Grow Market Lead
By Evan Hackel
Optimize
Your Franchisee Conventions
Part 3: Year-Long Results!
Part 1 of this series addressed how to improve attendance at franchisee conventions. Part 2 discussed how to maximize the benefits
to your franchisees. This final article explores strategies for taking
the momentum generated at your convention into your franchisee
operations and using it as a recruiting tool for your next convention.
As with the first two parts, we drew on the results of an online survey conducted by Speak!, Ingage Consulting, and Franchise Business Review, which drew responses from nearly 200 franchisors.
H
osting a top-quality, exciting conference can do
many things for
your organization. For starters, it inspires your current
franchisees, sparking and renewing enthusiasm for the
business and for the relationship between the franchisees
and franchisor. Additionally,
a great conference can be a
fantastic recruiting tool for
new franchisees. If you have
candidates you want to close,
bring them to your conference.
The energy can be contagious
and you can close more sales
on the spot. Most of all, a great
conference can provide the
tools for improvement that
can permeate your entire organization.
Survey your attendees
One important tool in that
process is the conference survey. According to our survey,
12
Franchiseupdate Iss u e I, 2 0 1 3
How do you determine the overall
success of your meeting?
We do a
post-event
survey
internally
68.1%
We do both
a pre-event
and postevent survey
internally
22.5%
Other 2.8%
We don’t
measure5.5%
We work with a third party to help us
understand exactly what the franchisees
need and want pre-event and how well
we did post-event 1.1%
more than nine of 10 franchisors surveyed undertake their
own survey as part of the conference, typically following the
event (see chart).
Whether you survey your
franchisees as they leave the
conference or through an email
survey a week to 10 days later,
your post-conference survey
should include the following
questions:
• What were the top two
highlights of the conference
for you (e.g., speaker X)?
• How can we make the conference better (e.g., more/fewer
speakers, more networking)?
• Do you feel you received a
good return on your investment
in coming to the conference?
“You want your survey to
provide genuine feedback on
your conference and not restrict the commentary,” says
Eric Stites, founder and CEO
of Franchise Business Review.
“In fact, quite often the people