How to Sell a Franchise Business
there are people out there that like working as employees and don't want to take the risk and then there are people that spend their whole life trying to think of a way to start their own business and having that internal desire that might be a really great group of people to go after to sell franchise business opportunities to hello it's Michael helper with sales scripter and in this video we're going to talk about how to sell a franchise business or a franchise business opportunity and just for full disclosure I've never sold this product or sold franchise businesses so I actually have very little experience in this area and why I've arrived at having something to talk about on this subject is simply because I received an email on LinkedIn from a salesperson trying to sell me on franchises and whenever I receive these emails or phone calls I always just stop to think about how is this sales person communicating to me and how could this salesperson communicate better to make their job easier and to improve their odds for Success so here's the message that I received this is a contact that I'm not connections with on LinkedIn he sent this through the LinkedIn inmail feature and it's a fairly short LinkedIn message which is actually probably pretty good I often think most LinkedIn messages are too long so he's really quick to the point so that's good but he's also very direct about what he's selling by getting right to the point of are you open to learning about potential franchise opportunities in your area which is basically what he sells so he's just very directly saying do you need what I sell which would be what I would consider more of a product selling sales message you have a product to sell and you're just basically saying this is what I sell do you need what I sell I think that's a less than Optimum approach for many reasons but one reason in particular why that's not good for selling franchises is one of the Core Concepts that I believe and that we teach as part of the smart sales system is that most likely when you're reaching out to prospects they're not in buying mode for what you sell this is not to say that they're not a fit or that they don't need what you sell it's just that I believe when you send your cold email message on LinkedIn the odds at the Prospect is sitting there Googling and doing research for what you sell is very low I'm not saying that it's impossible but for this particular salesperson selling franchises if when he sends someone a cold email I think that there's not a lot of people that are going to receive his email and be thinking about buying that at that particular time now this does not mean that this sales person cannot sell what he has to sell but if he realizes that the prospect is not likely thinking about purchasing franchises at that particular moment he could modify his approach to an approach that might be a little less direct and the logic behind that is that there are a lot of people that might be very interested in what he sells there might be very interested in buying a franchise that you can start a conversation with in a more indirect way and through that conversation you could introduce the product that you have to offer which in this case is a franchise business opportunity so let me show you how to to create an approach and a message that might be a little bit more indirect and start conversations for this particular sales person in this particular product and the product that we're talking about here is selling a franchise business opportunity and the first step to creating this sales message that might be a little bit more indirect is to First brainstorm a few features of what you sell so if you could kind of view what you sell as being a box what's in the box what does the prospect get when they become your customers so a few features for this business opportunity is that this is a fully packaged business under an existing brand so it's a plug and play TurnKey business opportunity for an established brand in the marketplace and the customer will get basically everything they need to start a business all the instructions all the training materials documentation everything they need to start their business which is different than starting a business on your own where you don't have all the instructions and everything all laid out for what the product is going to be called the pricing the legal terms and whatnot and with this product the customer would also get access to all the back office systems and back office support and you could probably go on from there to add more features I actually don't know the details of the actual franchise that this sales person sells so I'm just going to leave it there with those three points The Next Step that I recommend you do when you're brainstorming the details of a product that you sell us you should stop to think about how is what you sell different from what you're competing against and you might be competing against direct competitors in this case you might be competing against other franchise opportunities or when you're selling franchise businesses you might be competing against the option to work as an employee so that might be your differentiation how are you different than working as a W-2 employee for a big company think about who you compete against in this case I came up with a couple points thinking about how this sales person might differ from other franchise business opportunities and and here are just a couple examples for you ideas from but our brand is the market leader in our space our franchisees success rate is close to a hundred percent and our customers love us so some selling points there on why to choose this franchise opportunity over other franchises but once you have a few key details on the product that you sell the next step is to think about who are we going after here and when you're selling B to B this could be thoughts around what industry are we going after what are the different people in the organization but in this particular case some different audiences that you might go after is you might go after everybody which would be a big mistake for selling franchises because not everybody is going to be interested or able to become a franchise business owner another example of an audience you could go after that is people that might be very interested in buying a franchise is people that are in between jobs so they're looking for their next opportunity the challenge with this audience is that these people will not have the income and probably have the savings or funding available because they're currently in between jobs so that might not be a good audience and another audience that you might go after are people that are working as employees this could be a good audience because these people probably have income and they might have savings and they also might be not happy and enjoying working as employees and you provide another option an Avenue for those people to go down so that might be a good audience to go after and then another audience to think about is people that want to start their own business there are people out there that like working as employees and don't want to take the risk and