In this episode, I discuss two big ways that franchise candidates hijack the discovery process because of their fears. I also share four specific ways that you can overcome difficult objections that stall or stop progress in the franchise sale. By understanding the language patterns, steps, and tone you must have in the sales process, both you and the franchise candidate will have a clear understanding of what steps should be taken next as you progress towards the sale.

In this episode, I talk about achieving HARD Goals and how to set up your own system of accountability to help you move from your expectations and current reality to what needs to be done on a daily and weekly basis to make more franchise sales. I also discuss the seven steps of the franchise sales process and the eight roles that you need to better develop to get better at selling more franchises, more consistently.

In this episode, I conclude my discussion of bad sales habits that franchise candidates want you to give up by discussing seven more habits that you can and must avoid in your interactions with others in the franchise sales and discovery process.

In this episode, I discuss five more bad sales habits that franchise candidates want you to give up and discuss why making those choices in the Discovery Process will yield better results with your franchise sales.

In this episode, I talk about four bad sales habits that franchise candidates want you to give up as the first part of a three part series where a total of sixteen bad habits will be discussed. Learning how to overcome these bad habits will help you better connect with franchise candidates, eliminate resistance, and express greater empathy to those to whom you are explaining your franchise concept. 

Research has shown that seven out of ten marketing messages are misunderstood, mistaken, missed, or just plain messed up in one way or another. What this means is that you must be absolutely clear about what it is that you are asking and what the franchise candidate means by what he or she says they are looking for in order to help him or her find the right franchise to start for them. In this episode, I talk about communication tips you can use to help you better and more quickly connect with franchise candidates. I specifically discuss words you should say and the words you absolutely shouldn't say that automatically disengage you from a prospective franchise candidate when presenting your franchise brand. I also discuss ways to better involve the senses when selling to build trust, create excitement, and cause franchise candidates to want to move forward to the next step of your discovery process.

In this episode, I talk about differences in selling to generational groups and specifically ten ways you can better sell franchises to the Millennial Generation. A franchise candidate's background affects his or her buying preferences. Franchise candidates don't buy the same way that you do, but if you can't get into their world and understand them, you'll be much more successful at establishing a meaningful connection in order to make the sale.

In this episode, I talk about key ways that you can overcome discouragement when things go wrong with one of your franchise sales, how to overcome disappointments and letdowns, how to have more patience when the sale takes longer than you planned, and key ways to better ask for the franchise sale.

In this episode, I talk about the twelve most important skills in franchise development and how to rate yourself and your skills so that you can work on improving these critical skills. I also share key lessons about presenting your franchise brand to showcase confidence without appearing arrogant and putting together the most important KPI's (key performance indicators) that measure what you do on a daily and weekly basis.

At the conclusion and epilogue of my book Franchise Sales Secrets, I share several suggestions to help you thrive in an extremely competitive environment with your business and sanity intact. All of us struggle with disappointment and discouragement when things don't go according to plan. That is a part of business. Yet, as leaders, we have to be optimistic about the future while still confronting the brutal facts of reality. This means that we keep moving forward and take steps and actions that will help us get through challenging times. In this chapter, I share how you can lead your organization by fighting fears with action, how to lead better with optimism, and refusing to allow despair, doubt, and discouragement get you down.

It can be easy to lose perspective. Many franchise developers and franchisors have realized this as they experience whiplash from the up and down roller coaster ride with their sales in today's economy. In this chapter, I discuss eight ways about how you can stand out to prospects and clients and act more decisively towards putting together marketing promotions to reinvigorate your business and marketing message. I also discuss how to get back in control of your business and your life if you feel that you've lost control with all that you have to do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

In this chapter, I discuss the most important elements that can help your franchise create and build a powerful competitive advantage. I also share seven game changers you can use to better stand out in the marketplace, five ways to reposition your competitors, and fourteen questions you should ask to evaluate how well you stand up to your competitors, and if you have what it takes to create the elements you'll need to beat your competitors.

