How to sell country club memberships: the membership director’s weekly numbers

To sell country club memberships, work backwards from leavers. A 770-member club at CMAA’s 4.3% median attrition, aiming for 2% growth, needs about 49 joins a year: 0.93 a week. On mid-band assumptions, that takes 8.9 enquiries, 4.4 tours, 2.2 family visits and 1.3 proposals every week, and about 21 hours of selling time.

• The target: joins a year = members × attrition + members × growth target. Divide by 52 for the weekly number.
• The five weekly numbers: enquiries, tours, family visits, proposals, joins. Each one is the previous one times a stage rate.
• The sensitivity: CMAA puts median golf and country club attrition at 4.3%, for a single year (2021 data). At an assumed 8%, the same club needs 1.48 joins a week.
• The ceiling: on labelled assumptions, the mid band needs 20.6 selling hours a week at 4.3% attrition and 32.7 at 8%. Most of it is follow-up, not tours.
• Not covered here: the first call (its script and qualifying questions) and the per-enquiry touch calendar, which have their own pages.

How many members does a country club need to sell each week?

The weekly join target is set by leavers before it is set by ambition. The Club Management Association of America’s 2022 Finance and Operations Report executive summary (2021 data, 440 clubs) reports an average of 770 members at golf and country clubs and median attrition of 4.3%. Those are the base inputs below; the 2% growth target is an assumption.

CMAA’s 4.3% is a surveyed median for a single year (2021). The 8% row is an assumption that shows how sensitive the target is to attrition; it is not a published figure. For a UK comparison, the Hillier Hopkins Golf Clubs Report 2024/25 found its 69 members’ clubs averaged 75 joiners and 63 leavers in 2024, about 1.4 joins a week. A membership director’s weekly target is roughly one join, and nearly every week of a normal year goes to replacing leavers.

The weekly activity model: enquiries, tours, family visits, proposals, joins

Each stage is defined so it can be counted. A tour is the first visit with the director. A family visit is a second visit with the partner or family, usually a meal or the pool. A proposal is a written offer with category, fees and start date, with a proposer arranged. We found no published stage-conversion rates for country clubs with a disclosed method, so the rates are labelled assumptions in three bands. The join target is 0.93 a week (CMAA median attrition).

Worked mid row: 0.93 ÷ 0.70 = 1.33 proposals; ÷ 0.60 = 2.22 family visits; ÷ 0.50 = 4.44 tours; ÷ 0.50 = 8.9 enquiries. The spread between bands is the lesson: the same join target needs anything from 4.6 to 19.4 enquiries a week, depending on stage rates the club has probably never measured. Count your own for one quarter before setting any marketing budget.

How much follow-up can one membership director cover?

Tours and proposals are the visible work. The hidden work is the open pipeline: every prospect who has enquired but not yet joined or dropped out needs contact each week. Open prospects ≈ weekly enquiries × weeks in the sales cycle. Assumptions: an 8-week cycle, one 10-minute follow-up per open prospect a week (treated as an upper bound, since some drop out early), 60-minute tours, 90-minute family visits and 45 minutes to prepare and present a proposal.

A director who also runs events, onboarding and retention rarely has more than about 15 to 20 selling hours a week (our assumption; we found no published survey). On this model, the mid band at CMAA attrition sits right at that line, and every row below it does not fit in one person. The weekly follow-up load, not the tour count, is what one membership director cannot cover. For the minute-by-minute cadence of a single enquiry, see our 8-touch enquiry-to-member calendar.

The weekly scoreboard a membership director should report

Five counts and four ratios, every Monday, compared with the model above. When a ratio falls, it points at the stage to fix.

Read the counts as a rolling four-week average, not week by week. At under one join a week, a single family deciding on a Monday instead of a Friday swings the weekly number from zero to two. If your resignations cluster around an annual renewal date, the join target is lumpy too: a club that renews in January and loses most of its leavers that month should front-load enquiries in the quarter before. Set the quarterly target from the leaver count, then hold the director to the four-week average.

The first-call checks link to our page on membership enquiry response time, and the full-cost check to country club initiation fees.

What running the weekly model in-house costs

The model is a spreadsheet and a CRM with five stage fields; no vendor is needed. The cost is the selling hours in the table, and the honesty to log a prospect as lost. What breaks first is the follow-up column: when a week fills with tours, the 71 open prospects get no call, and they surface as lost three weeks later.

Past that line the role splits: one person for first contact, follow-up and booking, and the director for tours, family visits and proposals. The enquiry-count thresholds for that split are on our private club enquiry cadence page. That first seat can be a coordinator, or an outsourced or AI appointment-setting service that books tours into the director’s diary. LeadsNow is one such provider, with 50,769+ AI-booked sales appointments since 2017. How clubs sell memberships alongside corporate days and functions is on our golf club lead generation page.

Frequently asked questions

How do you sell country club memberships?

Set a weekly join target from leavers plus growth, then run every prospect through the same five stages: enquiry, tour, family visit, proposal, join. Measure each stage rate weekly and fix the stage whose rate falls, rather than buying more enquiries.

How many new members does a country club need each year?

Members times attrition, plus any growth target. The CMAA 2022 Finance and Operations Report gives an average of 770 members and a median attrition rate of 4.3% for golf and country clubs (2021 data, 440 clubs), which is about 33 leavers a year before any growth.

What does a membership sales director at a country club do each week?

Answers and qualifies new enquiries, runs tours and family visits, prepares proposals and follows up every open prospect. On the mid-band model on this page, that is about 4.4 tours, 2.2 family visits and 1.3 proposals a week, with follow-up taking more hours than tours.

What should a membership director’s weekly report include?

Five counts (enquiries, tours, family visits, proposals, joins) and the four ratios between them, compared with the club’s own model. Add the number of open prospects not contacted that week, because it predicts next month’s lost prospects.

Why does a country club need a family visit as well as a tour?

Because the buyer is usually a household. CMAA found 82% of surveyed clubs offer a full family membership, so the partner or family who did not attend the first tour need their own visit before a proposal is likely to be accepted.