then there are people that spend their whole life trying to think of a way to start their own business and having that internal desire that might be a really great group of people to go after to sell franchise business opportunities to and that's actually who we're going to create our strategy around is going after people that want to start a business that maybe haven't started a business yet or haven't figured out how to do it or have I've tried it but haven't been successful so we're going to go after those people and the next step in the process is to think about when we sell our product to that type of audience what is the value that we have to offer to that audience and what we're basically looking for here is simply what improvements can we deliver to those individuals by setting them up with a franchise business opportunity now this can sometimes be difficult to think about what improvements can we offer with our product or service and what we can do is we can actually bring back the features that we just came up with we can also bring back the differentiation points and think about when we provide any of those to this target audience of people that want to start a business what are some improvements that we can make and another thing that we can use here to make this more simple is that I believe there's just a few common ways that most products and services help and those are that we can often help to make something work better help to make something easier decrease the time time it takes to do something increase revenue or income decrease costs or expenses improve product quality decrease the risk of something bad happening improve visibility or access to information and so what we can do is we can use this list of common areas of improvement and then go back to the features and differentiation and look at each point and ask ourselves does that particular feature or that particular differentiation does that create an improvement in this in each of these areas and when we identify that it does we can try to organize a few thoughts that very quickly and concisely explain that Improvement for example by going through these one at a time without knowing a whole lot about selling franchise business opportunities I can come up with a few improvements such as a franchise business opportunity help someone that's looking to start a business to start and run their own business help them to be their own boss help make starting a business much easier helped to decrease the amount of time it takes to start a business help to increase the odds for Success you're more likely to be successful starting a franchise business than starting a new business under a new brand or new product and we can help to increase the amount of income that this individual can earn versus what they might be able to earn as an employee working for a company and the next step in the process is to try to think about what pain points can we make go away for people that want to start a business by providing them with a franchise business opportunity and so what we're looking for here are a few challenges or concerns that the prospect might have or might be experiencing that we can make go away and if I were to ask you what are some pain points that you can make go away for the product or service that you sell you could likely very quickly throw a couple out at me but here's another process is that what we can do is we can bring back the improvements that we just came up with and we can use this as a guide to think about what pain points can we make go away because for each Improvement there's basically an opposite pain point that we can make go away so what we can do is we can look at each Improvement and keeping in mind the target audience of people that want to start a business we can say for that audience what is the opposite of this Improvement in terms of a pain point that might exist or something they might be concerned about we could also think what problem goes away when we create this Improvement or what problem starts to happen if we're providing this Improvement and we take it away so if we go through this list one at a time looking at each Improvement and some pain points are that it can be difficult to make the leap to being a business owner maybe making the leap from being an employee to being a business owner and for the target audience that we're going after they might not be having a lot of fun working for others and working as an employee for a company but when you want to start a business it can be difficult to know all the different things to do in order to start your own business and it can take a lot of time to start a business either a lot of hours in the day or it can take many months or years before you're actually successful in making money and most businesses that individuals start fail in the first year and if we're competing against people working as employees and our competition is is the status quo and just normal jobs a pain point that those people might have is that they're not able to increase their income very much every year that they have to wait for just the periodic raise that they get or every once in a while getting a new promotion and that's a pain point that we can make go away by selling our franchise and allowing these people to be business owners and the next step in the process is to think about questions to ask I personally believe the best salesperson is the one that asks the best questions and you might agree with that but you still might not know what questions to ask well here's a process that you can go through to always know what questions to ask prospects and the first step is to think about good pain questions to ask if we just came up with a good list of pain points that we can make go away well we should ask questions to see if our target audience of people that want to start a business if the people that we're communicating with if they have these pain points so what we can do is we can look at each pain point and try to ask ourselves what question could we ask to see if the prospects that we talk to have that particular pain point because for each pain point that the product fixes there's a question that could be asked so what we can do is we can just go through the list of pain points one by one and then compose a corresponding question to ask so how interested are you in starting your own business what has held you back from taking the leap to be a business owner how important is it for you to Be Your Own Boss one day how do you feel about knowing how to start your own business how much time would you have available to establish a new business and that can either be how much time do you have available in the day or how much of a Runway does that person have in terms of how quickly would they need to be up and running in terms of having a profitable successful business how worried are you about failing as a business owner if you take the leap how do you feel about your ability to increase your income in your current job or what you're currently doing so those are questions that you could ask to probe to see if someone has the pain points that you can help make go away with what you're trying to sell there's another category