to the trends that the world of sports imposes or that the communication and advertising media promote and the companies that generate services react to these needs. Marketing is in the highest area of this chain, first generating these trends and managing advertising coercion and later analyzing and interpreting the results in order to create strategic and effective processes. Processes that aim not only to create attractive services or products but also adaptable to each segment according to its characteristics and needs.
Marketing is not from the point of view of business management a framework alien to the directive vision. The set of concepts between business management, management, sports marketing, leadership, etc. It is what will undoubtedly define the final success of the sports entity.
The sports environment is also a great communicative element, any aesthetic manifestation is, and the field of sport is above all a factor of aesthetic communication, something that has not escaped the Marketing technicians of the main sports brands who have known offer (and embed) each social group in a very defined aesthetic. Urban environments are also a breeding ground for these strategies where groups tend to form and coalesce in spaces of great exposure to the “contagion” of trends.
Marketing undoubtedly works better between groups, basing its effectiveness on the mimetic factor of the actions and trends that we all tend to follow, copy and make our own in order to feel identified with aesthetics and therefore with certain patterns of action. And this current reaches everyone, even those who believe they are out of the reach of the tentacles of the brand world of Branding and Marketing as an enhancer and coercer of life patterns and buying attitudes.
A large number of people, close to anti-control or even anti-capitalist ideas, might feel outside of these strategies, but in every society there is an exchange of goods and a satisfaction of desires and needs, that is, there is something to offer to everyone based on what you aspire to, what you love, what you want, or even what you reject.
When a group (and when we speak of societies we speak of segments, that is, very numerous groups of people) is identified as a segment "closer to" or as a segment that rejects a certain trend or group attitude, product or brand, in a way Automatic there are hundreds of brains devising a tactic to bring substitute products to this segment for those that they will not acquire or use.
In these cases, the one where these segments move, that they aspire, that they love, that they attach importance to, become data that will finally have a translation with a reading that will be essentially what will automatically encompass them within the world of marketing. and consumption: we will know where they spend their time and where they spend money. It will not matter if they do it in vitamin complexes for their children or for them, it will not matter if they do it in biological products so as not to follow the common trend of consumption of "capitalized" and chain foods, it will not matter if they do it in products obtained in a way natural and under sustainability regimes. Your life, your time and your needs must be covered and knowing how and how constitutes one of the primary values of Marketing: information.
You need something, I have what you need…
In this sense, it is important to highlight that in the environment of physical activity and sport we play with an important differential advantage: one can live just as well with a lower quality car (the differentiation between aspirational need, real quality and brand image is an interesting detail), one can live great by eliminating a certain brand from his life as a consumer, but we cannot live well if something so common in developed societies such as cholesterol, being overweight, stress or osteoporosis reduces our quality life and ultimately "what we do daily." Health is therefore a primary and unconditional need in the life of every person.
As technological advances, medicine and lifestyle have advanced, life expectancy has increased enormously. Children born in the sixteenth century will live for more than one hundred years and today people belonging to the group of "third age" maintain a quality of life in terms of their physical condition unthinkable for grandparents of just two generations ago. This broadly means two things: firstly, a new market with enormous possibilities is born: the elderly, and secondly, two new points must be added to our work guidelines as health professionals: prevention and paratreatment.
The negative point of all this amalgam of opportunities, concepts and markets is the oversized pseudo-offer.
Pseudo-offer: from your weakness I make my success
The pseudo-offer is carried out by pseudo-professionals who offer infraservices. When a market is very young and has a great demand (we are talking about sports services), in many occasions this demand cannot be covered immediately by truly trained professionals. The reason is very simple: the training offer is minimal and may not have had time to create the necessary protocol to train high-quality professionals since this would require an investment in time that would go against the profit factor that is necessary for any market to become a profitable market. In other words: at one point the market quickly needed new professionals in emerging sectors such as Fitness. Since specialization was expensive and time-consuming,This new professional started working from a minimal knowledge base. We are talking about knowledge about biomechanics, physiology or nutrition that today we take for granted in most professionals. Currently it is undeniable that there are two professional platforms: licensed professionals and those who have received non-regulated training.
However, it was a very profitable market: a huge trend towards aesthetics and quality of life, an unbridled search for physical appearance, health and a growing need for the values associated with the Wellness lifestyle. The sports brand environment quickly began to devise and make available to this new typology of consumers the most assorted establishments specialized in sports that increasingly began to become popular activities. Mountaineering, Treking, Diving, Tennis, Surfing, Skiing, etc. Making all technical means available to the consumer brought each sport closer to a specific customer segment, a segment that automatically became regular consumers of that specific sport or even of several of them.
