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A long time ago I wrote a blog post that started with a very specific YouTube video, and yet again I feel compelled to include it once more:
“I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger”
A few months into this business, we’ve learned a heck of a lot about a lot. There have been high highs and low lows. But ultimately, we’ve emerged the other side super ready to continue to lead the franchising space into a new era of sales and marketing.
In honor of the 100 day mark of our company, I wanted to put together some of the lessons we’ve learned.
When we started FranFunnel, we focused nearly exclusively on automation. We believed that the way to disrupt the lead world was to take as many processes out of the hands of people and put them into the hands of machines. And in some ways we weren’t wrong. Our platform’s automation capabilities have done wonders in allowing our customers to spend their time doing high value tasks in lieu of the menial to-dos they had been focused on.
But that being said, we’ve learned very clearly that automation is only part of the equation. It turns out that what our customers want (and frankly demand) is that we make their lives easier. “Fit into my workflow” is a common refrain we hear. “Don’t make me do things I’m not used to doing.” Simple things (in our mind) like recommending that salespeople keep an extra tab open on their browsers has been met with pretty high push back.
The future of FranFunnel is very much focused on making as many things as possible as easy as possible. Every additional click, every additional email, every additional tab, adds up over time. You want to do less and get get more. And we’re going to deliver that to you.
I’m going to come clean. When we sat down and laid out the first version of FranFunnel last September, we didn’t include text messaging in the product road map. Then, after an elucidating visit to FLDC in Atlanta, we made a very important change. Not only was text messaging going to be a part of our platform, it was going to be at the core.
In reality, this is a truth that we’ve never become completely comfortable with. The fact of the matter is that a reliance on any singular communication medium is exactly what you should not do. Communicating with leads is not about a magic bullet, it’s about a sophisticated ground game designed around probabilities.
We know that you love text messaging. We do too. But I promise you that text messaging’s effectiveness will decrease over time. This is the natural cycle of marketing. The question you (and most importantly us) need to ask yourself is whether or not you have a plan that’s durable enough to handle whatever comes next. And that’s what we’re here for.
I’d be lying if I said that this was something we knew was going to happen when we first laid out FranFunnel at the end of last year. You would not have heard in a meeting that “once we get this thing going, our customers will be our most useful asset in figuring out where to go next.”
Looking back, one of the more stressful parts of initially building FranFunnel was having to do a whole lot of guessing about what our customers needed. We would have pretty heated conversations about what to do next, what the latest and greatest was to be.
But as the roster of FranFunnel clients has been filled out, this has become a significantly easier part of our job. Why? Our customers are pretty freaking good at knowing what would be helpful for their lives. This comes not only obviously from speaking with them but more importantly watching them use the software every day. Our customers are awesome.
A few weeks ago, I got to try out virtual reality for the first time. Now, without a doubt VR and its surrounding technical community is on the cutting edge. It’s a technology that has precious little adoption right now that may one day be the way that we all interact and our surroundings.
When we first started FranFunnel, you would have very clearly heard me say that what we were building was not cutting edge. “We’re simply taking technology that already exists and customizing it for the franchise world” is a common refrain that I can still hear echoing in my head.
But 100 days later, I’m not so sure. We are doing things that no one else in the world is doing, especially for franchises. We’re spending our entire professional lives uniquely focused on improving the way franchises communicate with leads. And we’re making unbelievable changes. One customer put it best when he said, “I always knew this stuff was possible, but I never thought I could do it.” That’s the cutting edge.
FranFunnel is the world’s first software platform uniquely designed to help franchises communicate with leads more efficiently and effectively. We focus on taking leads, wherever you may generate them, and getting the most out of them.
Take a demo.
Let us make your life easier with FranFunnel.
(This article is part of our series commemorating FranFunnel’s 100th day. Make sure you also checkout our report on contact rate and the leads themselves.)