questions that I think you should ask and those are what I would refer to as current state questions regardless of what you sell there are questions you should ask to see what the prospect is currently doing in the area where you have something to sell so if you sell cars you should ask questions like do you have a car today how's it running what year is it do you own it do you lease it how much do you owe on it how many family members do you have so each sales person should have their own unique set of current state questions depending on what they sell and here's is a tool to come up with your current state questions is you should probably ask if the prospect currently has what you sell who they're buying it from any details around current systems or processes maybe people in the organization current contracts or agreements expiration dates usually there's some sort of sizing details that you might want to ask about how many sites they have how many people how many systems maybe any current performance data regarding the area where you have something to sell maybe the last time they looked at buying what you sell so using that as a guide we can come up with some questions when trying to sell franchise business opportunities such as what do you do in terms of what are they currently doing for work what's their current career how long have you been doing that have you ever started your own business do you have any goals of starting your own business one day do you have any ideas for a business that you can start do you know how to start your own business when was the last time you considered starting your own business have you ever looked at any franchise opportunities how much are you making per year how much has your annual income increased in the past couple years so I don't know if that's a perfect list or a complete list of current state questions but that could give you some ideas of questions asked when selling franchise business opportunities in the last step of the process is to come up with a customer example that we could share when we're talking to prospects I personally think sharing customer examples is a great way to not only create more interest in what you sell but it's also a good way to kind of explain what you sell if the prospect is having trouble picturing what you sell and it can also help you to establish credibility in terms of you being able to show that you can deliver what you say you can deliver and help make the prospect trust and believe in what you say that your product can do or what you have to offer so here's a tool that you can use to create a really short customer example for your particular situation and you might want to think about who is a current or past customer that you helped and maybe pick one that's similar to the Target buyer type that you're communicating with what is a problem that they had that you help to solve what did you sell to them to solve that problem and then maybe what are two different improvements that you helped to create for that particular customer so following that we can come up with this example that we worked with a mid-career individual they wanted to start their own business but did not know how to we were able to help that by setting them up with one of our franchise opportunities this not only helped them to start their own business but it also helped them to drastically increase their annual income so right there's a really quick short customer example that we can use when we're talking to prospects and so going through each of those steps basically helped us to create what we refer to as building blocks and when we have these different building blocks we can mix and match those to create a lot of different sales tools that we can use when communicating with prospects for example we can use those different blocks to create a cold call script or to create an appointment script or to create voicemail messages or to create a cold email campaign now as you can see there are so many different documents that we can create with those different blocks and I'm not going to show you all the different documents in this video because we've already done that in another video if you want to see all the different combinations that you can create with those different building blocks I recommend you go to another video and I'll include a link to this video in the description but if you go to the playlist the smart sales system there is a video titled writing sales scripts in this video we basically show you all the different combinations that you can create with those different building blocks so be sure to check that out but I will actually show you an email campaign because this the example that this video started with was a LinkedIn inmail message so let me show you what we could create for that particular scenario and the first email it could be a value message which uses your value points and so these emailed messages here are color coded with a key on the right side and what I've done with the color coding is I'm just showing you where those bullet points are being inserted so you can kind of see how they the email is structured but we use a value point for the subject line and then the center piece of the email is basically sharing the different ways that we can help to improve the life of the target audience that we're communicating with and we're trying to look for people that want to start a business and these are the different ways that we can help that individual so these emails that I'm showing you here get back to that key concept that prospects are probably not searching for and thinking about buying what we have to sell so we're not reaching out to people to say hey do you want to talk about buying a franchise we're reaching out to people saying are you interested in being Your Own Boss are you interested in starting a business are you interested in increasing your income and if someone is then let's talk and let's start the conversation and then the second email in that series we can use our pain points building block so the green points here are those individual pain points that we can help to resolve with the product that we have to offer the next email in the series uses our customer example building block so this email brings in the value points a pain Point some product details to share a very tight concise customer example and you're basically sending an email out saying this is someone that we helped and I don't know if we can help you in the same way but that's why I'm reaching out the fourth email uses our questions so certainly I would not send this email by itself nor would I expect the prospect to answer these questions back in their reply more so this is my fourth attempt at reaching out so at this point I'm starting to reach a place where I'm just letting them know these are the questions I'd like to talk to you about if I had the opportunity then the fifth email this is when we start to get towards the product that we sell and by the way this is what most salespeople send as email one and we're sending this at email five so if you agree that just out of the gate being very direct with the product selling approach might not be Optimum this approach gives you other emails to