The diversification of the offer brings with it in parallel a need for the consumer to establish a criterion regarding the quality, need and use of what is being offered.The so-called "Buyer's criterion" and which bases its operation not only on the price that must be paid for a certain item or service in relation to the use that it is going to give it or the benefit it is going to obtain. Brand Marketing or Brand Marketing is concerned not only with making a product or a brand reach a specific target of consumers but also with making this item or service perceived with a specific image, generally associated with aspirational values that have a lot to do with that target, and all this is only achieved by offering (and bombarding) the consumer with constant information about what we want to highlight about a product or service, and influencing the potential need that we should have of a certain article in order to carry out a sport "X" with sufficient guarantees.Security guarantees? No, also quality guarantees and especially image guarantees.
The consequence has been very progressive but also very clear: the consumer has been surrounded by the omnipresent advertising for several years now, surrounded by permanent information from different media: static and audiovisual advertising, new publications, specialized magazines, etc. Today we face a much more educated consumer, with their own criteria on training, food and especially on the benefits obtained from sports.
But above all we find ourselves with a consumer accustomed to a standard of services offered almost always by large surfaces, since in recent years the trend marked more by the offer than by the consumer to "re-accustomed" the customer to having these facilities and its services (almost always little differentiated from each other) to the detriment of the small neighborhood gyms that are unable to compete in terms of infrastructure, machinery, etc. they have been disappearing.
Understand your market or find an interpreter
When we talk about sports facilities, we know that few have a well-trained Marketing department. And we also know that even the executive panels of these entities did not have until recently a level of training in business management and management. Many of them based the success of their permanence in the market on the maxim of "without competition there is no Marketing", there was always competition, but in proportion to the existing market it was not necessary or a priority to establish loyalty strategies beyond the day to day.
In this sense, the concept of personalization was a sufficiently effective weapon to retain the micro-markets that small sports clubs were targeting. In the small gyms there was an air of familiarity that today is difficult to find. They did not need (or they had not induced us towards the need) to have facilities of the highest level with the latest technological advances. At this time the neighborhood facilities were the health center, the meeting place for friends and possibly the most effective nursery not only for those who today are great athletes and professionals in the sector but also great competitors of activities such as martial arts that They had their "golden age" in these times.
The concept of a large area arrived over time, finding a market sensitive to changes, many of them belonging to new generations eager for new proposals and ideas. It was easy to re-educate the new generations towards the concept of innovation over personalization. Modernity over warmth at a time when in areas like the province of Barcelona, they breathed Olympic airs and sport became a vital need for everyone.
The market was not only large enough, it was also sensitive enough to change and ignorant enough to be educated and directed towards new sports trends.
It is clear that from what the average citizen previously knew about physical activity, health or sport to what he now knows, is an abyss. The positive side was that the entry of department stores and new sports concepts brought new life to the sector. The need for training then became imperative not only to be more competitive but also to know what and when to offer sports services to a market that is increasingly cultured and familiar with concepts related to physical activity, with what the sports professional saw in specialization the cornerstone of its survival in a sector where the consumer knew more and more.
Knowing him was then the basic need of sports entities, but not only knowing him but also considering the idea of retaining him, satisfying him and always offering him quality services. Marketing suddenly appeared as the ideal system to assess the market's needs: "interpreters" were sought who were able to understand what the market needs and also capable of inducing it towards new needs, needs that were otherwise supported by the best. Possible advertising claim: the well-being of oneself.
The large sports entities with budgets capable of accessing Marketing specialists, years ago emphasized linking their image with that of health and physical well-being and thanks to them the sports sector was "shaken" in such a way that both the small businessman which has had to be updated to be competitive as the large entity that specialized even more if possible to understand and convince an increasingly formed market have set the trend that the sector is currently following, a trend that is growing and in continuous evolution.
Understanding the market requires, on the one hand, to know its language, it is not enough to know what we can offer you but to know above all what you need. The interpreters, the Marketing professionals therefore have a lot to say in this regard and the Marketing Information System SIM introduced by Kotler in 1995 becomes a good bridge between conventional business management, Marketing and the sports environment as long as how much it identifies such important aspects as the target audience, competition or service planning.
Between the company and the professional
Most of us know that the sports professional is largely marginalized in the current business environment, this is a point that directly affects the level of training of sports professionals. Currently, the salary of a graduate in physical education is not the same as in any other university branch, and neither are labor contracts and even the hourly regime. The activity of sports teaching is shared on many occasions with other professionals with unregulated degrees and taught during periods of time in which we could hardly absorb enough information on physiological or biomechanical aspects of great importance.
However, these professionals with parallel degrees are currently the workhorse of many large supermarkets that would destroy their cost policy if they had to pay proportionally compared to other specializations to university professionals. However, it is important to note that there are sporting activities in the technical field that do not require exhaustive knowledge, although the level of quality and safety offered to the client increases the greater the knowledge related to the biomechanics of exercise or other aspects of the therapeutic and postural field.
