Franchise opportunity finding serious prospects
It can be so very time consuming searching for people who are genuine and serious franchise prospects. It can prove to be very costly on a franchise businesses resources. There are so many people out there who make an initial enquiry about a franchise business opportunity that are not remotely 
interested but for some unknown reason they feel the urge to submit the online enquiry form.
Many of these franchise business enquiries especially the ones that have enquired using online enquiry forms from various franchise business opportunity websites fill in the forms with bogus telephone numbers, email addresses or even bogus postal addresses! What is that all about I often ask myself? At least with these franchise business enquiries once their email as bounced back to you and you have found that their telephone number is false you can at least delete them from your records and forget about them!
The really time consuming and expensive so called franchise business prospects are those that go to the next stage of requesting an initial business meeting. There are numerous times that I have travelled upwards of 200 miles to meet a so-called prospect that fails to materialize. I have even had phone calls from franchise prospects whilst waiting for them to turn up saying unfortunately something as happened like my friends dog needs taking to the vets I do apologise can you come back to see me tomorrow! What! Or you travel down to the London docklands for a franchise prospect to say we don’t really like your franchise or brand but we just wanted to meet you, what is that all about! These days I personally request that on an initial visit that franchise prospects come to my office so then at least it cuts out some of the day-trippers and time wasters and also it is a good test of their commitment.
There is also another type of franchise business enquirer who almost goes the whole hog attending various meetings and they even send their initial fee knowing that they haven’t got the funds and that their cheque will bounce, I have had more than one of these and on each occasion that this as happened I have never ever been able to contact the person again afterwards, why do people do this? I have no answer to this last problem, suggestions are more than welcome.
Tags: business meeting, franchise, franchise business opportunity, franchise businesses, franchise opportunity, franchise prospects
January 25th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Robin,
Thanks for sharing your misfortune with us, it is a very interesting side of the franchising business that I did not know about. Most people like to share the good aspects of their business, too few care to raise this type of issues.
I went though your franchise oportunities page and couldn’t help but realize that one problem might just be that the barrier to entry is too low (as in “free” if I am not mistaken). Adding the fact that you were the one doing the initial effort of reaching out to them, may be that was just too comfortable for people who were just “one effortless click away” from sending a request for information. Building statistics of those “teasers” could probably help spotting them in the future… Have you managed to make a profile of those?
January 25th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Hi Robin,
You have a wonderful recession proof company here. In tough times people take on more work or more jobs and that means opportunity for your business.
Kindest,
Michael