Whether it’s pre-sales assistance, staff training, or a complete ‘no-results, no-fee’ package, Alliance has a bespoke solution for all businesses, says head of client support, Paul Woodford

What’s the scope of Alliance Leisure’s client support?
We offer complete solutions for leisure sites to help drive their business forward. We might work with them on increasing sales, retention or customer service – anything that helps them to boost revenues, improve performance and increase customer satisfaction.

What we really excel at is changing culture within an organisation – showing them how to drive that change, starting with their staff, and embedding proven systems, processes and techniques.

Do you have to be an existing Alliance customer to benefit from this help?
No, a few years ago these services were only available to the facilities we’d built or refurbished, but now we work with any business that needs our help.

We mostly work with local authority and leisure trust sites, but also some private businesses, in a wide variety of leisure areas such as fitness, bowling, spa, high ropes, swimming and toning centres, etc. We also work with some of the large hotels chains such as Holiday Inn and Village Hotels.

So how do you begin to change the culture of an organisation?
We work with a lot of organisations in the public sector that don’t really have any kind of brand identity. They might have a nicely-designed logo which they think is their brand, but true brand identity is what’s coursing through the veins of their staff, and how those staff feel about the organisation.

Motivation and driving income can be a problem in facilities where there are a lot of part-time workers, but we help to train all staff, empower them with knowledge and skills, get them passionate about what they do, get them passionate about selling – and that means ALL staff. Everyone needs to be involved in selling to customers, often in ways they don’t even realise is selling.

In fact we hardly ever use the word ‘selling’ when training our clients.

Can you explain the process that you take businesses through?
After we’ve looked at overall branding and the strategic vision with senior management, we move onto training. There’s a base level training that all staff must complete, followed by an intermediate level where key members are trained in lead generation.

We often find through this process that unexpected staff members emerge as really enthusiastic sales people, with the potential to become true brand ambassadors for the company.

While we can deliver motivational one-off training days, they don’t really change anything. We prefer to work on longer-term packages with clients so their culture really can transform.

What follows the Alliance training stage?
We then focus on marketing and what the business specifically needs to achieve. Foundation marketing is quite general – such as leaflet distribution, while targeted marketing is where we start to drill down into a site’s data – for example what Mosaic profiles should they be looking to attract?

With some offers, like Toning Suites, there’s a very clear demographic and we know exactly how to tailor marketing literature so that it talks to these users. With our pinpoint marketing, we’ll purchase data relevant to the site.

What’s the next step?
Retention, which is a really key area for all fitness and membership-based business, and tends to cause them real concern. Staff are taught to ‘educate, motivate and inspire’ customers.

It’s all about ensuring new joiners experience a great and varied journey – and we’ve developed targeted training for different areas. For example, we have a fitness journey, swim journey, extreme skate park journey, spa journey, etc. Never pigeonhole new members into a single activity, because if they engage in multiple journeys, they’ll stay with you for longer. To complement this training, we’ll often fund retention software (we work closely with The Retention People) as part of our offer.

Isn’t this type of intervention too costly for many facilities?
Many of the businesses we work with don’t have a big sales team or marketing or training budget – but they don’t necessarily need those things to achieve successful income generation. It’s about making the most of the staff that they have – and we show them exactly how to do that.

We even offer a ’No Risk, Income Share’ option where we give a company all of our products and people, pledge to protect their level of income – and we only get paid if we actually make a profit for them. This approach makes us really unique in the marketplace [read more about this business model in next month’s article].

To give an example of this, three years ago we started working with Cardiff Council, which urgently needed to increase its fitness and membership income. We pledged to protect its current income plus a further 10 per cent growth before we started taking any commission.

Overall the council’s 11 leisure sites are currently performing 40 per cent higher than when we started working with them three years ago. The council could never have achieved that kind of figure on its own, so our intervention represents the true essence of partnership.

Also, we’ve never failed to exceed our targets with any of our clients.