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On June 13th, 2019, FranConnect did a pre-release of its annual look into how deals actually get done in franchising. Below you'll be able to read about what we found most surprising in the data, but let's start by addressing the headline.
Of all franchise deals in 2018, 85% came from leads contacted within the first four hours after being generated.
BINGO. BINGO. BINGO. For as long as we've been building FranFunnel, we've been promoting this exact idea. If you want to close deals, you need to start a relationship with leads as soon as possible. Waiting, even a couple hours, can devastate your chances to ever start a conversation with leads, much less ever close a deal.
People are distractable. (Statistics even show that you won't make it to the end of this relatively short article.) When they're in the mood to research your concept, you have to sate that curiosity. It is simply unreasonable to expect leads to sit by their phone waiting for you. Start working leads the second they submit their information.
Here are our other four key takeaways from this afternoon's presentation:
I think this is the most shocking statistic presented. We know that the power of the internet is that you can reach a nearly infinite number of people for relatively low cost. As the internet continues to pervade lead generation, lead counts should be going up. A lot. If your marketing dollars are becoming more efficient annually, which would be a reasonable expectation, it makes no sense that you would choose to decrease the number of leads you’re generating.
On a similar note to the last one, this seems low. We know that you’re going to have to run through quite a few people not actually interested in order to find the deals that you’re looking for. I would imagine that if you’re serious about truly scaling your franchise quickly, this number needs to be 3-5x higher. I’m not a fan of generating leads for quantity sake, but 135 is just simply nowhere near an appropriate number.
It should absolutely shock no one that websites generate the highest percentage of space across the franchise space. People who submit their information via your website, at least, are interested in your brand specifically. Likelier, they’ve actually educated themselves about your brand and are serious about learning more. However, it’s important to remember that this is last touch attribution. In all likelihood, there’s another source that they started on. It takes a talented marketing team and software suite to identify where the traffic originated but ultimately the answer to that question can make or break your entire marketing efforts.
Text messaging is the most effective form of lead follow-up, by far, and it hasn't been close for a very long time. Rather than lumping texting into the same category as "auto-responders" or "drips," they need to be tracked on their own.
It's difficult to make the improvements you need to (in order to keep driving costs down) if you co-mingle data.