The continuous evolution of sport and physical activity in our country currently points to the personalization of services, the so-called "one to one", personal training and personalized health programs. But it is no longer valid in any way, the client, the user now demands tangible results and sometimes aesthetic changes in accordance with the existing trend or fashion and a little further changes in their global health status and in their mental health and all this requires unprecedented training, extensive knowledge in physiology, nutrition, biomechanics and of course Marketing, since sometimes and more and more frequently the sports professional becomes a sole proprietorship that works in parallel to the sports entity, but in a autonomous,For this reason it is important that you know and handle important aspects of market identification, loyalty formulas and promotion techniques.
Little by little, the trend towards the Wellness concept and the growing need for health is making the sector evolve gradually in search of greater professionalism, an even higher level of specialization and, above all, greater consumer knowledge in accordance with the new services and concepts of sport and health that are being implemented in our society.
Macro-gyms are no longer so competitive, there are currently new concepts of infrastructures dedicated to health and well-being in the form of urban spas -for example- that offer new and efficient alternatives to the demand for physical and mental care and renewal that is imposed in large cities as a formula to counteract the effects of daily life stress. Today's consumer is also a much more experienced consumer than he was ten years ago and is no longer satisfied with "coffee for all."
The current user also values personal attention as an added value that contrasts sharply with the "Taylorist" model imposed in a generalized way in recent years. This assessment extends to a broader conception of the concept of well-being that has gone from being merely sports to also belong to the field of recreational, relaxing and restorative activities.
In this sense, activities related to health and the preventive environment have taken on special importance: the sports professional has separated himself from the company, practicing as a specialized professional not only in physical preparation but also in aspects related to physiotherapy or support for treatments doctors from the field -for example- of personalized training.
At the moment, an important inflection point is being reached, on the basis of which great professionals are standing out above "standard" professionals with much lower levels of training. The specialization in different areas of sport and health and above all the ability to establish a multiprofessional feedback between all these professionals is the differential point that stands out between sport and physical activity a few years ago and the degree of quality that little by little it is imposing itself.
The company now has the possibility of delegating certain management areas to professionals capable of probing the client and their needs and translating the responses in the form of sports Marketing strategies, into expert health professionals capable of continuing conventional medical treatments with the In order to help the client to achieve objectives beyond the basically functional ones and ultimately in professionals with a quality standard much higher than that of a few years ago.
Competition and market
We cannot talk about the market without referring to the competition. What we offer to our market or our potential client, what we do to build loyalty to the existing client or the very positioning of our brand will basically depend on the existing competition.
Defining therefore the strengths or weaknesses of this will help us to create strategies to create and maintain our place in the market. Currently, excellence in sports services cannot focus only on offering increasingly better and more updated services, consumer loyalty is not only achieved by improving yourself but by improving with respect to the existing competition. since the information flows that reach the user are enormous and from very different channels. In the province of Barcelona, for example, the percentage of users of Fitness centers is very high. This is an opinion channel that on many occasions interacts with each other.It involves a large amount of information and therefore comparison and judgment that circulates by word of mouth among clients with highly perfected analytical skills. The first symptom of this sports oversupply is fear of innovation.
Today the most competitive sports companies and professionals survive based on the offer of services and above all on the level of quality obtained in comparison with the competition.
This dynamic of Sports Marketing reflects that currently the focus is increasingly focused on a constant evaluation of the performances of the competition. Analyzing it means not only being able to precede their actions but also learning and self-diagnosing possible failures. This does not mean at all that the customer, their attention and their loyalty are neglected, quite the contrary, gaining ground from the competitor means obtaining a very valuable advantage in their mind and gaining the “share of mind” or strategic advantage in the Mind of the consumer is the first step to later gain their loyalty, working exhaustively on their satisfaction. A "safe" customer is, or should be, the greatest motivation for an entrepreneur to turn him (and it is not an easy task) into a happy customer.
Is a happy customer always a loyal customer? No, mainly because the consumer is among other things a good comparative filter. In the first place because the current capacity for choice is enormous and secondly because that same capacity for choice is what puts new and different options in the hands of the customer to grant and dedicate their leisure time and therefore their money.
Within the framework of sports activities, two concepts are brought together: that of service and that of product. The service would be the intangible for which the client pays, this can be obtained in the form of group classes, personalized training, design of health programs or even in the form of payment for the rental of a certain facility: paddle tennis courts, tennis etc. The product would become part of the physical infrastructure itself, this being the workhorse of small entrepreneurs against large sports surfaces. This approach can also be expressed the other way around: the competitive formula to deal with multi-surface areas would be based on excellence in service, since it is difficult to face these huge competitors without sufficient physical means.
