How to pitch your franchise offering

Sarah Cook, founding partner of Coconut Creatives, explains how to engage successfully with potential customers

You know how some businesses just seem to be everywhere? Ever wondered how they do it? Follow an integrated marketing approach and you’ll be one of them.

If you have been on a Coconut Creatives franchise marketing workshop or heard another member of the Coconut team speak at an event,you will probably be familiar with our version of a ‘perfect pitch’ for business owners.

Stages
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This is a psychologically proven method of engaging with someone to help them understand quickly and simply what you do, how you do it, why you are good at it and why it is relevant to them. In short, this process goes through four fundamental stages of:

* Clarity.

* Credibility.

* Relevance.

* Believability.

Very few small businesses adopt a perfect pitch approach to engaging with potential customers. Across the business world it is common for a company to have a 90-second pitch that it uses at networking events or to train sales team. The company understands the value of having it, the power it provides in consistency of approach and how it helps engage its target audience.

This is a powerful tool in franchising. Once you understand how important it is and what impact it can have on your business, you will realise why spending time developing your perfect pitch is paramount.

In the franchise industry, where many people attend exhibitions, the first question visitors ask as they casually walk up to a stand is: “So, tell me about what you do”. The response is often a mixture of product and service information, usually delivered with too much detail, something vague about the business, followed by an invitation to fill in a form. It’s not a good start to a potentially long-term relationship for the business owner or the interested visitor.

By utilising a perfect pitch approach, you can train your staff to engage more effectively with prospects. As so many businesses attend exhibitions, we are also sharing some thoughts on improving your show success. Attending a show with an innovative stand design, appropriate merchandise and plenty of enthusiasm is a great start, but there are a few more tricks to learn.

We always prefer to have at least two people working on a stand, or more depending on the size. Brief your team on what you want them to do and how you want them to record the number and details of visitors to the stand, remembering to cover any data protection issues.

We like to set our clients’ stand teams individual goals. For example, if you want loo leads over a two-day show and you have five people working on the stand, that’s 50 leads a day and io leads per person - five before lunch and five after lunch each per day. Breaking it down like this makes it less daunting.

We also like to grade leads by quality and relevance. By having a 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C system you can prioritise calling the is or As first once the team is back in the office the week after the show. Those who are genuinely interested will appreciate the fast response.

Multimedia
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An exhibition provides an excellent opportunity for you to showcase videos, testimonials, events, discovery days, case studies and product demos on screen. Visitors naturally stop to watch and this gives your team a chance to approach them.

Some of our most successful clients adopt a system for attracting visitors to their stands. A great way to do this is through the use of speaking slots. By scheduling a few on your stand, you attract potential customers. Also, prospects like to speak to people who have already been in their position, so have a franchisee or customer available on your stand. You can also use this in your pre-show marketing activity.

Another important target audience at exhibitions is the press. Leave your media pack in the press room for any interested journalists who wants to find out more about your franchise. Always ensure that you include your perfect pitch in your press pack too.

Interested prospects that have opted in to receive further details of your business should be followed up quickly An eye-catching branded email and personal phone call works best. On your return from an exhibition, work out a return on investment snapshot to allow you to evaluate the show’s effectiveness and decide whether a return visit is worthwhile.

Overall, businesses should consider exhibitions as part of an integrated approach to marketing - a joined up approach. By linking up exhibition attendance with Linkedln, Facebook, Twitter, your database, and magazine and newspaper advertisements and editorials, you amplify the impact of all of the marketing and advertising you do.