Franchise Development Contact Attempt Rates Dropped During Summer Pandemic Months, and Are Rising Again

October 1, 2020 – When we last reported results from our monthly survey of interested franchise buyers in May, franchisors were contacting 62.5% of prospective franchisees sourced from FranchiseVentures lead generation platform. In fact, this reading was the second highest in all of 2020, despite the uncertainty and organizational disruption brought by the pandemic. Soon, a disconcerting trend emerged, with contact attempt rates dropping below 50% for each of the subsequent three months. 

In September that downtrend reversed, with 55.6% of prospective franchise buyers indicating they were contacted by each and every franchise to which they inquired. Underscoring the importance of this uptick in contact rates is the fact that 46.4% of prospective buyers submitted an inquiry to only a single business concept in August, and 63.1% made inquiries to only one or two concepts.

 A puzzling number of prospective franchisees were never contacted by any of the franchises that piqued their interest. Indeed, 19% of prospects surveyed in September indicated they never received contact attempts by the opportunities they inquired about. Underwhelming contact rates (ability of franchise development teams to get response back from prospects by phone , text or email) have long been a hot topic in the franchise development community. In Franchise Update Media’s most recent mystery shopping survey, published in its 2019 annual review of best practices, only 46% of franchise leads were reached by franchisors, across all sources. Exacerbating the responsiveness challenges faced by franchise development teams is the fact that 67% of inquiries are made outside of the standard business hours of the franchise development team

In an effort to help improve contact rates, the Franchise Insights mobile app was launched in early 2020 to enable franchise development professionals to increase early engagement with prospective buyers. The app is offered free of charge to FranchiseVentures clients.

The “Mystery Shop” survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise prospects that have submitted inquiries on the FranchiseVentures lead generation platform. The latest data is from the week of September 19, 2020.

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 Thursday, October 1st, 2020.