Franchise Prospects Report Improving Contact Attempt Rates In Recent Months

By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights

November 26, 2024 – Initial contact attempts by franchisors to inquiring prospects rose substantially over the last six months  as reported by the latest FranchiseInsights.com “mystery shopping” surveys from June to November 2024.  In November 2024, over 60% respondents reported that they were contacted by all of the franchises they inquired about.

Back in June 2024, a record low 35.7% of inquirers to franchises reported that they were contacted by “all of the franchises they inquired to” within seven days of the requests, below the prior record low for this measure at 41.4% in February 2023. But in the months since June, contact attempts by franchise sales teams have resulted in dramatic improvements, as seen in the chart below.

Those who reported being contacted by “none of the franchises” at seven days after inquiry plummeted to 13.2%. With another 7.5% of respondents being contacted by “less than half” of franchises they inquired to, that still means that something like one fifth of lead generation budgets in November were wasted by some franchise sales teams, assuming that the survey respondents are representative of the total population of prospects.

The lost opportunity of low initial contact rates (any prospects who say they weren’t contacted within seven days of request) remains a mystery.  The Mystery Shopping survey is directed to prospects from one to two weeks after franchise inquiries are made, so any initial contact efforts made after two weeks are not counted.

Why aren’t all prospects approached promptly?  Rather than blaming it all on insufficient effort or inadequate responsiveness of franchise sales teams, here are a few hypotheses:

• June, July and August were in the busy summer travel season, which makes connections more difficult for all parties.
• Inquiries received outside normal business hours or on weekends are more than two thirds of all inquiries, making the lag time a likely factor. Sending prompt or automated email and/or text follow-up as a precursor to a voice call is always a best practice, based on consistent respondent feedback from these surveys.
• Apple’s “silence unknown callers” feature introduced in 2019 likely hinders many initial voice conversations before the caller is in the prospect’s phone contacts. This again underscores the importance of emailing or texting before calling. In fact, according to Apple, calls will not be silenced from “people that are saved in your contacts list, recent calls list, and from Siri Suggestions to let you know who’s calling based on phone numbers included in your emails or text messages.” These are the “maybe: contact name” caller IDs you see when receiving calls from individuals who are not in your contacts.
• Email service providers (ESPs) are aggressively blocking emails that look like or have been reported by users as spam, or from sources that routinely email to abandoned accounts. Purging lists of targets that have not opened emails within 180 days is a good practice, and email hygiene providers will flag bad addresses for you for pennies.

It is easy to employ a few simple tactics to improve these results. Make sure that you are implementing best practices for initial prospect contact from years of feedback and benchmarking.

The Mystery Shopping survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise prospects that have submitted inquiries on the Franchise Ventures lead generation platform. The data presented is from June through November 2024.

Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.

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Published on Tuesday, November 26th, 2024.