Optimizing your franchise sales process and aligning it with marketing is critical to driving franchise development success. This is where a well-executed sales enablement strategy plays a pivotal role
In the following blog post, Rachael Wachstein, Director of Franchise Client Success, will give you an in-depth look into sales enablement and explore the ways you can use it to close more deals and grow your franchise brand.
What You’ll Learn:
- 6 Steps For Franchise Sales Enablement
- Key Components of an Enterprise Sales Enablement Strategy
- Overcoming Sales Enablement Challenges in Franchise Development
An Introduction to Sales Enablement For Franchise Development
Franchise brands need to empower their sales teams as much as possible to help them do their job. Without the tools needed to help them succeed, sales teams will flounder, and subsequently, the growth of the franchise system will suffer from that inefficiency.
Enter sales enablement solutions, which are an essential ingredient for your sales team’s success.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement involves giving sales teams everything they need to maximize their efficiency and velocity of sales, including optimized processes, innovative technologies, and relevant content that resonates with prospects.
Some of the recent trends making sales enablement easier than ever include AI integrations that analyze buyer behavior for better personalization. AI helps with predictive analytics for sales projections, microlearning that educates prospects with concise and focused content, and digital sales rooms (DSRs). such as Showpad or Highspot, that allow for even more effective collaboration between buyers and sellers.
In a sales enablement strategy, sales and marketing teams must work cohesively and closely to align their processes and data.
What Does Sales Enablement Do for Franchise Development?
Sales enablement helps franchises meet the unique needs of potential buyers by ensuring the sales team can effectively communicate value. The process enhances franchise sales by:
- Aligning Sales and Marketing: Create a cohesive strategy to reduce miscommunication and streamline lead acquisition.
- Providing Data-Driven Insights: Equip sales teams with market research and performance data, allowing them to make informed decisions tailored to each prospect.
- Improving Lead Management: Defining clear criteria for Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) for a focused approach.
- Streamlining The Franchise Buyer Journey: Deliver content and interactions that match the buyer’s unique needs throughout the sales pipeline. Creating high-quality gated content and maintaining responsive communications are a couple of the keys to more efficient franchisee journeys.
- Showcase Franchisee Benefits: Create clear messaging about what the franchisee gets for buying one of your franchises. High-quality, engaging content and an equally engaging sales team can establish what sets you apart from competitors’ opportunities.
If you’re not yet convinced of the importance of sales enablement, consider the fact that enterprises with a sales enablement strategy in place saw a 49% higher win rate for predicted deals. Additionally, sales enablement shortens onboarding time by as much as 40-50%, helping franchises meet or even exceed their growth goals!
In short, you need effective enterprise sales enablement to fully realize your franchise’s success.
The Role of Sales Enablement Content in Closing More Deals
The right content will fuel your sales enablement marketing efforts as you work to move your prospects through the sales funnel.
There are many types of sales enablement content you can use for your brand, including:
- Overview decks
- Sales playbooks
- Scripted introductory videos
- Educational webinars
- Palm cards for brokers
- Case studies and testimonials showcasing the success of other franchisees
- Email templates with personalized messaging for various investor segments
- Franchise development SMS texts that connect with
- prospects on mobile devices
- Training materials
One sales enablement strategy example is Two Men and a Truck, which uses data-driven information with tailored resources and efficient communications to optimize franchise development.
Another sales enablement content example is KFC, which also offers franchisees access to case studies, performance analytics, and business plans, among others.
My Expert Opinion on Sales Enablement for Franchises
One of the main issues that franchises face is the misalignment of marketing and sales efforts. Franchises, like every other business, must equip their sales teams with the relevant data needed to establish a real connection with prospects.
Sales teams often find themselves isolated from marketing teams and their strategies, potentially leading to miscommunication and disjointed approaches to lead acquisition. With the help of a reliable sales enablement strategy, you can eliminate these potential roadblocks to get better results, streamlining your sales funnel.
The key is understanding your franchise buyers’ needs and wants, and then delivering the kind of content and correspondence they need to keep them moving along the customer journey.
