Playing the Waiting Game

By Dugan Aylen, Director of Franchise Recruitment Services (FRS) Ltd

Recruiting franchisees successfully starts with being able to offer a good business opportunity. The advertising and marketing campaign is also crucial as this is how a Franchise communicates and attracts potential prospects. Effective advertising generates the enquiries which make expansion through franchising possible.

Doubling Up...

If a franchise brand can generate 100 leads a month and these leads are handled correctly then up to 12 of these enquiries will attend at least an initial meeting. The conversion rate from here depends on 4 things: the accuracy of the information given from the start, the handling of the lead before a meeting, the meeting between franchisor and the potential candidate and then the after care of that person or persons.

Many Franchisors will only convert around 1 in 12 people they meet and their solution may be to increase the advertising spend to generate more leads at the front end. However, before this is done they should take a close look at their current recruitment process and work out ways to improve it. By improving the current process a Franchisor could even double the number of franchisees gained from those 100 initial enquiries.

9 Months, 100 Meetings, 18 New Franchisees...

FRS decided to carry out a study to determine the speed of the process from initial enquiry to verbal contact with a prospect. So we made a statistical analysis of the last 100 leads that attended a meeting with one of the larger Franchisors we work with. These were based mainly on internet leads.

The time it took from the franchise seeker submitting an enquiry and receiving the information (the same day), to when they were actually prepared to have a discussion, was 18 days. From this point it took a further 23 days (with contact being made once a week to check progress) for this enquiry to actually attend an initial meeting. This is a total of 41 days from clicking the ‘Submit’ button online to actually having a face to face meeting.

We decided to look at the contact process of those leads that actually became franchisees. In total, this meant we looked at 18 out of 100. Interestingly we found that with these leads, the time it took from initial enquiry to a discussion on the telephone more than halved – it dropped to just over a week. The time to attend a meeting following that was still 19 days, whatever steps were taken. The result was it took 27 days for serious enquiries to actually meet with the franchisor face to face.

The final part of the analysis concerned the decision time from 1st meeting to joining the franchise. This was generally a further 30 days. Brands should therefore plan a lag time of 2 months from when they first start advertising to recruiting their first franchisee.

Results...

It takes almost a month for the most serious prospects to attend a meeting, and the rest of the leads quite a lot longer. From this point, a further month is taken before a franchise agreement is signed. This shows a patient approach is required, and where people are ‘pushed’ into meetings, although one ratio may improve, the overall result will not.

A Relationship Based on Trust and Honesty...

The cliché of franchising being like a marriage is used many times, but before that stage can be reached, both parties need to have established a relationship based on trust and honesty. This begins with first impressions, is strengthened by the lead handler, consolidated by the franchisor and confirmed by the mutual signing of the franchise agreement.