Marketing for Franchise Sales

Smart sales and marketing leaders understand the importance of collaboration across marketing and franchise development teams. In a perfect world, each team would work in tandem with one another. In reality, however, marketing and franchise development teams often work in silos, unable to see eye-to-eye on lead generation and consumer messaging, causing fragmented and confusing branding. Something as straightforward as a Facebook ad can cause conflict between a sales team who wants to highlight a testimonial versus a PR person who wants to produce educational content that talks about anything but the brand.

On the other hand, companies that successfully integrate their franchise development and marketing practices create a rounded lead-to-close process, laying a foundation for other elements of marketing and sales collaboration, like a shared definition of a qualified lead and better aligned messaging.

Your customer relationships depend on these separate teams finding common ground, and when they do, it’s beautiful for everyone. Sales teams provide a direct lens into your target’s needs while marketers know exactly how to reach new leads through content and consumer education resources.

Here are three great places to begin joining forces with your marketing and development teams:

1. Position marketing as a content creation engine and sales as a learning and distribution point. Every marketer knows that content is important, which is why they’re ramping up budgets for blog posts, press releases, case studies, video, etc. Ambitious marketers are constantly on the hunt for article ideas and distribution channels, but they often overlook a crucial, untapped resource that’s sitting right next to them. The sales team is on the front line, speaking with the leads the marketing team generated. Their conversation isn’t going to revolve around the content the lead may have seen. They’re going to be asking questions about their business challenges and determining if the franchise opportunity would be a good fit.

2. Unite around a common goal. If a marketer’s performance is measured by number of leads as opposed to qualified leads, for example, they’ll be incentivized to ramp up volume rather than quality, forcing sales reps to spend more time sorting through prospect information than closing deals. Instead of choosing a pack of different metrics, choose one or two that encourages collaboration and forces sales and marketing teams to work together.

3. Create a culture of communication. Everyone knows that communication is crucial for success in business, so I won’t exaggerate that point. As much as we value communication, however, we find it hard to prioritize collaboration, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Encourage marketing and sales teams to remedy that by encouraging weekly meetings and listening to feedback from each team.

Consumers nowadays are constantly being targeted by brands from every angle. At the end of the day, they will seek a balance between trusting a brand that has been well-communicated to them and trusting the development person they’re on the phone with. An integrated process will look different in all organizations, but the best way to move forward is to learn from our colleagues.