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How to Sell Yoga, Without Selling
Mikel Bruce
Most yoga professionals are leery about selling yoga to prospective students for fear of appearing too aggressive or too pushy. Unfortunately, this creates a dilemma since selling is an integral part of building any business. Most yoga teachers have a misperception about selling and associate a sales process with what they might experience if they were to visit a used car lot. Sales techniques are ultimately a process of educating your prospective students the benefits of your services, based upon their needs. There is a saying that most people are telling when they should be selling. Selling any service is primarily to focus on listening and not on talking.
Questions are a critical part of every sales process and if you can re-program yourself to ask questions to prospective students about their needs, not only will you show them that you are concerned and interested but you also have a very specific understanding on how to show them you can help. For example, if you were to discover in a conversation with a prospective student that they have back problems, you can talk about how yoga is a long term, preventative approach to dealing with back pain and you can go into detail regarding specific poses and the benefits of them and the results they can create. This will be much more interesting to them than your telling random information pertaining to the type of yoga that you teach.
Here are some steps to take to improve your sales process:
* Come up with 3-10 basic questions to determine a students needs. If possible, create a needs analysis form and write down their answers.
* Give them as much time to speak about themselves as possible; this will provide you with more information about their needs when you present yoga as a solution to their needs.
* Make an effort to follow up with a prospective student at least three times. Very few prospective students are converted initially. If you do follow up, your conversion rate should increase significantly. If you are speaking to many prospective students you may want to create some type of prospect follow up system. You could invest in a software program such as ACT to help with the process. You can also follow up with your prospective students via email in an email newsletter. Mikel Bruce with WebFlexor Yoga Websites ( www.websitesforyoga.com ) recommends adding an email opt-in form to your website to capture email addresses of potential students so that you can educate them about you and your business as a subscriber to your
e-newsletter.
* Get in the practice of closing your prospective students with a simple question at the end of the needs analysis such as, Would you like to try a class sometime next week? I have classes on Monday and Wednesday evenings.
Remember not to be afraid to promote your services proactively. Most yoga teachers know that most people need their services, so take it on as a conscious mission to learn more about the sales process and to implement as many techniques as possible into how you present and promote your services so that you can help more people get onto the path of yoga. It is important to have a web presence in todays market since the vast majority of new students use the Internet to find new teachers and studios. If you are looking to develop a professional web presence and succeed on the web, WebFlexor Yoga specializes in affordable and quality websites for Yoga Teachers and Studios.
Mikel Bruce, WebFlexor Yoga Websites, 888-282-7818, www.websitesforyoga.com
Article submitted Thursday, June 26, 2008
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