Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2011 | Page 46

Grow Market Lead

By Kerry Pipes

No Mystery
About It

Study finds franchisors still coming up short

T

here’s good news and bad news
for franchise sales and development executives. That’s the
way Steve Olson, president of
Franchise Update Media Group sees it
after reviewing the results of the company’s
most recent Mystery Shopper survey.
“My observation from the 30,000foot level is the good news is that more
franchisors are taking aggressive steps to
close performance gaps and regrow their
recruitment efforts,” says Olson. “The bad
news is 15 percent of our franchise community refuses to embrace best practices
in our new environment. Clinging to
yesterday’s world, they will wither away.”
A bold statement, but Olson says it’s
backed by the survey results, unveiled in
October at Franchise Update’s 13th Annual
Leadership & Development Conference.
Franchise brands that pre-registered for
the conference can choose to have their
phone response and website evaluated by
a team of expert mystery shoppers. The
results are used by those brands to measure their franchise recruitment efforts
and to provide benchmarks to improve
the performance of their sales teams. The
results also become part of Franchise
Update’s Annual Franchise Development
Report (see page 36).
The mystery shoppers pose as qualified prospects and go to work making
phone inquiries and filling out application forms on franchisor websites. The
telephone mystery shoppers call in as
qualified prospects and evaluate sales

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teams’ performance including their response time, information requested, how
they control the conversation, and how
they direct the prospect.
On the web side, researchers evaluated
performance drivers including SEO and
navigation, how compelling, organized,
and informative the content is, and how
effective the design, multimedia components, and direct response elements are
in driving qualified inquiries to the sales
team. The researchers record the brands’
ease of access, timeliness, responsiveness,
and follow-up, which are then analyzed
and presented at the conference.
This year’s results were based on 92
phone call and 107 website evaluations.
New to the study this year is an analysis
of how the brands are using social media
in their recruitment process.
As Olson said to the crowd during

his presentation of the mystery shopping results, “Don’t wait for the recruitment environment to change. You need
to change your approach to succeed in
this environment.”
Who’s calling (back)?

First up for review this year was a look
at franchisors’ responses to the good
old-fashioned telephone inquiry. Marc
Kiekenapp, president of Kiekenapp &
Associates, called 92 franchise brands.
Surprisingly, he discovered that 20 brands
either did not have a phone number for
prospects to call in on, or worse, they
had an incorrect phone number on their
website.
“Maybe even more interesting was the
lack of preparedness for incoming calls
that we discovered among franchisors,”
says Kiekenapp. “Very few had a system