How to identify the right franchise buyer persona

Who is your real targeted candidate? Is your business set-up to sell franchises or develop franchisees? Is your sales team incentivized to bring on quality buyers?

If the answers are financially qualified scale-minded franchisees, then, understanding the gaps in the sales process is essential to figuring out the right buyer persona.

What if you go on a mission to build the frictionless franchise?

To help guide you to the insights, as always, I looked back at buyer feedback. But this time, I focused on the turbulent. The turbulent can be deeply valuable toward revising the ideal candidate profile. Here’s some bumpy things franchisees have said last month:

We have been disappointed at how support drops off after opening as well as some of the ways the franchisor fell short during the startup process. Training should have been better and longer.

They could have prepared the franchisee better financially - how much to save, specific to market, labor, breaking it down more specifically. That would have helped. We just got a big general scope.

Need to share more precise numbers with potential franchisees.

The margin expectations and profit, they aren’t technically allowed to give you that but that would have been helpful. It's less about information and more about the potential viability of the service the franchise provides in this area.?

I was in I.T. and there are a lot of systems involved here and I had to dig quite a bit to find out what they all do. It felt overwhelming so it could be useful to make it more clear. It would be nice to have a one-pager.?

I wish they'd given us all the info they had, but a lot of it is restricted. You want to know everything, but if they gave all that away before you signed, you wouldn't get any more after signing. They gave us enough to be comfortable though!

I wish they had been more transparent about the support system. They said there would be a marketing "team" to support me and never clarified that that "team" is one person. The support is an important part of franchising, so that's a big deal to me.

A better layout of budgeting and the different vendors that you will use.?

If we were to break this down into categories, they would be support/training and Item 19.?

So, now, we can look back at the selling/buying process and look at opportunities for improvement that help settle these fears. However, before doing so, it is important to note that it isn’t simply the responsibility of the franchisor to set the tone of the buyer persona – it is also the buyer who needs to make sure the franchise aligns to their financial and personal goals and outcomes.

Support & Training can be better communicated in lead nurturing emails, website, calls as well as better built into the FDD. Sales/Item 19 numbers can be better disclosed. And, from an expectation standpoint, especially when looking at investments north of $100,000, bumping up the training expense, the marketing investments (grand opening), operating capital expectations, and overall qualifications can be deeply impactful to driving the right buyers into the organization.

Years ago, I worked with a brand that sold franchises to anyone who had a penny. Some of those candidates had hustle and grit – which ultimately lifted them up to success. But many folded when the going got tough. I would imagine the 8 franchisees from the above limped into franchise ownership. In my opinion, we qualify people to own three, award one, reserve enough for a rainy day and enough to scale – and then build infrastructure around them to make them successful no matter what it takes. The bestest (I know I used that word) franchise brands grow smart and in concentric circles to maximize the potential of support, marketing and thus unit level economics.

For the franchisees above, if you are being negative at the point of signing or opening it is usually driven by two things – a lack of transparency in the buying process (which will be instantly elevated if we qualify the persona correctly) and stress of bleeding money without revenues coming back in.

Just because franchising allows business operators the ability to skip the line to business ownership, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require some crazy to muscle through storms.

Who is your ideal buyer? Who is the franchisee who is worth more in royalty than others? Start there and be very strict who you let in – especially if you have a sound business model and opportunity.

Join me on the next Coffee & Analytics to discuss the buyer persona and how to find that target – 5 pm EST, October 10. Register here: https://streamyard.com/watch/3nMJMh5MTZ5C?