Franchise Development – Best Practice Is Enterprise 2.0
Posted on 22. Feb, 2010 by borourke in Franchising
Developing and awarding quality franchises is a challenge. With so much competition quality franchisees are getting harder to find. Ironically, most of the development approaches used today, despite many changes in technology, prospects and available methods, are based on old paradigms of professional selling. There is a real opportunity for those who want to embrace new proven methods.
John Patterson who founded National Cash Register was the originator of the professional selling movement. He invented most of today’s “standard sales operating procedure”: territories, quotas, prospecting scripts etc. He was an amazing man. He was the “Thomas Edison of the sales profession”. Interestingly, John Patterson hired a fellow called Tom Watson at NCR and trained him in all his sales techniques. Tom Watson left NCR after several years and set up his own company…IBM. IBM has long been considered the “gold standard” for professional sales organizations. So the story of just these two men is a history of the professional sales profession in a nutshell. John Patterson invents professional selling and Tom Watson perfects it.
The innovations that Watson and Patterson initiated, however, took place in the 1890’s. This was when the last big shift occurred in the way a professional sold – a Sales “1.0” methodology. Since that time a lot has changed and so has the opportunity to adopt a more effective Enterprise 2.0 approach. Why should a franchise organization reconsider its “awards” or sales methodology based on 2.0 thinking ?
In the recent past franchise prospects moved into the “Internet world”. The tipping point was Google. With Google you had a search engine that really worked for prospects. People were given a tool that they could use to find almost any information they needed. This helped them research and make early decisions on which franchise to pursue.
Prospects no longer needed sales people to give them basic information. Therefore, franchise development professionals lost an “excuse” for engaging a prospect. Prospects can find whatever detailed information they need early in the process simply by typing into Google and pulling up dozens of whitepapers, webinars, FDD’s and a plethora of alternative opportunities. The power is in their hands.
Now prospects not only use Google , they are increasingly using social networks. Development professionals are therefore dealing with more well informed buyers with numerous ways of learning and researching what THEY want to know and this is making the old methods of franchise development obsolete.
The path to a “new way of franchise development” is also being driven by the Internet. Tools have recently appeared (and more continue to appear) that are giving people a way to fight back against this wave of prospect behavior in engaging with franchise development professionals. These Internet based tools really help development professionals build optimal franchise relationships that result in new successful franchises. They are not CRM systems set up as management reporting systems. They are tools that make a developers job easier and more efficient. Using these tools to improve your award process is what Enterprise 2.0 and Franchise Flywheel is all about.
Contact us today to learn more about how professional franchise organizations are adopting Franchise Flywheel to implement Enterprise 2.0 development solutions that increase ROI for your development process. Its time to reevaluate your approach by working with a solution that embraces these new trends.