6 Steps For Franchise Sales Enablement
- Create a Universal Goal: All of your teams should align around a specific unified goal based on the franchise’s vision. This goal will also establish the kind of budget each team will need to help achieve it.
- Develop a Lead Qualification Framework: With your universal goal in place, you need to figure out which targets to set specifically for marketing and sales teams by establishing what counts as a sales-qualified lead (SQL) or a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Both will include certain characteristics that define the ideal customer profile.
- Draft a Service-Level Agreement (SLA): You can hold your sales and marketing teams accountable with the help of an SLA based on yearly franchise deal goals, including the number of qualified leads your team generated and how many of them ultimately became SQLs and led to a sale.
- Target the Best Prospects: You must also know how to reach the right potential franchisees at the right time with high-quality content that resonates. Creating buyer personas profiling different types of franchise buyers, defining your audience’s specific needs and the values they want from a franchise, and establishing your franchise as a “hero” to your audiences can help you build better connections.
- Use Sales Enablement Content: Consider what kinds of content your franchise buyers want to see, such as details about how to start a franchise, the potential profits they can generate, and what sets your opportunity apart from other similar franchises. Blog posts, videos, testimonial pages, financial requirement details, and other content can help lead more qualified leads down the sales pipeline.
- Automate Processes With Innovative Technologies: While most brands already have a CRM, it’s important to automate other communication tools like SMS and email marketing, and make sure they all work together properly.
Sales Enablement Best Practices for Franchise Development
If you want to get the most from your strategy, the following are some additional sales enablement best practices to implement:
- Align Sales and Marketing: These teams should work together towards common goals, along with all other teams, to keep your strategy cohesive with consistent messaging and lead generation.
- Tailor Content to Speak to Each Prospect: Your content should speak directly to each potential franchisee, with case studies, training materials, projections, and guides that speak to their unique concerns, wants, and needs.
- Make Full Use of Software: To supercharge your efforts, use and integrate the right platforms to help you automate and generally streamline sales and other processes.
- Make Informed Data-Driven Decisions: Use data to determine performance and trends that might steer your strategy in a smarter direction. Over time, you can perfect your efforts for improved conversion rates and revenue.
Key Components of an Enterprise Sales Enablement Strategy
When putting together your sales enablement strategies, you’ll need to include and utilize the following elements:
Sales Enablement Tools
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms
One of the main tools to use is a franchise sales CRM system, which helps your sales teams manage workflows, from tracking leads and managing contacts to mapping out the entire sales pipeline.
There are plenty of CRMs to choose from, some of the best being Salesforce CRM and HubSpot Smart CRM.
Others that are great for franchise sales enablement include:
- Zoho: Automate sales, workflows, reporting, and sales pipeline management, with the ability to create email templates and collaborate across teams using a customizable dashboard.
- FranConnect: This platform includes lead capture and automation, in-depth analytics, task management, and the ability to help streamline the process of developing new locations for your franchise.
- ClientTether: Visualize sales pipelines, facilitate comprehensive task management, utilize click-to-dial functionality, automate call scheduling, and customize your sales cycles using this CRM.
- Pipeline CRM: Take advantage of many features with this CRM, such as management for pipelines, teams, and leads, along with sales automation, automated email marketing, tracking, and reporting.
Content Management Systems (CMSs)
CMSs are also essential sales enablement tools, allowing you to easily create, manage, and publish content on various platforms. Website hosts like WordPress include easy-to-use CMSs that can help you manage all of your content in a central hub.
Other Tools and Resources
- Showpad: Sales teams will also benefit from this platform, which uses analytics, training, and content management to make it easy to manage all of your sales enablement resources in one location.
- Seismic: For more emphasis on personalization in your content delivery, consider using Seismic.
- DocSend: To keep all of your documents secure and trackable, you may also want to use this tool to protect sensitive sales documents and keep track of all of your documentation.
- Gong.io: To optimize communications, you may want to implement Gong.io, which analyzes sales meetings and calls with AI, providing you with in-depth insights into communication performance.