Excellence in service is undoubtedly the fundamental basis on which the sports sector must rely to, together with other aspects such as specialization and continuous training, offer increasingly higher levels of quality and thus ensure a line increasing continuity of the sector.
Chapter II
The client, that great source of income
From a point of view close to radical Marketing, the client is in addition to the reason and foundation of the company a great source of income sensitive to how many options we put at their disposal. In any case, as a sports professional, I have always had a very clear approach that I consider of utmost importance both for myself and for the people with whom I share my work: One can set up a mechanical workshop to obtain benefits, one can practice a certain profession with the only objective of making money, but a health club, a sports center or a wellness professional is useless if it is also not capable of improving people's lives. That is the main foundation that should move the sector: the unique and unavoidable commitment to improve the quality of life.
For this reason, on many occasions I regret to observe that for a long time the sports sector has constituted the professional subterfuge of people with little or low training. This is one of the reasons that the marginalization of the sports professional has lasted so long and has allowed the line to be followed by the large sports service companies, gyms and other entities to seek profitability above all without attending to their own health concepts and customization, concepts that could only be offered by professionals with a high level of training.
It is clear that business and economically it is inescapable that this dynamic was finally established, knowing that the primary objective of any business project is to amortize investments in order to obtain benefits, but it is also true that lately the trend is changing as quickly as the level User training is equal to the training level of sports professionals.
Sports formations and clubs are not non-profit associations, but this profit must clearly be obtained in the most responsible way possible, offering tangible results to specific problems and above all promoting and promoting the quality of our workers as the best strategy to offer the client the highest quality services possible.
As the customer "knows more", that is: he assimilates external information, learns, trains and becomes an "understood" consumer, his capacity for demand and above all for choice increases enormously. The training paths are usually varied, but in general they have a common nexus: they use the Marketing base as a launching platform. Far from what it may seem, a well-informed customer is a more loyal customer, a customer who knows the quality that he is receiving and above all a customer with choice and usually stays with whoever is doing it well. Therefore, it is essential to provide it with enough information to evaluate what is right and what is wrong.
When a Fitness user, for example, is not informed, it is simply that: a Fitness user, a customer who is limited to using the facility according to the series, repetitions or the training program assigned to him. If this client is recommended to buy a protein bottle but it is not explained what its function is and what it is for, she will surely not buy it since she will not know its usefulness. This client will therefore be a potential client of any structure that convinces them that their product or service is better than the one they currently use. Customer training works from three aspects:
In the first place, the capacity for choice increases: More training = more capacity for understanding and therefore more capacity to choose and demand what you really need.
Secondly, a client who "knows more" also knows how to differentiate the quality between one offer and another, between one club and another, and between one service and another. If we are really doing well we have nothing to fear. But if a client has been well trained outside the club and suddenly appears in our facilities for some reason, you can be sure that their ability to analyze exactly what they are receiving and translate it into satisfaction or dissatisfaction will be very efficient.
Third, a more informed customer is a customer to whom it is easy to offer new services and to whom it is easier to make him a "loyal customer" since he will possibly evaluate efficiently whether what is offered meets his needs or not. Do I need it or don't I need it? This is a very common approach among more educated consumers, but as I mentioned earlier, the basis on which customer training is promoted is Marketing and thanks to various Marketing strategies we can "explain" to the customer why he really needs a certain service or even coerce their aspirational will, that is, adding to an inconcrete need the attraction of feeling part of a certain group,to identify with certain values or to complement their health with certain services or products that are not essential to maintain a good level of health if they are essential to be part of the Wellness environment that we try to project.
An important point that we will deal with later is the concept of worker satisfaction as the fundamental basis of customer satisfaction: a satisfied worker generates satisfied customers.
The truth or the non-truth depends on the diameter of the channel with which you proclaim it…
I am lucky to meet good and great professionals in this sector. I would even say without fear of being wrong that many of the great advances we are experiencing today in biomechanics, strength training and the scientific application of training in the search for results, are due to these professionals. However I find it curious when many of them hear phrases such as: "in the end the market will realize…" or "it is a matter of time before they start training differently…"
From my point of view, to go "to the market" not enough a course, not enough a presentation… not even a hundred, when you realize it, five years have passed and four new and innovative trends supported by millions of euros in marketing have passed above you and "your truth".
About this there is a new "immutable law of marketing" and that is that "one can tell a truth three times a day through a tiny speaker… and it will convince a hundred people… if you tell the same truth from a large building, through a large speaker and for six months, you will convince maybe five thousand people… but if you tell a lie through the biggest loudspeaker imaginable and five times a day for two years… you will convince millions of people.
