Two Strong Months of Prospect Contact Attempt Rates Precede a Dip in June

By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights

July 17, 2024 – After two successive months of higher prospect initial contact attempts, rates dipped  as reported by the latest FranchiseInsights.com “mystery shopping” survey in June 2024.  More than half of respondents say they were contacted by all of the franchises they inquired about in April and May, at 50% and 57.1% in April and May, respectively. 

But in June, only 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% back in February 2023.

Those who reported being contacted by “none of the franchises” at seven days after inquiry stood at 31%. With another 15.5% of respondents being contacted by less than half of franchises they inquired to, that means that more than a third of lead generation budgets in June were wasted by some franchise sales teams, assuming that the survey respondents are representative of the total population of prospects.

Given stronger showings in April and May, seasonal factors may have contributed to lower contact attempt rates in June.

The lost opportunity of low initial contact rates (prospects who say they weren’t contacted within seven days of request) remains a mystery.  

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 is the beginning of the 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 anything that looks like or has been reported by users as spam. Are you routinely evaluating delivery to ensure that your emails are getting through?
• Finally, the Mystery Shopping survey is directed to prospects no sooner than seven days after franchise inquiries are made, so any initial contact efforts made after a week are not counted.

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 FranchiseVentures lead generation platform. The data presented is from April to June 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, July 16th, 2024.