Another successful franchise convention has come to an end, providing franchisors with valuable nuggets about how to make the best of the current economic environment. While the attendance at 2350 was short of the previous mark of 3000+, the enthusiasm was probably higher because everyone was looking for ideas and suggestions that they could take back home.
My company FranConnect, itself had a great convention allowing us to meet hundreds of our customers while meeting several new faces. We also sponsored the General Luncheon session on Tuesday with Carly Fiorina and it was interesting to get her analysis on the way out of the current economic morass.
Anyways, here are some of the things and ideas that I heard from folks at the convention and thought that some of you may find this useful:
- While everybody is concerned about leads being down and the difficulty in getting financing for qualified leads, new franchise sales are still happening at a reasonable pace. The trick is to adapt your processes to the new realities. e.g. Local lead generation through localized marketing, chamber of commerce based events, franchisee referalls is growing and providing high quality leads. Smart franchisors are also trying to market to existing franchisees of other non-competing concepts – e.g. A Subway franchisee may be a good prospect for opening up a Baskin Robbins store!
- Franchise relations was another big topic area with people looking for ideas to strengthen their ties with franchisees. One key idea here was to provide franchisees with tools that help them improve their profitability. Performance dashboards that display key metrics, sales numbers, expense ratios, etc and compare these numbers to other franchisees can certainly help franchisees identify areas where they can improve. Similarly, communicating continuosly with franchisees through all possible channels can further strengthen relationships. As they say, there is no such thing as overcommunicating in franchise relations!
- How to best manage social media and Web 2.0 technologies such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogging, MySpace, Youtube were probably one of the biggest focus points for a huge number of franchisors. Any roundtable or session that focused on these sessions was completely full. The key takeaway was that franchisors need to be active participants on all these platforms. The new generation of franchisees are anti-advertising and anti-brands and communicating through social networks is going to be one of the most important channels for finding new franchisees!
There are dozens of more ideas from the convention that I would like to share, but more of it later!