Your Leads Are Not Bad. Your Sales Process Is.

I want to talk about the thing that grinds my gears more than anything else in this industry.

Owners blaming their leads.

Sales leads blaming their leads.

GMs blaming their leads.

Whoever is running the sales floor at your gym. This one is for you.

Because I hear it everywhere. Every consult. Every coaching call. Every podcast I do.

"Tom, my leads just suck. The quality is bad. The Facebook ads are bringing in tire kickers. My VA is sending me garbage. Nobody who comes in is ready to buy."

That is the fitness industry's favorite lie.

Here is what I actually see when I crack open the books on a gym that is "drowning in bad leads."

You are following up once. Maybe twice. Then writing the lead off as "not serious."

You are responding to inquiries six hours after they came in. Sometimes the next day. Sometimes never.

There is no script. There is no qualifying call. There is no system to handle the people who do not pick up the first time.

The "bad" leads you are complaining about are coming through the door and getting handled like a stranger asking for directions.

That is not a lead problem. That is a you problem.

"But Tom, my leads really are bad."

Maybe.

One in five times, the source actually is broken. Fine. The other four are you.

Let me ask you something.

How many times do you call a new lead before you give up on them?

If your answer is one or two, your problem is not your leads. The data is not even subtle. The average sale takes between five and twelve touches across phone, text, and email. The average gym makes one or two and quits.

You did not lose the sale. You quit on it.

How fast do you respond to a new inquiry?

If a lead comes in at 8 PM and the first response is the next morning at 10 AM, you are not playing the same game as the gym down the road that texted them back in eleven minutes.

You can have the better facility. The better trainers. The better program.

The gym that responded first is the one they joined.

Speed beats almost everything in lead conversion. And almost nobody in this industry runs that play.

Three things about gym lead follow up that grind my gears

Here is what really gets me.

The same people who tell me their leads are bad are spending zero time on follow up systems. No automated text sequence. No reminder to call back the ones who did not pick up. No tracking sheet for who got contacted, when, and what they said.

Running a million dollar business off sticky notes and good intentions.

Then they look at the conversion rate at the end of the month, see eight percent closed, and blame the leads.

Next.

The "they are not serious" line.

Of course they are not serious yet. Almost nobody who fills out a form on Facebook at eleven o'clock at night after a glass of wine is serious yet. Your job is not to find people who are already serious. Your job is to make them serious.

That is what selling is.

If you only want to talk to leads who already decided they want to buy from you, you are not selling. You are taking orders.

There is a name for businesses that only take orders. They are called Amazon.

Last one.

Owners, GMs, and sales leads who blame their leads are almost always the same people who refuse to invest in their sales team. No training. No role plays. No script. No call review. No accountability on follow up numbers.

Then they wonder why their salesperson is closing eight percent.

Of course she is. You hired her. Sat her at a desk. Gave her a CRM login. Walked away.

Why "bad leads" is the most expensive excuse in the gym business

Bad leads is the most expensive excuse in this industry.

It feels good because it puts the problem outside the building. The lead source is broken. The market is bad. The economy is tight. People do not value fitness anymore.

None of that is wrong. All of it is also somebody else's problem.

The owners, GMs, and sales leads who close more deals next quarter are not the ones who figured out where to buy better leads. They are the ones who admitted the pipeline is leaking and went and fixed it.

Sticky notes get replaced with a real system. Random follow up gets replaced with a sequence. The salesperson gets a real script and gets watched on calls. The person running the floor stops protecting their ego and starts measuring.

That is not a lead problem. That is a leadership problem.

And only one person can fix it. The one reading this.

How to know if your gym leads are actually bad

If you want to settle this honestly, do this for the next thirty days.

Track three numbers per lead.

Time from lead in to first contact attempt.

Total contact attempts before they booked or you gave up.

Whether they were ever spoken to live, voice to voice, by a human being who could ask qualifying questions.

Then look at your numbers.

If the average time to first contact is over an hour, your leads are not bad. You are slow.

If the average number of contact attempts is under five, your leads are not bad. You are quitting early.

If under half of them ever had a live human conversation, your leads are not bad. You are letting them slip through a system that was built to lose them.

Fix those three numbers and you will be embarrassed by how good your leads suddenly become.

Stop blaming bad leads. Fix the sales process.

If you are still convinced your leads are the problem, fine.

Run them through a real qualifying call. Make five contact attempts inside the first forty eight hours. Get them on a live conversation.

Then come back to me at the end of the month.

If you do that and your conversion rate is still eight percent, you have a real lead problem. I will help you fix it.

But that is not the conversation ninety five percent of the people complaining about bad leads need to have.

The real conversation is whether you are running a sales process or running a coin flip.

The leads are not the problem.

You are.

And that is good news. Because you can fix you. You cannot fix Mark Zuckerberg's algorithm.

The book has the full nine objection playbook. The qualifying call script word for word. The ten commandments of follow up. The weekly scoreboard that tells you in five numbers whether your sales process is working or whether you have been lying to yourself about it.

If your leads "suck" and you have never run any of that, you do not have a lead problem. You have a system problem.

The book fixes the system. Five dollars plus shipping at tomleonardis.com/claim, or on Amazon Prime.

If you would rather have me on the phone with you while you build it, that is what the one on one coaching is for. Five spots open at a time.

Frequently asked

Why are my gym leads not converting?

Almost always not the leads. It is one of three things. You are too slow on first contact. You quit follow up too early. The lead never had a real live conversation with a human being who could ask qualifying questions. Fix those three and your conversion rate moves before the month is over.

How fast should you respond to a new gym lead?

Inside ten minutes if you can. Inside an hour at the absolute outside. The first gym to respond has a massive edge over every gym that responds later. Speed beats almost everything else in lead conversion.

How many times should you follow up with a gym lead?

Five at the absolute minimum. Twelve is closer to what actually closes deals across phone, text, and email. Most gyms quit at one or two and then blame the leads.

Are Facebook ad leads bad for gyms?

Sometimes. But almost never as bad as the owner thinks. The same lead that "did not convert" at your gym often joins the one down the road. Same lead. Different process.

Whose job is it to fix gym lead conversion?

The person running the sales floor. Owner, GM, or sales lead. There is no fourth option. Lead conversion is a leadership problem before it is a sales problem.