❤️ Sell what you love; love what you sell
Lesley re-lives her first multi-location deal at FitGrid in this one!
Detailing her evolution from yoga instructor & FitGrid power user to joining their sales team.
The goal? Grow a product she personally believed in.
Her journey has helped in building lasting relationships with her fitness studio clients.
Guest Feature
Lesley’s story is unique, not a transition that happens daily.
She has been a Bikram Yoga Instructor and Studio General Manager for the past 10 years. j
Then moved into a sales role at FitGrid and has been absolutely crushing it.
Deal details
What are you selling?
- Fitness studio management software
Where did the prospect come from?
- Assigned in her Salesforce territory.
Company type
- Fitness studio with multiple locations
Prospecting method
- Cold call that transition into a detailed follow up email
Barriers to Overcome
- A death in the mid-deal changed Bradley’s entire focus & had to rely on his team.
- End of the quarter deadline provided a challenge to close on time.
Buyer type
- Decision Maker: General Manager
Deal length
- 6 weeks sales cycle
Episode Highlights
Note: timestamps correlate with the full conversation
Referral: Power users = incredible sellers (16:41)
3 Tips for Account Executives
1. Under promise & over deliver.
Tee up your customer teams to crush it.
2. Be honest, human, & relatable at all times in the process.
People buy from people
3. Sell something you love.
The grind is much more fun when you're passionate.
Watch the full conversation
Full transcript
Taylor Dahlem
Welcome back to How I Deal, where we examine a single past closed deal, how it played out that way, and really try to provide some actionable sales tips. Tips that any seller can use in their deals today. My name is Taylor Dahem, full cycle account executive, now full-time content guy, and I'm joined as always by my cohost, Junior Lartey, the sales maverick here at Pickle. June, what's up, man?
Junior Lartey
Not much. Sales maverick. I kind of like that. I don't know what it means, but it seems cool. It's episode seventeen, so I opened the floodgates, right? I offered the opportunity to have people reach out and essentially say, I want to hear a deal from X Company, or so and so I felt the floodgates. So now we're pretty lined up, Taylor. We've got some fun podcasts coming up and coming, I should say, but today's I'm actually really excited about. So it's going to be a great conversation.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes, we've got them lined up. We're excited. Thank you all for participating and helping us continue this thing and keep it rolling forward. But for those that haven't listened before and maybe didn't help us out, just a quick explainer for what we do here. Each conversation we chat through a passive deal. We want to keep all names, places as fictionalized, anonymized as possible, and that really allows us to dive deep. So we want to understand from the first time the seller came across a prospect, maybe it's on their CRM certain territory, or even an inbound lead, all the way to getting that final signature and kicking off implementation or onboarding.
Junior Lartey
Our guest today is Lesley Klose, and her story is so unique, it's a transition that just doesn't happen every day. So Leslie has been a Bikram yoga instructor and a studio general manager for the past ten years. She jumped into a sales role at FitGrid and has just been crushing it. So Lesley, it's great to have you tell us about your role today and what problems Fit Grid solves.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, well, thanks both of you for having me today. Really happy to be here and get a chance to chat with you. As you mentioned, I work for FitGrid. We are a SaaS company. We work with fitness studios, and a big part of what we do is help boost conversion and retention numbers for those companies. But we do it in a unique way. We're not about automations, we're about relationship building. So really helping to build community, connecting people together. You can break up with a transaction, you can't break up with a relationship. Right.
