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11 | 04 | 08 Take a leaf out of the corporate membership sales book.

I speak to a lot of golf clubs and one of the most popular topics of conversations is membership sales. How is it going? How easy are you finding it? How do you go about getting leads for memberships? That sort of thing. It has been well documented over the past few years about the decline in members at golf clubs but one thing seems to have remained constant. Corporate owned golf clubs or groups put a huge amount of effort into getting new members and it works!

Now, I am not suggesting that we all implement the same philosophies as these companies because for all there strengths they have a lot of weaknesses as well. Some say that if they put as much effort into keeping existing members as they put into getting new ones then they would not need to sell as much as they do!

The corporate clubs usually have one person employed at the club dedicated to selling memberships and looking after the existing members. In fact I was at a club recently where they actually had 6 permanent staff in these roles. I accept that they were a golf & health club with gym, pool, aerobics studios and restaurant but they still worked on the philosophy that there should be 1 account manager for every 300 members. This significantly changes the way the traditional golf club thinks.

The big thing is sales leads, where do the clubs get the details of there prospective members. Well 90% of it comes from the club itself. Ask yourself, of all the visitors that walk in the pro shop, how many of them do you ensure fill out a contact details card? I was at a club that is part of a large group and talking to them about this very thing. They pointed out that although it was not easy to get the pro shop to commit to this practice, when you looked at the statistics for the group, the clubs that had the highest percentage of cards filled out sold the most memberships.

He went on to say that he is currently selling around 30 memberships per month and he will soon have to stop selling due to the club being full. The atmosphere at the club is vibrant the members are happy. He can now concentrate more on member retention and selling society and function room bookings.

He has a strategy for selling memberships. The filled in contact cards come to him from the pro shop, they are entered in to ACT contact database and he then contacts the visitor to ensure they were happy with there recent visit to the club. If they have played more than 3 times he asks if they had considered joining and discusses the benefits of being a member at the club. He is tasked with making 100 phone calls per month to visitors on the database. From those he is expected to make 35 appointments and from those he is expected to make 15 sales. As he pointed out, he has a much better ratio that that but that is the target.

It is not a mystery, it is however quite time consuming. Without a dedicated member of staff it is very difficult to assign the time required to achieve success. However, if you think about it. 15 sales per month at an average annual income of £700.00 per member is £10,500.00 per month or £126,000.00 per annum. This doesn’t include the added spend behind the bar, in the pro shop or bringing guests. A reasonable salary for a sales person is £25,000.00 per year so that is not a bad return.

Even in the event that the club is full, most clubs will loose around 50 members per year at renewal time so these need to be replaced and this easily covers their wages and then they can concentrate on corporate memberships, societies and function room bookings.

Do not ignore the way corporate golf clubs operate, a lot can be learnt from the way they do things!

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