Predictable Franchise Sales: How to Build a Growth Pipeline

Wouldn’t life be a lot easier if you had a sense of what was in your pipeline, how it looked, what the activity was and what the likelihood of closure looked like?

For this month’s discussion, I have asked Brendon Dennewill, Co-CEO of Denamico ( to join me. Part of the discussion will be around RevOps (what is it and how can it really impact your franchise sales) and part around attribution scoring/candidate predictability.

What led us to this conversation? An important need to look backwards at candidate behavior. We can certainly celebrate the lead, but what insights can we gain from before they materialize (fill out the form) can be deeply impactful to our future marketing activities and spend.

Too many franchisors simply set-up a CRM. They don’t consider building operational infrastructure around every part of the sales process. Partly because it is too costly and time consuming. Partly because they don’t know how.

Two things I have shared with many of you:

1. The work I did with a bank opened my eyes up to the possibilities of funnel predictability. We were able to create a scoring mechanism that gave us insights into candidates who were likely to engage in a conversation and move assets under management. The winning formula was two fold: Upfront identification of the right targets and once we had the right targets activated, understanding the triggers that would push them over the edge (type of content and drumbeat).

2. I got tired of hearing our team talk about the weather of last week, so we worked on a model to have some predictability in what will happen next. The challenge with this model is it requires both us and our clients to input and analyze the data – but if done correctly, it can build to specific event outcomes. Traffic, then leads, then applications, then deals – focused on specific market expansion

The two biggest challenges in franchise development are what I wrote above – time and money. How do we simplify the sales process to save us (sales teams) time. And, how do we really study the financial impact to a business so that we properly invest in lead generation.

I was talking with a franchise supplier the other day. He said he was interested in adding marketing to the mix. He said the majority of his clients and leads came from referrals. I went to his website – poor messaging, poor CTA, poor why you/why now. I asked why he wanted to spend money on drumbeat without spending the money and time on the foundation. This created pause.

Thus, oftentimes franchisors become frustrated with the lack of momentum, but don’t put in the right operations in the front end of the expected return. The issues can be fixed – with time and money.