In this chapter, I outline the costs of a mis-hire, how to recognize A players and recruit them to your team, the realities of hiring today, how to evaluate the performance of every position in your franchise support team, how to create a culture of leadership, and constantly be developing great leaders around you. No one achieves any significant goal alone. This chapter shows how to build better teams, create an environment that encourages growth, and why great leaders are able to increase momentum (whereas good leaders can only sustain it). I also outline four ways you can build the right environment  to develop and unleash leaders in your franchise, how to identify who you should develop as a leader in your business, and what you must do to foster an environment where rotten attitudes and selfishness are quickly quenched. Great leaders focus on their dreams and the teams required to make such goals become realities.

There is power in taking action. In this chapter, I discuss five things you must be doing now as a franchisor or franchisee in your business including how to stay focused, how to better delegate tasks in your business, how to get better response from your marketing efforts, the critical nature of building your franchise brand, and what actions you must take to pay the price in reaching your goals. I also discuss the importance of moving from a generalist to a specialist to strengthen the position of your business, the two questions that let you know if you are really committed to paying the price to improve, and which of the two types of action will yield the best results. Sponsor: Franify.com  

In this chapter, I discuss the powerful force of resistance that stops us from doing what we know we need to do. In order to get anything done and to stay focused on your personal and business goals, you have to beat resistance every day of your life. Stephen Pressfield in his excellent book, The War of Art, makes this observation: "Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance." To help you overcome resistance in your life and business, I share four specific areas of your business and personal life where you are likely being beat by resistance and what you can do about it to get back on track and be more productive, focused, and successful.  Sponsor: Franify.com

In Chapter 8 of my book Franchise Sales Secrets, I talk about the value of creating and implementing systems to ensure that franchisees deliver on your brand promise. In a franchise, a system is a way of doing things to produce a specific business result. The system is the solution to get the results you want. I outline three characteristics of a great system, six mindshifts and mindsets that are critical for you and your franchisees to have to succeed in franchising, the essence of the book The E-Myth and why many entrepreneurs still don't understand this concept and why they struggle in their new franchise business, how entrepreneurs, managers, and technicians view the work of a business very differently (and what you must do to ensure that these personalities work together), and the three stages of business that every franchisor and franchisee go through on the way to success.

After every interaction or transaction at your franchise, your franchisee is one of three things: 1) Disappointed because they got less than they expected, 2) Satisfied and only got what they expected, or 3) Delighted because they got more than they expected. We can all go beyond just aiming to satisfy franchisees and clients. In this chapter, I talk about nine ways to evaluate how well you are doing at meeting the needs of your clients, how to improve performance expectations, how to better deal with frustrated or unhappy clients, and eleven specific situations where you can train your team to go from the mundane to the majestic in the experience that your franchisees and clients have with you and your franchise brand. Sponsored by: Franify.com

In this chapter, I talk about six problems with selling on price and how to build your unique, personal, and unique value in your franchise niche. I also discuss ten strategies in depth that you can use to increase your profitabilty and pricing for what you sell in your business. One of the biggest parts of learning how to sell with value as opposed to selling on price is understanding the language patterns, thoughts, and beliefs of profitable business owners and how consciously changing those thoughts, beliefs, and actions will help you build a more sustainable business.

In this chapter, I talk about how the franchise discovery process has shifted from the perspective of franchise candidates and franchise developers / brokers and compare the two processes and expectations side by side. I then discuss three reasons why understanding this shift will help you make more franchise sales. I compare and contrast how both parties interact during the Discovery Process and share seven ways that you can counter these shifts and make more franchise sales. 

In this chapter, I discuss ten of the best marketing principles and numerous marketing tactics you can use to increase sales and beat your competitors. I discuss how to dominate market squares instead of focusing on individual market pieces or products, nine of the most common marketing mistakes, fourteen distinct marketing strategies you must implement in your franchise, and the value of marketing success that comes from specialization and sacrifice.

