Running a health club is an ongoing challenge that can be successfully guided by strategic business planning and ongoing communications among departments. This includes your marketing and sales teams who are in the marketing funnel trenches looking to attract, engage, and motivate prospects to join your gym, and eventually retain satisfied members.
Sometimes marketing and sales departments are one and the same, and sometimes they are comprised of separate teams all under the marketing umbrella. Regardless, it’s essential for everyone to be on the same page for all efforts, as health club marketing is truly a team effort.
One effective way to align marketing efforts is to create and maintain this crucial, must-have health club marketing and sales agreement: the Service Level Agreement (SLA).
The SLA is simply a document to help you calculate and agree upon your marketing goals and sales activities in order to support one another on all related efforts. Agreeing on tangible, numerically-driven goals is a simple way to track progress and measure success as a united force.
According to HubSpot, companies with an SLA see 20 percent annual revenue growth while alternatively, those that don’t have an SLA see a 4 percent decline. So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started!
THE BASICS: WHAT’S INCLUDED IN A SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT
- Shared Goals: Identifying goals on behalf of both marketing and sales teams is a great start to developing a SLA and serves as a guide toward all efforts moving forward. When brainstorming, it’s best to use tangible and numerically-driven goals to effectively set and measure metrics (see #4).
- Defined Terminology: Come to an agreement on various terms from both teams. Who is qualified as a lead? What does a prospect look like? Clearly defining important and frequently used terminology ahead of time will prevent potential misunderstandings as both teams work toward the shared goals.
- Understood Efforts: Have a discussion about what the marketing team is doing to acquire new members, and vice versa for sales. Both teams should determine if efforts are tuned in to one another toward the overall shared goals.
- Set Metrics: By setting metrics, it allows for each team to shoot realistically towards shared goals while offering benchmarks to measure and track progress. Example metrics include: how many sales-ready leads will marketing deliver each week/month/quarter? How quickly will marketing follow up on each of the leads? What is the time frame for sales to follow up after handoff? To help calculate the marketing and sales metrics for your health club service level agreement, take a look at the HubSpot SLA four-step process for a good starting point.
- Ongoing Conversations: Set a monthly meeting with both marketing and sales teams to review progress and shared goal achievement. Don’t forget about the key performance indicators (KPIs), which will help provide additional insight and possible strategic goal adjustments.
Remember, your health club marketing SLA is meant to keep both marketing and sales teams on a united front toward overarching shared goals. Use the SLA as a living document that is reviewed, updated, and improved upon on a regular basis by teams for an ongoing, strategic effort.
Tell us, how do your marketing and sales teams work together as a united effort? How has the SLA changed your marketing plan and process? Share with us, we want to know!