Television, the press, radio, the Internet… in short: communication and marketing are the largest speakers we can imagine.
I have sometimes had conversations on these topics with some professionals. The Pilates system has been one of those that has generated the most debate: "the real Pilates" or the "false Pilates". Does anyone think of looking for "true health" or "false health" today? We are so immersed in our work, in our stress and in our lives at one hundred per hour that what we urgently seek is a solution to our back problems, overweight, anxiety etc. and health, beyond common medicine, no longer has a form of medicine. Now it is in the form of a homeopathic remedy, acupuncture needles, fengshui, shiatsu, tai-chi, feldenkrais, antiaging and… Pilates. And if we look at the history of loudspeakers and remember what we have talked about about customer micro-markets and people markets,the only true Pilates will be the one that is consolidated in the mind of the market as the most notorious, the strongest: the truest. Everything will depend on the diameter of the channel with which we explain to the client who we are and what we do.
So if you are not a big company; if you do not plan to address thousands of people; focus on your micro-market and do not pretend that "in the end the market realizes something…" your customers are your most valuable asset, take care of them with your small but invaluable speaker with which you will talk about personalization, results, health, well-being, Wellness… enter the world of people marketing, experiential marketing.
Let us begin to represent the truthful answer to the sports oversupply and let the great mass progress, fail or triumph. Let's not look for a bigger speaker until we want to grow and reach more people. But let's be clear that having or not having "the truth" is not in our hands.
Better services, better results
When we talk about sports services we are not just talking about gyms, we are also talking about tennis clubs, centers for outdoor recreational activities, personalized training studios, Thalassotherapy centers, urban spas, Golf clubs and any space dedicated to fitness. health and physical care. All these structures have some common denominators: their operational function revolves around the offer of recreational, health and wellness or sports services. Its basis is customer service and the better this service, the more guarantees we will have of success.
On the other hand, when we refer to activities that are generally carried out in the client's free time, we must take into account an important factor: it is during leisure time when the consumer is especially sensitive to the details and quality of what receives. It is difficult for a consumer to spend time looking for a better restaurant to eat during their free lunch hours if the one they go to on a regular basis meets their expectations in a fairly acceptable way, however it is very possible that they will change sports clubs if they cannot find the right one in the current one. expected level of quality, dedicating the necessary time to this search. Obviously -and again- when we extrapolate this situation to the environment of sports brands or even trends in Fitness or Wellness, Marketing has a lot to say.Not meeting expectations at this level may mean for a brand not having known how to create an image linked to a certain segment or activity, not having offered a level of quality in accordance with a specific target or simply having a quality below the expectations or below the competition.
The services, however, have a differentiating point: they are developed by people, therefore it is on these people that the work to improve any service should focus.
Marketing, customer and human resources management
How can you help me improve my installation?
It is common to observe that when talking about Marketing, this term is generally confused with management, and it is even given a purely commercial character. In reality, Marketing has been readjusting to the changes that companies have suffered over time and of course it has been readjusting to market demands. At this time we could say that Marketing not simply serves to "sell more and better" but to identify what the customer wants to buy or get, also defining who and how we are going to plan not only the sale, but also the loyalty of this customer.
Marketing, when misused, becomes only an overselling system that violates our real ability to offer effective responses to customers: it often turns into promises that are very well sold but difficult to fulfill: what is generally known as " sell smoke ”.
However, well understood Marketing is a great tool for empowering our own resources and above all an excellent "translator" of our service offerings for the client. Communication must speak the language of our clients.
But it is not only communication, Marketing is above all the common thread between the quality of our services, the operation of our processes, the correct customer service, the effective use of our resources and the correct management of human resources.
It is not possible to communicate anything to our partner if we do not have some very well defined points, because ultimately it is about selling how well we serve the client, how prepared our professionals are and how excellent our services and facilities are. And of course, it's about us being able to accomplish all of this.
At the end of the day, it is only about looking at the management processes and giving way to Management Marketing: we must avoid selling our installation or selling our services by ignoring who they are directed to, if they are really capable of meeting the demands of our customers, or if what reaches them is really what they need.
"First identify, then plan, then improve and finally sell"
In the end, everything depends on the work of a human team, it does not matter if our installation has excellent infrastructures, it does not matter if our management software is capable of accurately calculating a thousand variables, it is indifferent that we are able to copy services as fast as new holdings appear. If our human team does not breathe to the rhythm of our clients, what we are selling is smoke.
