During the summer, many franchisors find that their recruitment is fairly quiet whilst many people 
are off on holiday and not thinking about changing their career for the foreseeable future. This makes the summer an ideal time to review many aspects of your recruitment marketing that may not be working as well as they could be.
When you’re reviewing your franchise marketing collateral you should look at the messages you want to put across and make sure that they’re consistent throughout everything you offer to potential franchisees. I recommend writing a ‘Perfect Pitch’ as it is the best way to inform a prospect about your franchise in a simple and concise way. By creating a perfect pitch and ensuring that your whole team has a copy of it or knows about it, you can ensure that your message remains the same and everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.
Your perfect pitch should follow this formula:
- Clarity
- Credibility
- Relevance
- Believability
This format provides a simple way to let prospective franchisees know who you are, what you do, and why you’re the best in your industry. It’s also an opportunity to let them know how being part of your franchise network will benefit them and it is also a good idea to include evidence of your success, this could be in the form of facts and figures around your network or even testimonials from current franchisees. Spending time on your perfect pitch can make a great difference to your marketing collateral and how prospects respond to it. When a prospect first gets in contact with you or any of your franchise team, the first thing they will want to know is what you do.
Often, the prospect is provided with a mixture of product and service information which is too detailed and doesn’t actually tell them very much about the franchise. Each team member will also give a different version because you haven’t regulated the response. The result of this is an unclear and inconsistent introduction to your company and, if your competitors have already sorted their perfect pitch, could lose you a potential franchisee. Once you have perfected your perfect pitch, make sure your team are all trained to deliver a consistent and clear message when someone contacts you to enquire further about your franchise opportunity. Your perfect pitch will also help you to provide a consistent message across all of your marketing collateral.
The process of rewriting your marketing collateral can be quite long because you have to send everything off to be reprinted so the quiet time in the summer is the ideal time to do it. This will ensure that you have fresh material and all of your franchise team are clued up when recruitment starts to pick up again in the autumn.
As the franchisor, it is easy to become bogged down in industry terminology because you are very close to the product or service you’re providing and understand it well. However, jargon and terminology can be extremely confusing to a prospect who knows nothing about the industry. This is why I recommend carrying out research through a third party to help you work out the difference between what you think works and what actually works. Taking a survey of existing franchisees and past prospects to find out which different stages of enquiry they reached is a great way to find out how effective your messages at each stage were and which messages work best at each stage.