Junior Lartey
Leslie, let me ask you, because you go from Bikram yoga instructor, studio general manager for a long time, ten years like that is embedded into your life? To make the jump to sales is one thing, but why Fit Grid?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, there's kind of a lot to it. A short part I'll show you for you is pandemic, right? Obviously Pandemica World changed. The whole fitness industry shifted, so I knew I had to make a change in something. And I knew about Fit Grid because I used it when I was both teaching and managing. So I knew about this company. I had known the CEO prior to I actually had a friend working for the company. And so I actually went to my friend and just said, hey, I need a job. You talk to fitness people all day long. If you hear anything, let me know. And he was like, all right, well actually we might be hiring here. I don't know if you're right for it, but submit your resume and I'll just tell the head of that department to look for your resume. And I was like, okay, great, sure. And I submitted having never worked in sales, I submitted for a sales position at that point. It was like a special project, not an Ae position. It was more focused on something. Met with the VP, met with our CEO and they were like, well, I guess we'll see. You obviously have experience in fitness and you know how to talk to studio owners, but I don't know if you're right for sales, but let's see what happens. And obviously it went well because here I am.
Junior Lartey
I think you're building like a strong use case for any company to just go out and hire power users. Like someone who's used the product but does not work for the company. At least that's the use case. I see. And I'm going to keep that in mind for future Pickle employees.
Taylor Dahlem
Timing is right. Amazing story, and obviously it's working out because a deal was closed and that's why you're with us today. So excited to learn. What deal are you walking us through today, Leslie?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, great question. So the reason I picked this deal is when I was first transitioned into account executive, I was focusing on SMB Studios. So much smaller, more mom-and-pop type things. And the end of last year, I was promoted to Enterprise Deals. And when we talk enterprise at FitGrid, we're talking about franchise studios that have ten locations or more. So I went from here, one student owner, one location, to different franchises that have anywhere from fifty to one thousand seven hundred locations. Right? So it's a big difference, big shift. And this particular deal was one of my first franchise deals, the first enterprise deals that I closed. So that's why I picked this one. And this happens to be one owner who owns three franchise locations, which was pretty big coming into it. So that's why I picked this deal. And that's the one I'm going to walk you through today.
Junior Lartey
When we're keep saying fitness studios, yours, when you personally used it, was a yoga studio. Are we like fitness studio? Could that be like a ballet dance team? I'm assuming like small gym? Not small gyms. But gyms, right. So what is fitness studio? What's the definition there?
Lesley Klose
Great question. We focus on group fitness classes. So yoga is our number one. Right? Because if you Google that around the world, right, yoga studios are probably the most prominent. But yoga, Pilates, kickboxing hit studios, you've got some martial arts, you've got some dance studios. But dance studios are different because that's usually more like you pay when your kid goes to a dance studio every single Tuesday. So it's a different thing. We're focusing more on you've got that membership to that Pilates studio, and we want you to keep going to that Pilates studio. So how can we help the studio ensure that that relationship continues?
Junior Lartey
Okay. I've got a very good image of fitness studio, what we're talking about now. So one of the big questions in sales in general is just like, knowing who to prospect. It's not easy. Sometimes you're building your own list. Sometimes you're scrolling through LinkedIn and you've got keywords or something like that. So how did you become aware about this company and what research did you conduct when you found out about them?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, great question. So, as I mentioned, I came into this Enterprise bowl. So there was someone working this particular brand before me. When I came in, it was basically like, here, Leslie, you're going to take over this brand. So I had the brand in my name, and I had a bunch of different leads in my name in salesforce. So it was just, Here you go, go from here. Right. I never knew about this brand, so I obviously had to Google it. I had to do a little research into what types of classes they offer. A big part of what we have to do is learn their language a little bit, and that's in sales in general. Right. But when you're talking to a yoga studio, you're talking about their instructors, you're talking about their clients. When you're talking to, like, a hit studio, sometimes they're coaches or trainers. Right. So there's different language. So I had to kind of dig into their website a little bit, learn a little bit more. Unfortunately, there are no locations near me, otherwise I would have gone to take a class. But you do what you can. We did have some other studios under that brand working with us, so I went over their case studies that we've done just to try to understand how we've been able to help them already prior to reaching out.
