Your prospect has 14 tabs open. The enquiry form is the last one.

⏳ Read time: ~5 minutes

Seven years of new franchisee training and nobody has ever credited the landing page.

Below is what they credit instead, and why your enquiry form is the last thing a prospect touches rather than the first.

Plus the new FranFeast episode, and the button LinkedIn added last week for reporting AI slop.

Seven years running marketing at Jim's.

Between 100 and 120 new franchisees through training every three weeks.

Not once has one of them told me the landing page did it.

Not the information pack. Not the enquiry form.

The answer is always something else. And it always happened weeks before they filled in the form.

So I went back through the conversations in my head and did a general count.

A franchise prospect hits 12 to 20 touch points before enquiring.

My number, from hundreds of conversations with franchisees over seven years at our new franchisee training.

Last August I wrote about the 7-11-4 rule.

Seven hours of content, 11 touch points, four locations.

Everyone credits it to Google's Zero Moment of Truth research.

Here is the part I skipped.

Nobody has ever produced the Google document it came from.

The actual 2011 ZMOT study found buyers went from 5.2 sources to 10.4.

The rest is a marketing distillation people have been quoting at each other for a decade.

I took the 11 and multiplied it by four anyway, because franchising asks for more money than a fridge does.

I no longer need to borrow anyone's number.

The franchisees tell me directly.

More than 99% of our new franchisees say video was a major part of their decision.

Here is what 14 of those touch points look like.

The enquiry form is tab 14.

Everything you fund sits at tab 14.

Everything deciding the outcome sits in tabs 1 to 13.

Doug Downer from Franchise Ready described a brand he looked at.

Close to a million dollars a year, aimed almost entirely at tab 14.

Reddit, the podcast library, the YouTube channel and the founder's LinkedIn have all had airtime here. Two of these tabs have not.

You send the information pack.

The prospect copies the contents into ChatGPT or Claude and asks whether they should buy.

People have told me in training they did exactly this.

Some of them fed our disclosure document in as well.

Read it again.

The document your lawyers wrote and your marketing team formatted is now content.

A model you do not control writes the summary.

In May I wrote about AEO and GEO agencies. Different problem.

This one runs the other way. Nothing outbound.

A document you already own, judged by software before a human forms an opinion.

Most information packs are built to survive a compliance review and impress someone flicking through them. Neither job is the one being done now.

Before the first call, prospects search the name of your franchise development manager, franchisor or consultant (depending on your country)

The franchisors at Jim's who sell the most have the strongest digital footprint.

Interviews, podcast appearances, a LinkedIn profile with posts on it going back years. It shows up when someone searches their name.

The ones with nothing show up as nothing.

This is also why I argue against outsourcing your whole sales process.

If a brand will not put its own person in front of me, I have learned something about the brand.

Barbeques Galore went into administration in February with around 500 jobs at risk.

Receivers sold the brand this week and every company owned store is now shut.

Retail analyst Trent Rigby said the failure was largely self inflicted.

The brand blamed the weaker economy, and in his view never did anything meaningful to win a younger customer.

A brand selling outdoor cooking.

One of the most watchable categories on the internet.

Jim's Group runs 112,000 followers and 2 million likes on TikTok.

I do most of it myself.

Seven years. Between 100 and 120 new franchisees every three weeks. Zero have credited the landing page, the video sales letter, or the information pack.

You are funding tab 14 and hoping tabs 1 to 13 sort themselves out.

Monday: Copy your own information pack into ChatGPT and Claude. Ask both whether you should buy this franchise. Read the answer as a prospect would, then fix the parts of the pack producing the worst lines.

Wednesday: Google every person on your recruitment/franchisor/sales consultant team by name. Whoever returns nothing goes first. One podcast appearance and a LinkedIn profile with posts on it is enough to change the result.

Friday: Ring your last three franchisees. Ask one question. What was the first thing you saw about us, and how long before you enquired? Write the answers down. You now have a touch point list for your own brand instead of mine.

Your next franchisee has already made up their mind about you.

Which of the tabs open in front of them did you pay for?

Episode two is out!

Glenn Walford and I run the headlines, then sit down with Patrick McMichael, Josh Cairns from Minke, Doug Downer, Darryn McAuliffe from FRANData, and Mark Crapper from Lounge Repair Guys.

We opened on 7-Eleven.

Five segments on A Current Affair. Millions of views before you count TikTok and Instagram. The response was a statement.

Here is what I would have done, because we have been through it twice.

When Jim's Dog Wash copped a run of news.com.au stories inside a week, I printed every article and recorded a podcast episode on each one.

Jim answered the claims line by line.

We published the full email exchange between Jim and the journalist on our own site.

Prospects who were walking away stayed.

The other time, A Current Affair came for Jim's Plumbing.

I sat Jim in a room, told the journalist to take as long as he wanted, and recorded all 45 minutes on my phone from the back of the room.

Then I told him the full version goes on our YouTube channel if the edit was not fair.

The edit was fair.

A statement is a tab 14 response to a tabs 1 to 13 problem.

The story lives on YouTube, Reddit and Facebook now. Someone searching the brand in seven years still finds it.

On 30 July LinkedIn rolled out a Seems like AI slop option on posts and comments.

A flagged post gets hidden from the person reporting it and shows up less outside the author's own network.

LinkedIn is pulling its own enhance your post tool and putting a proofreader in its place.

AI detection firm Pangram found close to a third of short form LinkedIn content and more than 40% of long form is AI generated.

Highest of any platform they measured.

My take: AI slop is a stupid word overall, AI clearly can write better than most humans and if used tastefully is fine in my opinion. I think it’s cheap way to get training from it’s users, however, it will be abused.

Read the detail here

On 3 August the IAB published Measuring Visibility in the AI Era.

More than 20 companies sell AI visibility measurement.

Each uses its own method. Two of them measure the same brand in the same week and return different answers.

Anything under 50 queries is classed exploratory.

My take: I called AEO and GEO agencies the new SEO scam in May. The trade body has now confirmed nobody agreed on what was being sold. Ask any agency pitching you AI visibility how many queries sit behind their number. It’s all guesswork for now…….

Read the framework here

Joel

PS. Franchisees are using AI to know write emails to franchisors who are now using it to respond, interesting times!

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