When I first started in franchise sales at Hardee’s in 1991 I was green and eager to beat my new franchisee recruitment plan so I talked to every lead I could.
And in most cases they were eager to talk to me too about Hardee’s franchising.
What I was not so good at back then was qualifying people early on especially financially so I had to learn through disappointment, heartache and wasted time.
We had net worth and liquidity standards that candidates had to meet or exceed and it was not uncommon to have more than one person pooling their resources to meet the requirements.
Being naive at the time I was uncomfortable about getting people to share their financial wherewithal in an initial conversation.
After I did this poorly for longer than I want to admit I figured out I needed a solution and the turning point was with a lead that I was working with named Jim.
I had a number of long and detailed calls with Jim and explained the investment criteria, site selection, operations, etc..and every time I brought up funding I got put off.
Finally I on my second to last call I asked firmly where the funding for his Hardee’s restaurant would come from and Jim told me that his Uncle Charlie who was very wealthy had told that if he ever wanted to own a business he would provide the necessary capital to do it.
So I told JIm that we need Uncle Charlie on our next call and get him involved in this, he said no problem and I set the appointment for the next week.
Well as you can imagine we did not have that call since Jim left me a voicemail late the evening before saying that Uncle Charlie wanted to go in a different direction and that a Hardee’s franchise was not on that road.
After that my solution was to build a better an initial call script that gently and gracefully got the potential franchise buyer’s confidential financial information and it worked.
I became very successful at selling Hardee’s franchises, was promoted and as I added people to my team I taught this script to them and with their practice and input we kept improving it.
Building a great franchise sales process from start to finish with the right underlying tools and script guides is essential to your franchise recruitment success and we can build them with you so you can do this too.
Drop us line if you want to chat about your franchising and how to improve what you are doing.