Junior Lartey
Sounds like you can do the ultimate type of research. Like, hey, I went to four of your hit studios, I went to six of your yoga classes, and this is what I learned. This was the takeaways. The parallel of that for a lot of companies is I reached out to your account executives, and they say they have this problem. Or, I reached out to your SEO team, and it seems like you're lacking tools in the marketing department. So you're getting like, that very ground-level research before you actually reach out. I love that aspect.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, it's been super helpful. And then when you're talking to the owners and you say, oh, when I took my first class at Blumpblump, whatever that is. I know when I talk to them, they're like, oh, that was your first class. Jeez, you shouldn't have taken that one.
Junior Lartey
I paid you, now you pay me kind of situation.
Taylor Dahlem
Yeah, I know there's like, we were talking about this a little bit earlier, but there's a lot of people that approach top-down and sell that way. But there's also this idea of kind of a land and expand model, and it sounds like here that kind of applies where you want to start at each individual location, understand their pain and kind of build up from there, maybe expand on that a little bit and kind of learn us on how that process works for you.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, that's a great question. So obviously when you're talking about enterprise deals, you need corporate buy-in to some degree, whether that's just to approve that they get to do it, and some franchises and some corporations, they're like, whatever you want to do, we trust you on the individual level, some don't. So it's learning that first and foremost in this particular situation, we already had the approval. Like corporate was basically the same thing, right? Yeah, individual locations can do whatever they want. They can use it, not use it. So we really took the bottom-up approach, that land and expand approach of let's get a ground spot, let's get as many individual locations leveraging fit grid, so we can then go to corporate and say, hey, you've got fifty percent of your locations on board. Can we talk about an official partnership with you? Can we talk about being a preferred vendor or a required partner? Whatever you want to do so that we can get into all of your locations. So that's with this particular brand, how.
Taylor Dahlem
We've really approached it, and that probably leans itself into the next question, like how did you get your foot in the door here? How did you get in front of this particular prospect? Was it because you had already been in a few other locations? Like, what was kind of the CTA and hook that you used to kind of get the ball rolling here?
Lesley Klose
Great question. So I actually was a cold call. I called one of the studios, didn't even realize that this same owner owned three studios because I had different names listed in salesforce, which is also a challenge that we have sometimes because we don't always know which locations one owner has. We get someone on the phone and they're like, oh well, they actually own these four. Oh great, you have to go through and update your notes. So in this case I called, I got turned out to be the general manager on the phone, had a great conversation with her, and she said, well, look, it's not my call. You need to meet with the owner. She said, Shoot me over an email, I'll share it with him and follow up with me next week. Okay, great. I sent over an email, and in that email, I kind of reach out to a little bit about what we talked about. I mean, a very high-level overview of the grid. And I sent the case study we had done with one of the other studios in that brand so that they could see that we have some clout there. Right. We had some results that we could show, and it turns out the owner is the one that emailed me back. Because I wrote back and I didn't know it was him at first. And I said, I wrote the email back to the manager and the response was actually me. So it's pretty funny.
Junior Lartey
I think that aspect of I'm on a cold call. They say to send information over, a lot of times that's where things die. At that point, conversation is over. Maybe new account executives don't know that, but that's like the killer for everybody. But in your case, the follow-up email with the case study of franchise underneath them, high impact, like really high impact. It's the difference of me calling and saying, hey, I spoke with so and so, and these are some of the problems, some of the things they surface or concerns they had. And then in the email referencing, I spoke with so and so here's that high-level conversation that we had. So a lot of ties just to keep this relevant as compared to just letting it die at that point. So owner responds, he's like, hey, that's me. You book a meeting. Now it's time for a discovery. Time to uncover what's actually going on under the hood. So what did it look like? What did you learn in this discovery coverage?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, I learned with him that he has the three locations, get a big team of people under him, forty, fifty instructors, because he has such three locations, plus a handful of managers and front desk staff. So for him, his main theme that he really had to deal with was just like, keeping his finger on the pulse, saving time, finding ways to implement some systems for his people. Right. Because it's hard to implement systems when you've got so many people you're juggling in many locations. And also being able to keep track of those systems are people doing what you're asking them to do. And as we were talking, I was just thinking, we can help with this. And by the way, when we help with this, it's also going to help with your numbers, and you'll be able to see that it helps with your numbers. So the conversation went from him being like, oh, I have thirty minutes to all of a sudden that's been on the phone for an hour because he was just enjoying our conversation and we had fun chatting with each other.