To correctly plan the management of our human resources we must:
1. Know the characteristics of our clients and their objectives in our facility.
2. Verify whether our staff is capable of meeting and meeting these objectives in whole or in part.
3. Develop the functions of each worker based on the achievement of these objectives.
4. Develop the internal flowchart for customer service (who does what and when).
5. Develop the appropriate communication channels.
1. Know the characteristics of our clients and their objectives in our facility.
Sometimes, when human resource management is not correct, the success of our facility or our services depends solely on the demand of a single segment of our domestic market. That is, if we have a very empathic staff prepared for directed activities and very poorly prepared in the Fitness room, we will gradually observe that the client “type” of directed activities is varied and enjoys this activity for the most part. However, in the Fitness room we will observe that the typology of clients is uniform and little mixed, this is because we have only kept the client with “own objectives”, losing the member who needs special support or motivation.
This is due to the lack of "adaptability" to the client: lack of preparation, lack of resources to meet specific needs… and ultimately poor service.
Knowing what are the objectives that our client seeks in the center is decisive for the choice and training of our staff.
2. Verify whether our staff is capable of meeting and meeting these objectives in whole or in part.
We already know what our client needs, but do we also know if our staff is capable of offering it?
It is important to determine if our staff is capable of meeting all the needs of our clients. In this sense, it is easy to observe how many facilities launch different services in response to competition: Pilates, Personal Training, etc. But too many times the existing staff is taken advantage of or else these staff receive minimal training on these and other issues, with which we are finally -from the Marketing point of view- selling something that we don't really know how to do, which at the long it makes us lose credibility and strength in the face of the client.
We want to sell that we are able to offer a good level of quality. Quality training, quality social club, quality personalized attention, quality classes… but to arrive at this magnificent proposal we must be professionals and try to offer it from the most realistic position possible.
At this point it would be interesting to design a continuing training program. So we are going to be positive, and train our workers through talks with qualified professionals in different areas (biomechanics, nutrition, etc.), "round tables", presentation of articles to be exhibited in the club by our staff, attending courses and seminars etc. Without a doubt, the best remedy against the demotivation of our staff is to promote restlessness and internal activity.
3. Develop the functions of each worker based on the achievement of these objectives.
"We are what we sell", this statement is not true, of course, but it is not entirely false either: within the structure of any company that works with the client, there are strategic aspects. We can have identified the aspirational values of our clients and have the best monitors, but if from the reception -for example- of our center, the client is poorly served, we have lost 80% of our value.
This explains that we must precisely select the personnel who will occupy each position in our facility, regardless of its size. Almost always a "good morning!" or a smile is a factor of great value for the one who receives it. In the same sense, a client who feels that he is simply "renting" the facility with a monthly fee, without monitoring its progress or failures is the ideal candidate to become part of our migratory flow.
Carrying out a "Function Manual" is a good option to face the next step:
4. Develop the internal flowchart for customer service (who does what and when).
This is the simplest part, but also one of the most important. For this, it is necessary to design an organization chart of actions and processes in which all staff are involved: What happens from the moment a client requests information, what data is requested, how do we subsequently manage this information? Information is something very important in our facility: data such as the children a client has, their hobbies, if they are married, etc. They are as important from the point of view of Marketing, as knowing the possible pathologies that you may have.
If I know I can create, if I believe I can offer and if I offer I can sell.
Do you accompany this client to the changing rooms? Do you indicate the services that you can enjoy? Who shows you the facilities? Do you meet with the area coordinator or is it the receptionist (it does not have to have knowledge in physical education) who evaluates and offers a PT or Pilates service according to their criteria?
After a few weeks, does someone call you to inquire about your evolution at the center? How do we act afterwards?
Of course, who does what is important, and at this point aspects related to Quality, Management and Excellence converge, but without a doubt we cannot talk about Marketing without taking into account that ethically, we should not sell or communicate anything that it's not really true, and for it to be true you have to plan it and then execute it.
5. Develop the appropriate communication channels.
A communication channel must be internal as well as external to be truly effective.
Internally, the design of an "Entry Manual" for new workers is very effective in informing the worker of the direct channels that allow them to know the company and its modus operandi. The "Internal Manual", in addition to informing the worker of the specific functions of each position, may mention the labor regulations, agreement, possibilities for internal training and promotion, system of remuneration and bonuses, vacation periods, etc.
The effectiveness of these "Manuals" does not simply lie in the information they provide, but in making all the information and formal communication channels available to staff to manage and discuss this information, avoiding distortions that are introduced into the communication channels. internal when these are not well defined.
Externally, we must bear in mind that a good communication strategy for our clients must be informative and also formative since the trained client is much more loyal than a “free” client.
The "free" client
The free client is generally a partner of our facility who we have not attended, we have not trained and we have not been able to introduce him into our business dynamics, either due to laziness, ignorance, not having the appropriate professionals or not having identified your needs. In this sense, we would say that we have not known how to "sell" the product. And that responsibility is not a responsibility that floats in words that are sometimes difficult to understand for many of our workers: Management, management pyramid, etc. that responsibility belongs to our human resources and is called: devotion to service.
