As an entrepreneur striving for exceptional service, to achieve significant success in the business world, one must understand the following three paramount maxims:
If you don’t dare to sell, you deserve to be poor.
Serving wealthy ladies brings big money.
The value of emotion is worth a fortune.
These principles are not merely theoretical assertions, but truths verified in practice. Let us take my gym as an example, to delve deeper into these principles:
Firstly, after the holiday season, I returned to my gym in Hangzhou at the earliest opportunity, hoping to get a comfortable stretching experience through my beautiful coaching team. However, what I did not predict was that I would become a witness to the miracle of this gym’s single store reaching a yearly turnover of more than ten million. Located near Qianjiang New City, this gym mainly serves wealthy ladies who have plenty of disposable income, often coming here to workout, lose weight, and incidentally bring their children for fitness training.
Initially, I thought the owner of the gym was a big spender, renting the entire floor and giving it a high-end renovation, with merely the rent and renovation costs amounting to 5 million. However, half a year later I realized that this owner really had a good head for business. Coming from a sales background, he excels at touching people’s hearts with emotional marketing.
Secondly, I witnessed the entire process of the sixth-anniversary celebration organized by the gym owner. Even compared to the fifth-anniversary celebration of our group which I was part of, the excellent management skills displayed at this event gave me great inspiration. Note that this is a traditional offline gym, not operated by an internet company, but led personally by a post-90s owner. They built a professional sales team focused on making sales, without involving any substantive service fulfillment, with the sole purpose of creating sales performance for the gym.
Their sales tactics were incredibly precise— the first step was “shaking people.” The intersection of the China Resources Building towers A and B is the most crowded area in Qianjiang New City. During lunchtime, the end of the workday, or early in the morning, the foot traffic never falls below ten thousand. The sales staff will choose sisters with a healthy and beautiful aura there, offering free gym trial classes. Although people know that such an experience is nothing more than a prelude to sales conversion, surprisingly, after fifteen days of warming up, eventually, 200 people came to experience it. This tells us that as long as potential customers are willing to come, there’s always a chance to move them.
Thirdly, the next step was to convert those wealthy ladies into potential members. The owner made it clear that for China’s wealthy ladies, fitness is an essential part of their lives—they are not short of money or time, what they lack is attention and listening from others. Therefore, if students come with children, they are received by a kind female coach; if they appear worried, a handsome male coach is in charge. The goal is to ensure that everyone who comes for a trial gets a free and perfect first experience, so that the wealthy ladies or female clients who plan to lose weight and improve their physical condition, faced with a sincere sales ‘brother’ or ‘sister,’ find it difficult to refuse their recommendations. Even though they are aware that perhaps only ten sessions are needed, under the clever guidance of the sales staff, they often choose to purchase more, sometimes even thirty sessions. The boss’s conclusion is compelling: people are usually very susceptible to emotional sales and lack the courage to refuse others or express their own needs, especially when sales staff are adept at grasping customer emotions and have well-prepared marketing strategies in advance.
He says it’s human nature. I say, no, it’s the nature of the wealthy. I have no money, I won’t partake in your damned anniversary celebration.
