Every business owner faces the challenge of how to find customers, so I’m going to describe the 3 primary lead generation activities. Let’s call this prospecting, which is the activity required to get prospective customers to notice you and be interested enough to approach you digitally or verbally by calling in, or agree to meet with you, or visit your location.
Different businesses require different levels of activity and different prospecting strategies.
I want you to be thinking about which activities:
1) You would be comfortable doing yourself,
2) You would want to hire someone else to do, and
3) You would NOT want to be doing as a core function of your business.
Let’s look first at PASSIVE PROSPECTING – this is where you invest money in advertising and hope that the client notices your ad and responds; for retail-type businesses, it also includes the location of a business because location is often an important part of a marketing strategy.
Internet advertising is still mostly passive, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) requires a lot of ongoing behind-the-scenes tweaking and administration; PPC (Pay-per-click) requires an ongoing – and often expensive – marketing spend.
Social Media efforts require maintaining regular dialogues with people online, writing blogs, posting articles and videos, and participating in discussions on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.
Some franchisors have SEO and Social Media strategies, so much of this is done by them, but when you look at top-performing franchisees, a lot of them supplement the franchisor’s SEO and Social Media efforts with their own. Some franchisors do very little SEO/social media, so all of this is left up to the franchisee.
Let’s look next at Networking, which includes attending referral group meetings, participating in Chamber of Commerce events, and engaging with industry associations (we recommend volunteer involvement), among other activities.
It could also mean building close referral relationships with key influencers for your business (i.e. for an elder care franchise, it would be hospital intake nurses, community centre event coordinators, doctors, etc.) – where you want to develop a strong relationship so that they refer their clients to you when a need arises.
These types of relationships take time, patience and persistence to develop, but once established, they are a great source of continual business.
Finally, we have outbound cold calling and telemarketing – this is the highest level of activity, where a primary part of the business requires that the franchisee is actively involved on calling on prospects to create awareness for their product/service, and attempts to get an appointment with the owner/decision-maker of the business.
This requires a lot of tenacity and patience, as a significant part of this type of business generation involves dealing with rejection. In some businesses, the franchisee has to regularly do this type of work; in some businesses, the strategy is to hire a full-time salesperson to do this work.
Regardless, if this is a key function of the business, you as the franchisee have to be prepared to do it because if you lose your salesperson, it might take a while to replace them, and you don’t want your sales to stop while you’re looking for that next salesperson.
Different businesses require different prospecting strategies; without customers, you don’t have a business! If you’d like to learn more about which businesses suit you best, let’s talk! Book a call now.
Originally posted on LinkedIn