In this chapter, I talk about one of the biggest traps that small business owners, emerging franchisors, and beginning franchisees fall into which is that they focus on what is happening to them and external problems in their industry (that they don't have a lot of control over). I discuss five things that you should spend more time on that you can control: productivity, customer satisfaction, profitabilty, quality of experience you provide, and innovation and why your focus in these areas is critical to help you achieve the results you desire.

In this chapter, I discuss seven mistakes that franchisors make and what you can do about them to ensure continual growth and expansion of your franchise. Most people don't like to confront their weaknesses, but simply ignoring them doesn't make them go away. In fact, it often accelerates the problem until the pending crash becomes even greater. If you will take the time to overcome these common mistakes and really take the time to define why you are unique and different, along with utilizing more effective marketing and sales strategies, you will be able to beat your competitors. If you don't, your competitors will and you will be defined by default. Look closely at the systems that make up your business and resolve to fix the leaks and weaknesses that may have sprung up and been exposed with recent shifts in the marketplace.

In Chapter 1 of Franchise Sales Secrets, I share six challenges with franchise pitches, promotions, and presentations and talk about how you can overcome them to flood your calendar with more candidates who are ready to buy your franchise now. I also share five fundamental areas that all franchisors and franchisees should pay attention to if they want to grow their sales.

Over the next several episodes, I will be reading and sharing the contents of my book Franchise Sales Secrets. In this episode, I share the introduction and the self-assessment designed to help you evaluate where you are at as you look to scale and grow your franchise business.

In this episode, I discuss eight important questions to help you evaluate how well your franchise offering stacks up next to your competitors and show you how to make your franchise the clear choice when presenting your brand.

In this episode, I talk about eight signs that you have a great connection with a franchise candidate on the way to a sale. This is something you should carefully evaluate after each call to make sure that you are on the right track for helping franchise candidates understand everything about the franchise concept and how its support will take away their worries, fears, and concerns.

In this episode, we talk about how you can overcome the 4 R's of resistance in selling franchises. There are four obstacles that people have when you introduce a new idea to them. In this episode, I talk about how you can overcome them to set yourself up for success as you go through the discovery process with new franchise candidates.

In this episode, I cover seven reasons why franchise candidates aren't buying today and the  attributes that all top franchise developers possess that help them make the sale more consistently.

In this episode, we talk about critical roles and the sequence that franchise developers must go through in order to make the sale. Specifically, we talk about four ways that franchise developers shortcut and ultimately sabotage the sales process and how they can avoid those mistakes, build trust, and get the sale.

In this episode, I talk about four things that increase resistance when you first start talking with a franchise candidate and the five critical elements that must be a part of your initial conversation with a franchise candidate to build excitement around your brand. Ignore these approach elements at your own peril. The best franchise candidates know how to eliminate fear and build excitement about the franchise concept they present to their candidates. This episode shows you how to do it correctly.

In this episode, I talk about the key to successfully promoting your franchise so you can flood your discovery pipeline with candidates who are ready to buy your franchise now and six ways in which you can put your marketing and sales focus where it belongs.

In this episode, I share four things you need to have confidence in about your brand and that franchise candidates should feel about you and your brand before you can make the sale. I also share four BIG questions you should ask yourself if your sales are struggling right now with your franchise and what you can do to get your sales results back on track.

In this episode, I discuss ten common obstacles that mediocre franchise developers struggle with that limit their sales success. You can be a much more effective franchise developer by knowing what these obstacles are and avoiding them as you work with franchise candidates through your discovery process on the way to the sale.