Junior Lartey
He seems like he's not the owner that sits back and reviews just like a Sunday report to know, how much money can I spend this month? He seems like the owner who is like, at any given day, I am on-site somewhere.
Lesley Klose
Correct.
Junior Lartey
Is that the case?
Lesley Klose
Yes. He's incredibly hands-on in a wonderful way. Right. But because he's only one person can't clone himself, he needs to be able to keep an eye on if he's at location A, he needs to see what's going on at BMC that day or those couple of days. So this was really helpful for him. And he's an instructor himself too, so it was a very interesting conversation to chat with him.
Junior Lartey
So when you're saying process and time, those things are like very real here. It's not your typical, well, we'll save you time and we'll make it easier. This is actually his daily life. And so it became super real as compared to the Sunday owner that processing time doesn't matter because he's got the report and the report looks good.
Lesley Klose
Correct.
Junior Lartey
And I love that you are able to find that and just make it so apparent in that conversation.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, it was great. I felt very lucky that it came out and it came out very naturally, so it would definitely help us in moving forward.
Taylor Dahlem
Leslie had mentioned he was a past instructor, right. Or had that background. I'm curious, with your background, being a past instructor, did that lend itself to that extra fifteen minutes of comfortability and enjoying that conversation, or did you tap into some of that kind of past experience there?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, great question. With this deal, and I would say with a lot of my deals, when I tell them about my experience managing studio, when I tell them about my experience as a teacher, they kind of take a step back and go, oh, you do actually know what we do. Because I'm not just a salesperson, I'm someone who's been there. I've had boots on the ground. I've experienced it regularly. I know what that's like. I've run those reports in the systems on their end. Right. I know what their booking billing platform looks like. So to be able to have that in common allows us to have a.
Taylor Dahlem
Much more personal conversation, huge advantage, and instant rapport.
Instant trust. And that's really the name of the game. If they don't trust you, they're not going to buy from you. And you have that ability to say, hey, I know exactly what you're going through, here's why I bought it, and here's how I can help. Yeah, but moving into that next step, you've unearthed the pain. You've verified kind of maybe had a hypothesis going in based off of your prior experiences, and you've now confirmed that in this initial conversation. But at some point you've got to put the cards on the table. You've got to show the product or whatever you're putting out there to solve that pain that you've uncovered. So how did you personalize that demo process and maybe keep it focused within that same conversation?
Lesley Klose
Yeah, great question. In all my conversations that I have, I really try to unearth that team first because we have a pretty robust platform and I do not want to just feature down with them. If I just start showing them things that are not going to be helpful for them, I'm never going to get the sales. They're just going to go, all right, whatever. This is another platform. But if I can know where they're struggling and then be able to show them two, maybe three, usually try to stick to things that can help them, then it's more focused then it's actually like, we have a lot to do, but let's focus on this. And I'll tell them that in our conversation before the demo, the reason I'm asking you all these questions is because I don't want to just show you things for no reason. I want to show you things that are going to be beneficial. I don't want to waste your time. And that also will usually help them open up to me a little bit more in discovery because they know I'm not just playing twenty questions for the sake of playing twenty questions with them. There's actually a reason behind it.
