Franchise Update Magazine Issue IV, 2012 | Page 50

Grow Market Lead

within 24 hours.
It’s all designed to help attract qualified franchise candidates
to the New Jersey-based company, which has 60 franchisees
running 100 gyms in 10 states, mainly on the Eastern seaboard. Expansion plans include opening seven new locations
in California next year, says Mele.
The redesigned website also includes links to corporate
webinars, press releases, and news stories about the company
and the fitness industry. “It gives you a lot of information and
you can look at it at your leisure. Prospects like that,” says Mele.
Having so much information readily and continuously
available also helps company executives determine which franchisee applicants are best suited for success at the company.
“I get a lot of calls when reaching out to prospective franchisees, and one of the first things they say is, ‘I watched all your
videos and I’m intrigued,’ and they want to learn more,” says
Mele. “For the guy who watches the videos and says, ‘I don’t
get it,’ that’s okay too. If you don’t get it, maybe it’s not the
right investment.”

GREAT CLIPS
Best Website Prospect Follow-Up

Persistence should be Beth
Caron’s middle name. As franchise development marketing
coordinator at Great Clips, she’s
perfected the art of using technology to follow up with potential franchisees at the Minnesota-based hair salon chain, which
has 1,100 franchisees in the U.S.
and Canada.
In addition to phone calls,
she relies on regularly schedBeth Caron
uled emails to people who have
expressed interest and filled in information on the company’s
website, but who haven’t moved the process forward. To manage all the information collected from anyone who has inquired
about franchising with the brand, she relies on salesforce.com,
which Great Clips has used for the past five years.
It takes patience, since sometimes her relationship-building
efforts don’t pay off immediately. “We have had one or two
situations where people, for whatever reason, couldn’t act
right away,” she says. “Maybe the timing wasn’t right when
they initially inquired, or their job situation changed and they
weren’t ready to move forward. so they just kept it on the back
burner for a year or two.”
She keeps them engaged through her archive database.
“Once a month, they’ll receive an email that says, ‘Hey, this
is an interesting article about franchising,’ or ‘Here are some
interesting facts about Great Clips,’” she says. “Whenever we
send those out, we see an immediate spike in responses. People
will say, ‘Hey, has anything changed in my market? Is anything
available yet?’ Or they might say, ‘I wasn’t ready then, but I’d
like to talk to someone now.’”
Recently, Caron’s perseverance paid off after she worked

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Franchiseupdate Iss u e IV, 2 0 1 2

back and forth for three years with two franchise candidates.
“They were living in Canada and wanted to develop a franchise in Florida,” she says. “However, we have a very stringent
policy that people must be living in the market they intend
to develop before we start our franchisee evaluation process,
especially when they are crossing the border because there’s
so much that’s involved.”
Every six months for three years, Caron kept at it. Finally,
mission accomplished: her prospects recently completed their
move to Florida and operate a Great Clips franchise in Ft.
Lauderdale.

GLASS DOCTOR
Best Social Implementation

As more people flock to social
media, executives at Glass Doctor spied an opportunity for a
different way to attract new franchisees.
The Texas-based company,
which supplies glass products for
home, automotive, and commerc X[