I recently had a conversation with a franchise candidate who was overwhelmed with too many choices. He had recently been laid off from his job and his franchise broker kept putting new concepts in front of him week after week. By the time I talked with him, he had already met with a dozen franchisors and read through five FDDs. He was completely overwhelmed. On top of that, he was seriously worried about how he was going to provide for his family. He was scared, overwhelmed, and not sure what to do. Even though he had initially expressed interest in starting a franchise, by being completely overwhelmed, he wasn't able to understand what he was looking at and felt overwhelmed by fees and fears. This happens more often than it should. In this episode, I want to talk about why too many choices confuse candidates at the point when they are ready to make a decision. This influences whether or not they will say yes to your franchise. If they are overwhelmed or confused, the decision to buy your franchise is always delayed. Being thoughtful about how you present choices and limiting choices to one or two translates into more sales instead of giving franchise candidates the option to choose (which lengthens out the sales cycle and often doesn’t lead to the franchise sale anyway with the candidate exclaiming, “I just can’t choose." In this episode, I talk about how to focus your marketing and sales efforts to limit choices once you know what they are most interested in and to remember, to always keep the sales process simple and focused.

No one likes to lose a sale. When franchise candidates sometimes say no (especially after you've invested weeks and months with them), you have to stay positive and get back on track. In this episode, I share nine things that all franchise developers and brokers should do when they don't make a sale and tips to raising overall franchise sales performance and specific ways that you can make the most of adversity, discouragement, and difficulty as you get back on track with your next franchise candidate.

In this episode, I share eight ways that you can make the price of your franchise fee irrelevant to your franchise candidates as you build more value.

In this episode, I talk about five key things to remember about building relationships before the sale and nine tips to help you better present your franchise brand while creating buying desire and excitement.

In this podcast episode (the third of three parts), I cover ten more psychological triggers of why franchise candidates buy a franchise. When you understand and can tap into the psychology behind the buying decision and then utilize these principles, you will successfully motivate, influence, and persuade franchise candidates to buy your franchise from you now, rather than later. In this episode, I cover the final ten of the thirty psychological triggers you can use to make more franchise sales.

In this episode, we continue our discussion of psychological triggers that influence why franchise candidates choose to buy a franchise. Each trigger includes a discussion of how to use it and gives you specific assignments that you can use to start implementing these sales strategies into your daily conversations with franchise candidates so that you can sell more franchises, more consistently.

In this podcast episode (the first of three parts), I cover one of the most fascinating parts of selling: the psychology of why franchise candidates buy a franchise. When you understand and can tap into the psychology behind the buying decision and then utilize these principles, you will successfully motivate, influence, and persuade franchise candidates to buy your franchise from you now, rather than later. In this episode, I cover the first ten of thirty psychological triggers you can use to make more franchise sales.    

In this episode, I discuss the difference between process training and event training in helping you and your franchise developers increase your franchise sales. I discuss six major reasons why franchise developers don't work to improve their sales skills and what can be done to turn this around. I also discuss five ways you can avoid going with the flow and change direction as the economy continues to shift and change. This discussion will help you see where you are going and give you the vision to get better results now.

In this episode, I discuss nine lessons about how you can sell more franchises in today's changing economy. If you have struggled to understand what will help you bring in new franchisees in recent weeks, these lessons will help you evaluate what you are doing now and what you could and should be doing to get back on track with your sales goals.

In this episode, we cover the remaining 11 franchise sales blunders you must avoid if you want to sell more franchises (adding to the first ten that we covered in the last episode). You'll learn more about what is holding you back and what you can do specifically to be better at selling in today's competitive franchise market.

In this episode, I discuss ten of the twenty-one most common and destructive sales blunders and how to avoid them. I'll be covering the remaining eleven blunders in the next episode on the podcast. This discussion covers what not to do as well as what you should be doing as you work with franchise candidates explaining your franchise brand. Avoiding these sales blunders will allow you to make more franchise sales, more consistently.

In this episode, I talk about Matt Oechsli’s excellent book The Art of Selling to the Affluent and discuss twelve commandments to selling franchises to affluent buyers in today's market that you cannot violate if you want to make more franchise sales, more consistently.

In this episode, we cover part two of 10 Reasons Why You're Not Selling More Franchises and What to Do About It and explain the remaining five reasons that hold back franchise developers and brokers from making more sales. 

In this episode, host and best-selling author James Butler talks about the first five reasons why franchise developers and brokers aren't selling more franchises and what they can do about it. The second five reasons are discussed in Part 2.