Before writing this I spent the previous evening looking at hotels for a multi-location holiday to Turkey next year.
A new unknown set of criteria this time though, as not only do we have 2 kids to consider, but we also have 2 grandparents in tow – near enough for the olds to walk to the fun stuff, no hills, and accommodation that suits all 6 of us.
After being burned before by hotel listings that turned out to have issues like no curtains, no furniture, and most memorably – no lock on the door, I was researching every place like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Corkboard, a mad web of string and pins, the lot.
It is mad how meticulous you can become when you are about to hand over a serious chunk of your savings.
But it is exactly what is happening to your franchise every day, except you will never see the corkboard.
If you are advertising a franchise, it is likely that your ideal franchise prospect is currently in the middle of a deep research phase with their chosen AI partner.
They’re not hovering over the button for more information just yet, they are instead trying to work out if you are the real deal or a scam hidden behind stock photography and confident copy.
You’ll never see this moment and you will only ever see the ones who make it through.
Here’s what happens to the ones who do not.
They cannot find you
The prospect spots an advert, heads to google themselves or whacks the information into their AI research partner and tries to learn what they can.
If you are not ranking on google, do not have an up to date social media and YouTube presence, or are only sharing minimal information there is not much to go on for a human or an algorithm. Actually the AI will likely start to fill in the gaps with whatever information it can find and this might not always be positive about your brand.
Result – the prospect never even properly considers you. They find a competitor who is easier to see, and they get the enquiry click instead.
They do not believe you
If the prospect does find you and is met with generic testimonials that tell them nothing (“best decision ever!”), with no videos, pictures or names of the actual franchisees, it is hard for them to build belief.
They want to know and imagine what it could be like for them and if they cannot see the reality, they cannot connect emotionally.
Result – the opportunity stays a nice idea instead of becoming a real one, and the prospect searches for an opportunity that feels more believable instead of aspirational.
They think you are hiding something
Next they want some hard facts. Investment level, franchise fee, what is included, a realistic picture of year one to year three, and with context.
Meet them with vague investment figures, earnings information locked behind a discovery day or nothing at all does not intrigue or entice people to share their details. Instead it feels like you just want to get them into your sales funnel to go on the charm offensive.
Nobody’s expecting a guarantee at this stage, but they do want solid information to go on to make an informed decision, especially when they are comparing you to your competitors.
It is even worse though if the information you do share is inconsistent. The AI check is going to flag it up for sure.
Result – they do not trust the numbers, so they do not trust you.
They stop waiting
If you have got the rest of it right and the prospect, full of interest and excitement, has dropped an enquiry through only to be met with silence…
…it tells them more about you than your website ever could.
A templated reply selling the opportunity to them again, even on the same day, can still feel just as bad as no reply at all.
A slow reply from someone who clearly has not read what they sent is worse. Either way, they start imagining what it will be like once they have signed up. Will support be slow? How do they communicate with their franchisees? How efficient are they are dealing with things?
Result – they do not chase you a second time. They just go quiet and speak to the brand that got back to them properly.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit
None of this happens because your franchise is systematically weak. It happens because nobody’s thinking about or controlling what a prospect sees, hears and concludes before they ever speak to you.
A stale LinkedIn page will not lose you a franchisee on its own and neither will one flat testimonial, one vague number or one slow reply. But stack all four, and you will not hear from your ideal prospect at all, because they have made their decision before you were even aware that they were thinking about you.
In my experience most franchisors have never tested their franchise recruitment journey as if they were their own prospect. So my advice is to do exactly that.
Ask an AI assistant to compare you to your competitors and read what comes back. Search your own brand the way a stranger would and fill in your own enquiry form and time how long it takes to hear something back.
The problem is rarely the franchise you have built, it is how you are presenting the information and how you are showing up online.
Prospects will not ever show you their corkboard, but metaphorically it is there, every day, for every prospect currently deciding whether you are worth the risk.
Whether you ever get to hear from them is entirely down to what they find before they find you.
Ed Purnell is founder of The Franchised and creator of the Franchise Trust Gap Audit – a scoring framework built to catch exactly this kind of blind spot before your prospects do.