send before you get to that very direct this is what I I sell this is what it does let's start a conversation and even this product message is still a little bit more sophisticated and then the last email in the series is a last attempt so this is where we begin to walk away but we do go back to the improvements that we have to offer just to say those one last time and we start to walk away now that is a six email approach now getting back to this original email example that this all started from that is an inmail message and within mail you do not have the option to send those multiple messages in a series I believe so you would not have the option to send all those different messages and if that's what you want to do I do want to just consolidate what I just showed with you into a couple options that try to use this approach all in one message so here is a single message that uses your value points building block and your product billing block so this basically introduces these are the improvements I deliver and this is how I deliver it through the franchise business opportunity another option you have in a Consolidated in mail message uses your pain points building block and then introduces the product so these are the challenges that we help with in terms of pain points and we help with those challenges by providing this business opportunity now what I would recommend is sending those six messages so if you still want to do messages through Linkedin what you would have to do is actually send the prospect an invitation to connect and that way you can send multiple cold email messages to their LinkedIn inbox and that's actually what I think most sales people do is they use that approach what I would actually recommend is not doing any of that what I would actually recommend is instead of sending an one inmail message or instead of trying to become connections and then sending messages to the LinkedIn inbox what I recommend you do is actually use LinkedIn to find the target prospects that you want to connect with but don't connect with them through Linkedin send them email messages to their business email inbox and you may think well I have to connect on LinkedIn because I don't have their email address and here's the trick we actually use a tool inside of sales scripter called the email guesser and what the email guesser does is that it helps you to guess the prospect's email address if you have three pieces of information if you have the first name the last name and the company website address what the email guesser will do is that it will run a test ping against the most common combinations of those values because most prospects their business email inbox is most likely some combination of those three values and the great thing about LinkedIn is that you can get those three pieces of information extremely quickly from a prospect's LinkedIn profile and once you enter those into the email guesser within a few seconds you have their business inbox email address and then you can start sending your cold email messages to that without connecting and without sending LinkedIn in mail messages so not only does this help to shortcut your LinkedIn process by completely removing the request to connect step but it gets your cold email messages to the prospects business email inbox which I personally believe is a much better place for your message to be seen to be retained and to be read and that is pretty much it for this video hopefully you found a tip or two in there that you can apply to your prospecting and if you did and you want to return the favor very easy for you to do all you have to do is like comment share this video subscribe to our Channel any of those help us and none of those cost you anything if you like these tips you may want to follow us on any of these social platforms WE Post daily sales tips if you like this and you want more everything that I shared with you here today is part of the smart sales system smart stands for sales messaging and response tactics now we actually called a system because it's a step-by-step system that you can actually Implement for yourself or for your sales team and the foundation of the system is creating your sales message and so that's level one once you go through our process to create your sales message then as you can see once you have your building blocks it's real easy to create all of your different scripts and email messages and once you have all your scripts and emails and objection responses then it's about level three and the execution so how to send those emails and follow up on those email messages and how to call those prospects and that's all level three now the great news is that if you want to implement and learn the smart sales system you can do that for free because it's all on YouTube all you have to do is go to this playlist the smart sales system sell smarter not harder and there's a module that will take you through every step of the process of learning the smart sales system and the reason why we give it away for free is because all of this does align with a product that we do sell called sales scripter for example sales scripter aligns with level one which is to build your sales message there's an area of sales scripter called the sales message Builder that will take you through that process and make creating your sales message much easier and in fact we have a whole library of pre-loaded sales messages and I actually have loaded up this sales message that I showed you here today so the sales message of franchise business opportunities for people looking to start a business is already loaded up in the system so if you wanted to grab what I showed you here today it's all here and the great thing about either grabbing that sales message or getting your own sales message into sales scripter is that the software aligns with level 2 by providing a full sales Playbook which is a library of sales scripts and email templates and those get filled in with your sales message and that's how you end up with a Custom Tailor third library of sales scripts and email messages tailored to your product your service your industry your target prospects and then certainly the software aligns with level three providing full CRM email Automation and a lot of other sales tools and I'm certainly available to help with you with any of these levels on a Consulting basis if that's interesting but you still don't know what to do you may want to check out my book The Smart sales system sell smarter not harder and you can get a copy on Amazon here I'll put a link in the description as well that's pretty much it hopefully this was helpful if you have more questions or want more information the best place to go is sales scripter.com if you're looking for more tips there are plenty of videos with sales tips there are ebooks you can download for free if you have questions on the product of sales scripter there are plenty of demo videos on our website if you want to contact us this is the best place to go you can get our phone number email address there's a chat window as well thanks for being here hope this was helpful and we look forward to seeing on the next video have a great day take care bye thank you
2023-01-03 19:33