Junior Lartey
And this demo process you had mentioned before, we start recording that this is the same conversation, it's the latter half of your initial. Like, you spend the first fifteen, twenty minutes in discovery and trying to uncover that pain, and then the remaining half is going through a demo and helping them, as you say, focusing on these two or three things.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, absolutely. That's the goal. The goal is to do it on one call. Obviously, if they're short on time, I don't want to cram it in because that's not worth it. So I always figure out in the beginning of the call how much time they have so we can plan accordingly. Sometimes they end up going, oh, you know what, I'll stay longer. I can stay longer. Right. Because they're enjoying the conversation. But otherwise I might go into it knowing we're never going to demo in the next twenty minutes because that's all they have. So we'll have to schedule a follow-up call tomorrow or later in the day, whatever that is. But in this situation, yes, it was all in one call.
Junior Lartey
So my question, Leslie, is why is your goal to do it all in one call?
Lesley Klose
Great. Good question. So part of it is just the longer you wait, the harder it is to get the deal. If you catch them in that moment when they're thinking about the pain that they've already expressed, to you and it's kind of fresh, right? It's like that fresh moon because they brought it up and then you can show them right away how you can solve it. They are often more likely to jump at that moment if they leave that call and have time to think about what they talked about. Sometimes they come back and they're like, no, it's actually not that big of a deal. Right? My pain isn't that bad for me to go spend this extra money every month for the annual I'm actually okay. Or it's also scheduling. Everybody's busy. So if you get off that call and you haven't done the demo and you haven't started the process of actually booking the deal, getting them back, it's really hard sometimes. You've got their attention. Do it now.
Junior Lartey
This was a really great answer, too, because right now in the SAS world, especially in sales, it's like do not demo without discovery. The really unique thing here is Fit Grid is a SaaS company, but you're not selling to SAS people. These are people that own studios. Fit in a very different world. They'll use the tech, but they are not themselves a SAS buyer. So for you to do a discovery and a demo in the same conversation makes a lot of sense, right? You likely have a higher close rate when those are done at the same time because it is a low commitment with a huge impact conversation.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, exactly.
Junior Lartey
So Ae is listening. I don't want you to think, oh, I'm going to start doing discovery and demo every time, same conversation, no matter what. You have to understand where your buyer lives. You have to understand why your company sells the way that you sell before you go rogue. Maybe on the one-off conversation, you go rogue. But for the most part, there's a process. Stick to it. It's there for a reason. So through this deal, what are some of the barriers, the complications that came up that you really had to overcome?
Lesley Klose
The biggest barrier with this deal was it wasn't cost or anything like that with him, it was implementation. He was really afraid of spending money on something that would never be implemented for his studios. I think he's been burned in the past with this business as well as other businesses, and he's like, I just don't want to waste my money. So I had to really show him and explain to him that we have a phenomenal onboarding process, right. So we have laid it out. I showed him what that looks like with his onboarding call and follow-up set and his success manager, how that's going to go? I introduced him to it, was a director of customer success and handled all the onboarding for him. And so I had to just really show him like, we got you, you're not on your own. That's what we're here for and we're going to make sure you're seeing the value of what you're paying for. I don't want you paying money for something that you're not getting value in. And when I could reassure him of that, he said, all right, let's go.
Taylor Dahlem
Let's do it with this deal. Obviously we talked about discovery demo in the same meeting, same time. This objection I assume or barrier came up in that meeting. Did you handle it then and there? Was there an extra follow-up? Like how did you kind of go about building that trust up of how we're going to implement this as well?
Lesley Klose
Great question. I handled it then and there. But then we also had at that point we were offering a thirty-day trial for our new subscribers. So I was able to say, look, just sign up for the trial, you've got thirty days, we're going to get you on board, we're going to get you trained in those thirty days. At the end of those thirty days, you feel like it's not implemented. We part as friends, no big deal. But this way you have that chance to get in there and try it out and see what we can do to help you with your team. And he was like, all right, you know what, that's great, let's try it. It's a trial, it doesn't have to do a trial, let's see what it is. And then our amazing Rockstar success team came in and crushed it with him.