Surely we have a differential advantage, but… have we been able to transmit it? And if we have a differential advantage, what is it? Do my employees know about it, do they pass it on to the customer?
Small installations may find this not very important. Well, the less important we consider these aspects to be, the further we will be from the optimal level of quality that our customers expect. The so-called "total quality" seeks, among other things, excellence in service, that is, to offer the customer more than what they expect to achieve, and this is essential in smaller facilities as it configures one of the most powerful competitive systems.
As we see, Marketing and human resources go hand in hand and are often inseparable from other terms related to business management.
Everything in its place?
Many management professionals, university marketing professors, company executives, etc. I have been told on occasions that in my talks or articles I mix principles of quality, management, human resources, leadership… and Marketing. And is that actually not all part of the same process ?.
It is difficult to talk about selling a certain service if we have not previously evaluated each execution area down to the smallest detail to outline and correct errors that is also management, nor can we transmit an image of a “leading center” if our human resources beat thirty beats less that new trends in the sector or the needs of our micro-segment of customers, it is not feasible to speak of quality when we do not know how to prioritize between the different points involved in the start-up of a center or a service. How many times do we see that “the partridge is sold before hunting it”, how many times do we observe that services (and centers) are put into operation without having evaluated their internal processes, or their profitability and correcting failures during the execution of the service itself ?
Marketing is above all a tool that loses all its usefulness if previously we have not known how to fit all the pieces of the management pyramid.
On the other hand, my philosophy is that taking into account the profile of the sports manager and / or sports facility director, it is much more operational to offer "turnkey" information that allows them to act in specific segments of their company: Reception and service to the client, communication, staff training, areas of work of the worker, implementation of services, customer follow-up… to talk about CRM strategies, total quality system or Marketing Mix. In spite of this, the reality of our sector is that there is a significant lack of training, which is why the trend of brands and suppliers is to offer the installation.
Plan before you act
Sports services can be very well offered, very well connected and very well sold, but finally the service, all services have a common link: They are compared while they are used.
This ultimately leads us to make a statement about our own human resources that will be very useful in the management of our center.
In any process of change there is always a desire for improvement, which sometimes causes us to act with poorly planned systems and without having all the data at our fingertips. Having all the data means knowing in advance why we carry out in one way or another the different improvement actions in our facility. This would refer to:
- Knowledge of our clients, aspirational values etc.
- Customer satisfaction levels in the installation.
- Areas of influence of our facility (planning of communication actions etc).
- Socio-demographic data.
- Income, consumption and purchasing habits of both our current clients and our potential clients.
- Level of predisposition to physical activity and reasons.
- Level of objectives achieved in our facility with respect to customer needs.
- Existing competition.
- Strategic positioning.
- Knowledge of our ex-clients, (reasons for cancellation etc).
- Level of quality in our human resources.
- Quality level of our sales processes.
- Quality level of our loyalty and monitoring processes.
- Value added services.
- Economic and financial analysis and future strategy.
- SWOT analysis (Weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities).
Without these data, among others, it is impossible to perform any action, otherwise we would be acting "blindly". The most effective is to act with a certain degree of intuition and with a high degree of knowledge and diagnosis. Precisely the success of strategic management would be based on these two basic foundations to which we could undoubtedly add leadership skills, empathy and common sense.
The important points or references before facing any change process are these:
- Analyze: Your facility, your staff, your customers…
- Fixed: Reasonable and realistic objectives, let's not try to compete in the same segment as the competition, position yourself in a term in which you can be a leader and provide quality.
- Make your staff participate and live the change together with the management.
- Act with all the data on the table, derive tasks, plan an evolution of change that is not excessively fast and in accordance with existing resources.
- Delegate in those fields in which you do not have absolute control.
- Establishes a system for monitoring the quality of the facility's management processes.
- Define the management indicators and improve them little by little.
Who are you, what differentiates you, what is your positioning?
When we talk about the problems that exist in Spain between the public and private sectors, we inevitably speak of UNFAIR COMPETITION. And it is that for a long time the private sector has tried to compete against large stores always with more desire than means and with more fear than response capacity.
This lack of business and marketing criteria has made the private sector try to compete against the public sector in factors related to size, machinery brands, quantity of services, etc. In this case, from the Marketing point of view and especially from the customer's point of view, the differences between a public center of three thousand square meters and a private center of one thousand square meters, would surely go through talking about space, quantity of machinery in the Fitness room, modernity of infrastructures and diversity of activities.
In this sense, ignoring something as important as the quality of the services, the results that the client obtains from them or the personalized attention is a serious mistake. Let's not forget that we are above all service companies.
