Describe them the week before they walked in

I ran an exercise on my Tuesday call. Everybody had one minute to write down their favorite client. Not an avatar, not a made-up person. Somebody who currently pays you, who you could point at on a whiteboard.

Age, job, what time they come in, how often, what they said in their consult, what worried them at the start.

Good answers all the way around the room. Real people, real detail.

And almost every single one of them was wrong in exactly the same way, including mine.

Everybody described who that person is NOW. After the weight came off. After they believed it could work. After they'd already bought from you.

One guy gave us a genuinely moving one. Former prison guard, dealt with depression, down a hundred pounds over five or six years. Beautiful story and I'm glad he told it.

But that's who the man became. That's not who he was the week before he walked in, and the week before he walked in is the only version of him your marketing will ever meet.

That guy at his lowest is a hook. That guy a hundred pounds down is a testimonial. Both are useful. They do completely different jobs, and we keep sending the testimonial out to do the hook's work.

Think about what that means for what you post. Your best result is impressive, and to the exact person you're trying to reach it reads as "well, that's not me." You've shown them the summit. They're at the trailhead trying to decide whether to get out of the car.

So the phrase I should have opened with, and will next time:

Describe them the WEEK BEFORE they walked in. Not the way they are now.

What were they avoiding? What had they already tried and quit? What did they think it was going to cost? What were they embarrassed about? What happened that particular week that made them finally go looking?

I'll take my own lumps here too. I told that room not to invent people, don't give me a fictional woman named Becky, and then I demonstrated using our gym's avatar profile, who is a composite built out of about six real women. First guy up gave me a composite right back. Not a coincidence. Rooms copy the demo, not the instruction, and I handed him the wrong one.

Go do the one minute on somebody real. Then do it again for the version of them from the week before, and notice how little you actually know about that person compared to the one you see every Tuesday.

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.