Revolutionize Your Franchise Sales: Using AI to Close !More Franchise Deals!

Keith Gerson, CEO of Gerson Advisory Services, invited leaders from three of the highest-performing franchise development teams to compare notes on their use of AI:

• Brook Wise, Managing Director, International at Express Employment Professionals
• Mike Steed, Chief Growth Officer at SYNERGY HomeCare
• Joe Malmuth, Chief Development Officer at Batteries Plus (promoted 3 days ago!)

Perceived obstacles to AI adoption. Keith kicked off the discussion with a couple of polls. They revealed that among the audience members, 63% are not using AI in their marketing, and feel blocked by a lack of in-house AI expertise. That gave us the chance to talk about how a turnkey solution like Lumin.ai can be up and running in two weeks. Joe later added, “These AI vendors are your partners,” citing that Lumin.ai billing is success-based.

Steady-state conversion. Mike pointed out that, when they adopted Lumin.ai in 2022 Q1, lead-to-appointment conversion jumped from 15% to 35% and has consistently stayed north of 30% each month. He described it as doubling the team’s sales velocity: “if you’ve got four people, it’s like you now have eight”. 

Surge conversion. Brook chimed in with a story about Memorial Day weekend last year, when a promotional they ran generated 301 textable leads. They returned to the office on Tuesday with 112 appointments scheduled by Lumin.ai. Then it happened again last month, this time with 174 textable leads leading to 58 appointments. 

Outstripping the plan. Joe described how for a franchise development team, the two slowdowns each year are right after FDD renewal, and the last two weeks of the year. But in the last two weeks of last year, Lumin.ai generated 4X higher appointment volume than the same two weeks in 2022, and the highest he has seen in his career. That led to a killer January, placing his team in position to hit 70% of the year’s plan by end of Q1. The sales cycle, down from 120 days to 72 days, is helping the team have the capacity to maintain that sales velocity.

“The real estate side of the house is gearing up for a tidal wave. We’re gonna have to open a lot more stores than we’d been planning on this year. That’s the best problem a franchisor could ever have.”

Doing more with less. Mike and Joe both mentioned that, with the benefit of increased conversion, they’re actually spending less on lead generation, of course guided by analytics showing the relative performance of their lead sources.

Slowing down on purpose. Mike shared that in their team, they’ve actually adopted a policy to slow down their voice calling efforts. Instead of calling every new lead as quickly as possible, they call only leads who have been in the system for longer than half an hour, knowing that Lumin.ai will do best if a phone call doesn’t distract the prospect from texting.

Brook went a step further and recounted their decision to slow down with their Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) leads for an entirely different reason: their ANZ prospects perceived an immediate text or phone call as being a bit desperate. So they don’t call for at least half an hour, and they also asked Lumin.ai to interpose a half-hour delay on texting. This helped their ANZ conversion tremendously.

Playing less tag. In a related vein, Brook also pointed out that the 16-hour time zone difference between ANZ leads and the franchise development team in the US guaranteed a certain amount of phone and text tag. With texting service tuned to the lead’s local time zone, Lumin.ai closed that gap, enabling a first conversation to happen much sooner.

Warmer prospects. Joe reported, “People are coming in much warmer and more educated than ever before.” Mike built on this, vouching that that nowadays, his team has a lot fewer conversations in which the prospect can’t remember that they signed up for. 

Happier team members. Mike related these positive interactions to the the team’s endurance and energy in approaching their jobs. Skeptics on his team who had said “I’ve been doing this for 30 years and don’t need a bot” quickly decided that they love it.

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For the full webinar, see FranConnect’s page.

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