As health club operators know, personal training can be a major revenue generator for your club, especially if you engage your personal trainers by sharing some basic business principles with them. Doing so allows you to capitalize on the inherent competitive nature of personal trainers. Trainers know about body mechanics, fitness and how to improve human physical performance, but most of them do not know how to run a business and sell.

Here are nine things you can do to energize your personal training team and increase revenue:

1. Create a business plan specifically geared for your training department. Understand that although personal training is a department within your club, it needs to operate as if it is its own business. This will instill a sense of entrepreneurship among your trainers and help them understand how they have control over their income and can drive their own business. Your trainers need to be career-minded and fully committed to their profession.

2. Educate trainers about the club business. Show them how their individual business positively affects the club and increases their own individual success. They need to know what is in it for them.

3. Get rid of small, low-profit margin programs. Put all of the effort into programs that have the most participation or potential for higher profit.

4. Develop a sales-focused training program. If your club has a sales trainer, ask him or her to teach your team the sales basics. Match the right trainer to the client based on need and specialty. Coach them on ways to build rapport with new clients, such as sharing testimonials from past clients. This helps the trainers demonstrate how they will meet the client’s goals. Most importantly, teach them how to ask for the sale.

5. Coach each trainer to develop a personal action plan that includes a minimum monthly sales goal. The expectations need to be set, and the consequences of not meeting goals need to be clear. This training is fundamental to the process. That action plan could include being visible, building small training groups, participating in club fitness programs and social events, maximizing floor service time and providing solid fitness orientations. Set up an action plan for low achievers by giving them a short window to produce results. They either have it or they don't. If they fall in the latter category, you need to be prepared to cut them from the team. Low performers impact your bottom line, but more importantly, they negatively impact the team camaraderie. On the positive side, be sure to have a compensation package in place that rewards your strong performers. Provide incentives for meeting individual benchmarks. For example, pay a cash bonus for going above and beyond the expectation by mid-month.

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