Another critical tool to consider is franchise enablement SMS text messaging, which allows sales teams to send personalized messages to prospects right on their mobile devices.
This solution helps engage prospects more continually, simplify the process of scheduling appointments, provide links to various types of content, and gather feedback.
Sales Enablement Content
Using the above tools, you can create many types of content for your franchise website and communications to connect with prospects.
Some of the main sales enablement content you’ll want to use include:
A Navigable, User-Friendly Website
Consider the ease of use of your website, where all of your content will appear. Prospective franchise buyers should easily find the most important information about your franchise opportunity.
In addition to developing a dedicated franchise website or subdomain on your existing site, you should make it easy to find.
For example, 1-800-GOT-JUNK? Includes a “Start a Franchise” link in the top navigation, which could get people to see your opportunity right away.
But it’s not enough to just have franchising information in your header anymore. It should also be in the footer of your website.
Testimonials
The goal and objective of testimonials is to give your ideal prospects someone to identify with. One of the easiest ways for your prospects to connect with current clients is through videos. If you’re looking for multi-unit or multi-brand operators, that’s who you’ll want to feature in your testimonial videos.
Here is a sample format of interview questions for franchisees:
- What is your name?
- How many brand locations do you own? Where are you located?
- When did you become a franchisee?
- What led you to look at [INSERT BRAND NAME]?
- Why should someone consider [INSERT BRAND NAME] as a business investment?
- Why did you choose [INSERT BRAND NAME] over other opportunities?
- What was the biggest differentiator about [INSERT BRAND NAME] that led to you becoming a franchisee?
- What motivated your investment in [INSERT BRAND NAME]?
- Tell us about your family, life, and professional goals.
- Biggest successes so far in the business? Biggest challenges?
- Why did you continue investing in [INSERT BRAND NAME] after opening your first location?
- Do you own other franchise brands? If so, which ones?
- What’s the best part of being an [INSERT BRAND NAME] franchise owner?
- Tell us about your growth goals for the next 3- 5 years? How many more units would you like to open?
- What does corporate do to support your success?
BatteriesPlus has some good sales enablement examples of testimonials that focus on different touchpoints, such as franchisees’ ability to develop a family-based business and generate millions in sales.
One clear differentiator is Batteries Plus prioritizes videos featuring the types of investors they want to address, specifically multi-unit and multi-brand, interviewing multi-branded portfolio managers or multi-concept investors.
Gated Content
Do you have anything you can use as gated content? I’m talking about ebooks, whitepapers, or guides to educate prospects. Use these pieces of content for top of funnel outreach. Once a prospect fills out your form, they become a “soft lead” and you’ll move them into a long term nurture campaign.
Additionally, the more your potential franchise buyers know about what to expect with your opportunities, the more ready they’ll be to make a decision when it comes to engaging with your sales team. Ultimately, good gated content will help you identify the right buyers from the beginning, leading to more SQLs and sales in the long run.
One example of good educational content is the McDonald’s playbook, which goes over the details of how to get started as a McDonald’s franchisee for new prospects.
Other Educational Content
In addition to gated content, your website should include other important information including:
- Financial requirements
- Investment requirements
- Value propositions
- Industry stats
- Consumer demand for products or services
- Profitability
- And more
Don’t forget to share profitability including EBITDA, AUV, average gross revenue, etc. from your Franchise Disclosure Document.
Franchise-Focused Social Media Posts
Appeal to new prospective franchisees with your social media, especially on LinkedIn, where you can connect more easily with eager professionals. At the same time, appeal to consumers and prospects with posts that connect with both audiences.
For instance, Teriyaki Madness posts about grand openings on LinkedIn and other platforms, showcasing the introduction of new locations to customers while also indicating to prospects that they could own their own locations.
Teriyaki Madness also posts about individual franchisees on Meta and other consumer-facing platforms, giving faces to their brand to draw customers to specific locations while simultaneously showing how they value franchise owners.
Convenient Contact Forms
Shorten the sales cycle and get more people to connect with your sales teams through clear, simple contact forms.
