How to Encourage Them to Start Training

If you’re looking for motivation on how to get new students at your martial arts school, I’d like to share an important piece of information with you. Right now, there are a number of people who are ready to start training at your school, but they just need a little nudge. More specifically, they need the right kind of nudge at the right time. But it’s hard to know who’s close to being ready, what kind of nudge it will take to get them to start, and when the best time to nudge them happens to be. Still, the right nudge at the right time can produce great results.

Here’s an example of what happened at a belt promotion at one of our schools:

• With Mother’s Day, we always offer some kind of “Moms Train Free” promotion. We usually go with ‘Moms Train Free in May’ or ‘Any Mom Who Starts in May Gets 4 Weeks and a Uniform Free.’
  
  
• At our belt promotion the head instructor at this location announced this offer and told the audience that if any mom wanted to get started, to please see him to get the free uniform and set up an appointment for her first class.
  
  
• One mom approached him to take him up on the offer.
  
  
• He announced to the audience that this mom had decided to start her training and he presented her with her uniform. There was a spontaneous round of applause from those in attendance.
  
  
• He then made this announcement: “if there are any other moms who would also like to take us up on this offer, this is a great chance to get started.”
  
  
• Within minutes, four other women came forward to take him up on the offer. Instead of just one, he now had five new students signed up to start trial programs.

All it took was that one extra little nudge to get these four other women to join in.

This doesn’t work every time (nothing does!), but it certainly worked well in this case. So, of course, we recommend that you do this as outlined above. But what we really want you to think about is all the other people who might be very close to starting your program and all the different kinds of little nudges that might just get them to begin.

Obviously, you don’t want people to think of you as a pest. But more often than you think, you’re just one little nudge away from adding another student.