How I Suffered, Learned & Triumphed Recruiting Franchisees
Now I spend zero time chasing unqualified leads
As an experienced franchise recruiter, I know all about how hard it is to find serious leads. I’ve been doing it successfully now for over 12 years. Things weren’t always so good.
When I look back, I can clearly see how changing buyer behaviour was making me more and more inefficient. I needed to find new insights, a new philosophy and a new recruitment process. My recruiting world was spinning out of control. Without changing how I personally worked, I’d fail. Here’s my story. And it does have a happy ending; maybe for you too.
During my first four years I tried many different systems and approaches – I tried Excel. I tried Act!. I tried Outlook. I tried several others that shall remain nameless. I even tried simply printing the lead information and making notes on that bit of paper…lots of paper.
One day in 2005, I brought a stopwatch to work to time this painful process. As efficient as I thought I was, 15 minutes was the best time I achieved to ensure that: I had saved the lead details in a place I could find them; did a bit of research on the lead; sent an email; given them a call, which led to a voicemail 70% of the time. Add in another 15 minutes to make 2 or even 3 more attempts to speak and there you go.
A full 20% of people I reached weren’t ready to talk. I diligently worked that same lead list looking for serious leads I knew must be in the pile. Every day I set reminders to do all of this again if my calls or emails didn’t get a response in a week. And that was 90% of the leads. Uh, oh, here’s comes the next lead list. Can you define overwhelmed and unproductive? It was pure luck to find a serious lead in those piles. And that’s being honest.
Time is money
- I handled around 300 leads per month on behalf of two franchisors at the time
- I spent 75 hours a month simply trying to contact the leads
- That’s almost half my time. This shocked me
- I started my personal journey to become more efficient
- My goal: find the top 8% to 10% of leads that could become serious leads
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Why today is different
This journey started a long time ago. It’s now culminated in The Franchising Centre. I’ve spent the past eight years creating and refining a franchisee recruitment solution that finds diamonds in piles of rubbish leads. Every year sees new developments, evolution and greater recruitment success. In fact my solution has already been in the hands of many recruiters, whom I’ve trained in the same methods it’s taken me a decade to refine.
It’s amazing to me that our recruiters can now spend virtually zero time on unqualified leads. They pluck only serious leads from a rubbish lead pile that “ask” to learn more about our franchise opportunities. It’s a recruiter’s dream…and we’re living it.
The leads in your pile that you mumble “no good”. You know you’re right; they are. But there’s diamonds in that pile too. Let us show you how you can find them too.