However, we see day by day how the facilities are bigger every time, how services are duplicated without a specific value criterion other than that of competing in the same segment, how we even standardize the behavior of our own professionals and how we increase our ratios of customer rotation that has not stopped growing for five years.
We thus come to one of the most used words in Service Marketing: What is your position? What are you the best in? Who do you want to serve more effectively?
It is clear that we cannot be the best in everything, nor can we serve all clients with the same level of quality (and when we talk about quality we also talk about results, clear benefits and customer service).
Defining what is your "differential value", what differentiates you from the competition, that difference difficult to copy that provides a clear, tangible, easy to communicate and attractive benefit to a specific type of clients, is ultimately what we call " positioning ”, and must be above all CLEAR, since complicated messages are difficult to explain to the customer and especially difficult to sell.
A. If your strategy for change is to be the best in customer service, analyze how your customers are, what they look for, what they value, and let them know that they are important for the installation, probe them, consult them and involve them, that is planning Of action.
B. Then set yourself some viable short-term objectives. To achieve them, you may have to design a training calendar and a meeting calendar with your staff. Strategic planning must be global and known by the entire organization of your center.
C. Encourage the participation of your staff, make them participants in your desire for change. Spreading your desire for improvement to your staff will have a viral and positive effect on your customers: laziness stimulates abandonment and turnover, the desire for improvement stimulates loyalty and commitment to the sports center. That is leadership.
D. Act effectively by delegating actions to people capable of duplicating your will in all areas of the center. Delegating correctly is effective and also necessary.
E. Carry out an exhaustive monitoring of these processes and their results, ask your clients, make a statistic of the volume of complaints, enhance the management indicators (those processes that have demonstrated their effectiveness in achieving the objectives pursued) and eliminate the wrong sections.
These parameters, although simple, can help us to improve little by little in areas of maximum interest for our installation. However, trying to make a total change in all or in too many aspects of our organization: customer service, directed activities, programs by objectives, etc. it would possibly be a "focus" error that would undoubtedly lead us to failure.
Some areas of maximum interest for the sports facility are:
- Billing
- Number of users
- Quality levels
- Increase
- Customer loyalty
- Atypical income
- Consolidation in the area of influence.
- New services and activities.
- Personalized services (Personal Training, programs by objectives, aesthetics, etc.).
- Professionalization of the organizational structure.
However, it is very important to determine that our objectives for change and improvement must be viewed from two very different aspects:
• Quantitative objectives
• Qualitative objectives
Any of these is measurable and therefore its results can be quantified.
Chapter III
Identify, attend, retain, follow, listen and offer
Talking about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), is simply talking about those points that define the "Customer Service Indicators" and that will allow us to address not only our own services but also the attitude of our workers and the protocols of action at all times. Although it is true that in the field of management and business there are many acronyms and names related to technology and business: ERP, B2C, SCM, UMTS, IP, B2B, PDA, etc., CRM is nothing more than the answer to the growing need of companies to strengthen relationships with their customers. It is what in Marketing we call relational Marketing, that is, "the management strategy focused on anticipating, knowing and satisfying the present and foreseeable needs and desires of the clients of our facility".
It is interesting to highlight one aspect: "To attend, you must first identify", according to this, we should probe what the needs of our current and potential customers are. That is roughly what will give continuity to our company and one of the basic pillars of the "B to C", (business to consumer).
In the case of sports facilities, the variables with which we play in relation to the customer's needs could seem as basic as health needs, relational needs and aesthetic-sports needs. However, the current Wellness and Fitness environment is increasingly complex and even enters the field of medical prevention and the treatment of different pathologies, this requires that the intercoms (workers) of our clients be increasingly specialized and have a training capable of interpreting and directing the information they receive from our partners.
If our professionals do not have enough training, the necessary processes to identify, attend, follow, listen and offer, are absolutely stopped:
- It is not possible to identify a problem, a lack or a need if our professionals do not interpret the information received as a problem, a lack or a need.
- It is not possible to attend if you do not have the intellectual means and the necessary technical knowledge.
- The client's needs are increasingly specific, however the professional's knowledge continues to revolve around generalized aspects.
The solution to better serve our customers would always be to define a customized training plan.
For this, it is important to define in an absolutely objective way what is our flowchart of operational processes. That is to say: what happens when a client comes to request information at our facility? Who attends him? Has the person who attends him received commercial training? Is the information obtained processed later?… and after confirming the high, what happens? Is the client included in a tutoring process in which information is requested?… and after a few weeks, do we have valid management indicators to test the evolution of this client's results?…
(1) Frederick Winslow Taylor is considered one of the management and management "gurus". His work "PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC ADMINISTRATION" established the guidelines of administrative thought. Today his legacy is considered fundamental and an obligatory reference for any manager, since despite the time, his views are highly topical.