These forms should be quick to fill out and only request important information, with compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) that effectively convert.
The Pickle Pad has a good example of how a franchise contact form should look, appearing right at the top of the homepage with a simple three-step process.
Notice how they qualify prospects immediately, by asking about their liquidity and share financial obligations.
Sales Enablement Automation
To keep all processes smooth, use sales enablement automation. Tools like CRMs can help you automate lead management and other processes, while automated follow-up emails and other correspondence can keep prospects engaged and moving along the buyer’s journey.
The more automation you have in place, the more your marketing and sales teams can focus on converting high-quality leads.
Overcoming Sales Enablement Challenges in Franchise Development
There are inevitably some sales enablement challenges your franchise will encounter along the way to success, but there are plenty of solutions to ensure they don’t hinder your performance.
Some of these challenges include the following:
Inconsistent Messaging
One of the main issues that franchises can struggle with is inconsistent messaging, especially between marketing and sales teams.
Create a unified language that best represents your brand, its mission, and its values. Marketing and sales teams should then use this language across all content and communications, giving your franchise a unique, recognizable, and trusted personality.
The more consistent your messaging, the more stable your franchise will appear to potential buyers as you establish a clear brand identity with which they can connect.
Lack of Data Integration
All of your marketing and sales data should be aligned in addition to your messaging. Sales teams must have access to meaningful data from the marketing team, with fully integrated tools like CRMs that make data collection and analysis simple across the entire organization.
AI schedulers are very helpful in connecting leads with sales teams. According to the digital director of the UK-based We Make Footballers franchise, which trains children to play football, “We are beginning to use [AI] to analyze large data sets across our organization and provide insights and analysis that would not be possible (or at least be extremely time intensive) by human observation.”
Overcomplicated Journey to Qualification
It’s also a mistake to overcomplicate a prospect’s transition from lead to franchisee. Know what kind of journey your audiences take and eliminate any potential bottlenecks keeping them from converting.
Tools like FranConnect can help streamline the journey from MQL to SQL and, ultimately, sales. For instance, Firehouse Subs used this tool to decrease its entire sales cycle by nearly 50% through improved lead flow management.
The HubSpot CRM platform has also helped franchises like Smash My Trash, a mobile dumpster compactor service, use automation to optimize workflows for leads and contracts, allowing for easier contracting and an overall smoother lead management process.
Insufficient Content Creation
A lack of content can hurt your marketing and sales efforts, as prospects might not know what exactly they’re getting by becoming franchise owners.
Include as much information about your franchise as possible and the opportunities you offer, from investment requirements and other expectations to differentiators that show what you offer that competitors don’t.
This content should appear on your website, social media platforms, emails, and other platforms where you can reach your prospects.
Batteries Plus, for example, discusses its multi-unit opportunities, enabling franchisees to own several locations while many franchises limit them to one. It also advertises non-traditional locations that can reach people in areas where there’s less competition.
Inadequate Sales Training and Onboarding
You also need to sufficiently train and onboard sales employees to ensure they can give your franchise and buyers everything they need. Sales staff should know what kind of messaging to use, how to use all of the tools available to them, and how to connect with all teams to maintain cohesive and efficient processes.
To achieve this, develop strong training and onboarding processes with helpful courses and hands-on training.
Take Full Advantage of Sales Enablement With Ignite Visibility
At Ignite Visibility, we develop strategies that optimize franchise development processes at every level. With our sales enablement services behind you, you’ll be able to maximize your success in the long term.
We provide custom solutions for sales enablement as part of franchise development. We learn the individual needs of each client to determine the best approach, putting together tailored sales enablement solutions that work for them.
Need some help with enterprise sales enablement? With our campaigns, you’ll benefit from:
- Cohesiveness between marketing and sales
- High-quality content on a navigable, converting website
- Social media, PPC, and other marketing strategies to generate more leads
- Saving money by getting more out of the leads you’re already paying to generate
- And more!
Get in touch with us and get started on your next strategy today!
