Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2011 | Page 52

Grow Market Lead

“Knowing our investment and commitment to supporting franchisees in their journey to become successful entrepreneurs drives our continual review of our process to ensure
we are selecting franchisees,” says Sun. “As we learn about the
types of franchisees who are the most successful, we build new
approaches to find more of them. Conversely, as we identify
profiles who struggle we stop approving them.”

ePILLARe e e
e TO POST

Winner: Best Telephone Prospect
Follow-Up

At Pillar To Post Professional Home Inspection, someone is
always home. North America’s leading home inspection company captured the STAR Award for best telephone prospect
follow-up—the core tool of the company’s franchise development process. For Dan Steward, company president and CEO,
a fast response and effective, professional phone communication is an integral first step in finding the right franchisee fit
in a business that is all about relationships.
“Candidates can then experience our ‘Getting to know you’
process, and we get to know them,” says Steward. “Just holding a phone appointment says something about the quality of
the other person. We do not hold discovery days, so the full
sales process is largely conducted by telephone. We have to
be good at this, there is no choice.”
This personal touch is a reflection of the corporate attitude

The company’s
service savvy
is paying off
with satisfied
franchisees.
at Pillar To Post, a style that Steward calls a blend of “old school
person-to-person and new technology.” Technology allows the
company to achieve its goals, but is not used for its own sake,
says Steward. “We work to focus on technology being an enabler, not a definition of structure or process,” he says. “This
means that the process and structure are driven by the goals
and the human interactions to follow, and define how we use
technology to enable that to happen. It is especially useful to
eliminate the barriers of time and place.”
This philosophy is part of the franchisor’s “candidate centered” recruiting process. Each lead has its own response plan
based on the developer’s read of the prospect. Pillar to Post’s
use of technology includes phones ringing directly with the
recruiter whenever possible, no middle person or time delay,

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Franchiseupdate Iss u e IV, 2 0 1 1

and a live, trained call center when direct answering is unavailable. “We try to be real simple in this and will often have the
phone ring directly with the assigned developer so there is
immediate response for the candidate,” says Steward.
Other strategies include easily triggered email campaigns
to augment phone communications, response triggers that ind icate when a candidate has opened an email, and CRM tools
to track, measure, and build predictive models.
The company’s service savvy is paying off with satisfied
franchisees. With the brand now up to more than 400 locations across 43 states and 9 Canadian provinces, Steward says
the single largest source of new franchisees is referrals from
existing franchisees. Pillar To Post also garners leads from
online portals, its corporate website, public relations, trade
shows, newspapers, and special events. Looking ahead, Steward is leading the charge to develop increasingly targeted,
non-traditional sources of leads and to actively measure and
refine the leads received.
Steward likes to keep his mind open to new ideas and is
constantly striving to improve best practices learned from other
franchisors. The STAR Award is external validation of the hard
work of Pillar To Post’s recruiting team, strategy, and execution.
“It is incredible to win this when you look at the quality
of the other franchisors in this pool. The room [at the awards
banquet] is filled with high-performance, driven people who
operate some of the very best franchise brands in the country,
so we have the greatest respect for this group of peers,” he
says. “On a personal note, it is also awesome that we can have
some fun and gloat a little bit with some of my competitive
colleagues who were part of this mystery shop pool.”

eeeee

TROPICAL SMOOTHIE CAFÉ
Winner: Best Recruitment Website

At Destin, Fla.-based Tropical Smoothie Franchise Development, the vibe is “tropitude.” This flip-flop wearing, laid-back
corporate culture resonates online to produce a well-branded,
easy-to-navigate, action-oriented online experience that earned
Tropical Smoothie top honors for its franchise development
website.
“The job of our website is to provide information to make
them feel comfortable to get that one-on-one dialogue going,
whether by phone or email,” says Charles Watson, vice president of franchise development. The creation of a development
site linked to a consistently branded consumer website was the
first order of business for Watson when the hospitality industry
veteran joined the company in January 2010.
Tropicalsmoothiefranchise.com greets candidates with
whimsical fonts and orange, lime green, sunny yellow, and
purple tones that make visitors want to grab a wrap and sip a
smoothie (and, oh yes, follow up with an inquiry). Numbered