I once took over a franchise development department where the sales team was getting 5000 leads a year.
The sales team was very proud of that 5000 lead number and so was the CEO of the company.
We were popular with people inquiring about our franchise offering. And it seemed we were especially popular with just about every franchising web portal out there.
(In franchising we tend to use the terms lead and inquiry interchangeably and most of what we call leads are really inquiries. And that's okay as long we understand we can't sell to an inquiry until they have been qualified as an active lead.)
We had been selling a fair amount of franchises every year but given the amount of leads we thought we were missing out on some sales opportunities. So we decided to take a closer look.
Here's what we discovered about our web portal leads.
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Our financial qualification filters on the web portals were incorrect & too low.
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International leads were turned on but we only developed in the US.
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Some of the portals we were using had never generated a candidate application.
Here's what we did.
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Created a uniform franchise landing page for our web portals.
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Filtered out International leads.
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Dropped 50% of the web portals .
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Reallocated our lead generation budget .
Here's what happened after 12 months.
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Leads decreased 40%
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But, qualified applications increased 10%
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Franchise sales increased 23%
It took the sales team a lot of hard work and confidence to make these improvements.
They loved the results. And so did the CEO.
