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
The fitness team at Coventry Sports & Leisure were also trained in customer service
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.
Follow the series
1. Scoping / Investigation 2. Conceptualisation 3. Viability assessment & full feasibility 4. Site investigation 5. Fixed price contracts 6. Overseeing the building work 7. Ordering phase 8. Client support (part 1) 9. Client support (part 2)
Case Study Boosting numbers for Coventry Sports & Leisure Centre Alliance started working with Coventry Sports & Leisure Centre in January 2010, as the facility was on a dramatic slide in terms of members and income. The centre had just finished a three-year contract with another leisure client support company, and were sceptical that another partnership would work.
Alliance took the risk, believed in its approach and set a plan to empower the whole team. It embedded all of its systems and techniques and focused on the duty manager team to support, mentor and coach the sales effort. Woodford says: “We transformed the sales and marketing approach and soon turned the decline into growth. We also worked with the fitness team to ensure the customer experience was rewarding, motivating and helped achieve results.
“Membership numbers were just under 1500 when we started, now they’re at 2950, a 97 per cent increase! And we achieved these numbers in an environment where one of the biggest budget operator has opened just two minutes away.”
Alliance has helped the Coventry leisure site almost double its members
Global Wellness Day (GWD) will mark its 15th anniversary on Saturday 13 June 2026, with the
theme: #JoyMagenta – a celebration of the healing qualities of simple gestures and activities
that spark joy.
Global luxury hospitality brand, Six Senses, has partnered with longevity healthcare provider,
HUM2N, to launch a clinic at Six Senses London, at The Whiteley.
As part of its first hotel partnership, Mayrlife – the medical health resort company known for its
site in Altaussee, Austria – has launched a day clinic at the Rosewood Vienna.
Premium London health club, KX Chelsea, will imminently unveil its most significant
redevelopment since its launch in 2002 to create an integrated wellness model combining
training, recovery and relaxation.
Rosewood Le Guanahani St Barth, on the northeast coast of Saint Barthélemy in the French
West Indies, is offering a programme of ocean-inspired yoga classes between 8-14 June to
celebrate Global Wellness Day (GWD).
Hotel de France, located on the British Isle of Jersey, has created a wellness retreat package
that includes a hot yoga session that will take place in Jersey Zoo’s butterfly sanctuary.
The Ritz-Carlton, Langkawi, in Malaysia, has revealed a schedule for Global Wellness Day
(GWD) that includes guided rainforest walks, mindful movement and guided coastal meditation
experiences.
Longevitix, a clinical platform for preventive and longevity medicine, has launched its AI-
powered intelligence system to help physicians deliver continuous, personalised longevity-
focused care at scale.
Atmantan Wellness Centre, an integrative wellness destination in Mulshi, near Pune in India, is
expanding its portfolio by adding a new centre in Hyderabad that will launch between 2028 and
2029.
A recent survey by the UK Spa Association (UKSA) into the industry’s approach to cancer care
has revealed that almost half of participating respondents (46 per cent) are unaware that
cancer is a disability and guests with a cancer diagnosis must be given
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