Blog News: How to catch the perfect prospect!

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Blog News: How to catch the perfect prHow to catch the perfect prospect

I think one of the most shocking things people learn about me is that I love fishing. They just can’t understand how someone as hyperactive as me, can sit quietly for hours on end with a stick in my hand! And when I can’t fish, I love to watch fishing shows. Wicked Tuna, Swords on the Line, River Monsters, and my personal favorite, Deadliest Catch. And I had one of those, holy cow there is something that we can all learn from fishing and fishing shows. I know I’ve said this before but you might want to click this is pretty good plus it’s a continuation of a previous article I had written…

So last month I wrote a blog titled the “UN-healthy Club.” If you haven’t read it, or forgot what’s its about, or are just too lazy to click on the link, the headline is that, as an industry, generally we have done a “piss poor job” (that’s a technical term) of attracting new people into our clubs. In fact, I would argue that we are the first industry to recycle …people not aluminum cans.

So now that you are fully up to speed, what does all this have to do with fishing and fishing shows? Well I am glad you asked because the answer is everything. In fact whether you know it or not all of us love fishing…Actually all of us like crabbing. Put another way, we could all be on the Deadliest Catch. And that’s the distinction I want to talk about more.

So how are you like a bunch of crabbers on the Bearing Sea fishing for king crabs? Well I am glad you asked. Because our idea of marketing is just like crabbing. We throw a trap out and hope hope hope that the crabs aka prospects just walk in. We need them to catch themselves. Just like crabs in the Bearing Sea.

And the reason is we haven’t done a good job educating the public and the requisite follow up work. It was sort of like smoking in the 80’s. Everyone knew it was bad. But as humans that’s not enough to get people to quit. To get people to quit they needed to:

1. Put out massive amounts of data about the dangers of smoking
2. They had to come up with a catchy concept
3. They educated young people why they should not start smoking
4. They put a giant warning sticker on each pack telling you it was bad for you
5. And then they just taxed it to the point where smoking became so expensive that people stopped.

I would say, as an industry, we have done parts 1 and 2. Thanks to the internet everyone knows the benefits of working out. And I don’t know of an industry that has more catchy-ness then ours.

But we stopped at 2. We still haven’t, as an industry, invested in educating the next generation. There are plenty of one off examples but we never made a push. And when we did make a push, we didn’t have the follow-up aka steps 4 and 5.

So that brings us back to our favorite crustaceans and our marketing. We are putting out the traps and on occasion we get lucky enough to bring in a few new people, but as a whole we aren’t doing a real good job with it. We need to cast a wider net. We need to think about the 80% that can’t don’t or have never exercised and figure out how to get them to come in. And the thing is they aren’t coming in on their own. We aren’t going to get that lucky.

I try not to get too preachy here because educating the masses is expensive and not easily done by a single facility. But there is an organization out there that can and has taken on this task. It’s IHRSA. And if you haven’t figured out by now that these folks don’t just put on a good party and trade show, than you are missing out. As individual companies we compete. As industry members, we need to cooperate to our collective benefit.

I don’t want to break out too many fishing analogies here but we need to figure this out. Otherwise the double digit growth we have seen as an industry over the last 10 years will go away. So stop talking about the fish that got away and start thinking about all the fish in the sea that could be yours if we just did a few more things better.

ospect