Taylor Dahlem
I assume the timeline as well, or being able to kind of create some urgency was there, especially being one meeting. But we had talked about maybe the timing of this deal was kind of an advantage for you as well.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, well, in the fitness industry, January is always crazy, right? Because all those major resolutions. So he and I were talking in December heading into the holidays. And I said. Well look. If we can get you up and running quickly. Right. If we do this right. Which I believe we can. You're going to be able to hit January and crush it with all these new people coming in because you're going to have these systems in place. You're going to be able to see the results that much quicker because you're going to have all these things going on. So let's do this. And a lot of people are afraid of January is so busy, they're like, oh, I don't know if we can juggle something new. But he also saw the other side, which is the benefits that outweighed the idea of being too busy to do it. So he jumped on it and it worked out in his favor, in our favor.
Junior Lartey
I imagine when you say something like, I believe we can, the fact that you used Fit Grid before joining the company and then now you work, there's so much credibility behind what you say, being a former user. Let's recap the timeline just of the whole deal. Some of the specs talk us through from start to finish how many conversations you think took place and what the trial experience was like.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, great question there. So as I mentioned, it was like the cold call with the manager, little email exchange in there and then demo and starting the trial. So I would say from the initial call to the time the trial closed until we finished and got the payment probably I'd say five to six weeks max, just because you got the thirty-day trial in there. As far as during the trial, I was emailing with him. I are on boarding team emailing with him. I know there were several zoom calls and trainings in there during the course of that time, both for him as well as his team to make sure that they were up and running some training videos. Because again, his biggest thing was implementation. So we really helped hand as we were going through it. I met with him two weeks in just to be like, how's it going? Two weeks in? I just want to see, what do you need? Relayed that to the onboarding team so we were able to make sure that he had everything set, and then by the time that was done, he was like, I love it, this is great, let's go. And he committed and he got all three of his locations up and running.
Taylor Dahlem
That's perfect way to manage the deal, organize. It sounds like it moved extremely quickly, but at the same time, really, the sale just begins for him in that thirty-day trial. So it's a quick close, but realistically you still have to win them over with that trial and the onboarding, which sounds like went really well. Leslie, let's kind of wrap this thing up and really bring it home. What are maybe three things or three tips that any sales pro can use today in their deals and closer to that closed one, that may be either you learn from this deal or really just in general as a sales pro.
Lesley Klose
Yeah, I mean, obviously in this situation, it would make sure you don't over-promise what you can do from a perspective of onboarding and training. I think I obviously did a good job of showing him what we could do. He was very happy with it. But you just want to be careful, right? Be honest, don't oversell something. Another side is just be human, right? Relate to the people you're talking to. Listen to them. Again, he went in with one thing in mind, quick phone call, we ended up talking for an hour. We've now related. He's one of our champions. He refers us to people all the time. He loves the product. So the more of a human relationship you can have with your prospects and the people you're talking to, the better. And the third thing is that something you're passionate about and that you believe in, it's so much easier to do. Have those conversations when you believe in what you're selling.
Junior Lartey
Leslie, I love those three tips. Believing in what you're selling is clearly something that you have that you intimately know. I mean, great chatting with you. You've proved the Use case of hiring previous users, something every company should look at doing. You've proved the Use case of hiring someone who has non-SaaS experience, which can be a huge barrier to the SAS world. Screw that. You've literally proved it. It can be done. You're awesome. Thanks so much for joining the podcast.
Lesley Klose
My pleasure. Thank you both for having me.
Taylor Dahlem
Yes, and just like that, another episode of How I Deal is in the books. If you enjoy this conversation with Leslie and want to hear more, please let us know in the comments. Spotify, Apple, wherever you consume your podcast, and we will take that into consideration and implement as much as we can. But we always appreciate giving us reviews, comments, stars, even four, five, six, depending on how well we do. But please keep us informed, keep us in the loop, and we'll try to make this better every week. This was an awesome conversation. We're excited to kick out our next one as well, and we will see you next time.
