Ep. 263 INTERVIEW – Chris Wilson

Every Lead Needs a Task – Stop leads from slipping through your fingers. Certified Franchise Consultant, Chris Wilson, shares his winning lead generation plan.

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Get ready for an unfair advantage over your competition. This is The Sales Edge podcast. Where globally recognized sales expert and trainer Joe Pici helps you sharpen your skills for booking more appointments and closing more deals. And now here’s your host Joe Pici.

Joe Pici (JP):

Hey team what happens when you get across Beckley. Do you know that 92% of leaves never get followed up on today? Going to address that, but we have a special feature. As, you know, we have sell more virtually.com, which part of being a member on there. We have, continuous interviews. Well, everybody who comes on our podcast, we get three or four interviews from. And and number two, three and four gets posted on some more virtually, but as a special feature to you today, we are going to have interview number two with Chris Wilson. I’ll talk to him. About him in a second, but let me first, welcome you to the sales that podcast. I am Jus peachy. I’m your host. This is podcast number 263. We want to thank our sponsors Pici and Pici, which is a speaking coaching training consulting firm specializing in helping our clients recapture lost Revenue in front or Target Market, negotiate higher fees and generally gain an unfair advantage, over the competition and sell more virtually.com. Cam. That’s our membership platform and you’ve got to go there. You got to check it out, consider being a member, but also that ecourse that webinar that free webinar, we’ve been promised you is now posted and you’ll get a lot of value out of that. We want to thank you. We want to thank you for being loyal, just helping us expand. This podcast around the globe more and more downloads. And so thank you so much, but let’s

Talk about Chris Wilson. He was on a couple months ago. He’s back. He is a franchise owner. He is a franchise broker. When it comes to brokering, he matches the right person with the right franchise. So let’s move into that interview with Chris. But hey, Chris, welcome back.

Chris Wilson (CW):

Joe, good to see you.

(JP):

Good to see you. Now. I got a question for you when I look at your resume and I look at your lifestyle and I look at, okay, this guy is Is selling franchises, but he owns multiple franchises himself. And I know the one thing about business that so many times Gets Lost In The Weeds falls through the cracks is follow-up. Follow through. So as a professional, can you share with our audience some of your thoughts on those two topics?

(CW):

And you know, Joel It’s really amazing. That entrepreneurs business owners. We spend a lot of time and or Money Getting leads and then you’d be surprised.
And so, what I found in and because my background is in technology, I try to automate as many things as possible. I think that you need a really good CRM and if this is the first time that you’re hearing, that, it won’t be the last, right? And I, I just think that’s so important to have a collection of all of your leads there. And then one thing that I do is every lead should have a task, right? Whether it’s send an email, send a text to send the call, send all three in the beginning and see who Ooh, ooh, you know, where your client responds and then that’s their level of communication, or that’s where they want to be contacted. So, I think that every lead should have a task, and every time you complete a task set a new task, right? That’s the follow-up part, right? So, you call someone today. Hey, I’m busy. Can you call me back on Tuesday, set a task for Tuesday and call him back on that Tuesday. If they say, I’m not interested right now. Now’s, not a great time. Can you check back next year, set a task for next year, right? It’s really.

Simple and I don’t expect the human person to remember all of that but the CRM well, right? And you wake up in the morning, look at your task list and not now, you know exactly what you need to do.

(JP):

You know, it’s funny because 74 percent of sales professionals Never follow up with an inbound lead, whether your company is paying for it. No matter how they generate an inbound lead. 74 percent of those leads. Never forget. Get approached in any way. It’s funny because month and a half ago. I guide looked at my LinkedIn profile in my LinkedIn profile. And I have a way that I just call them and I called him and I went into my value proposition and he said, Joe, I’d like to talk to you. I’m getting ready to fly to Germany, call me on the 23rd of September at 901 on the 23rd of September. I called him, he goes. How did you do Just be quiet. Now. I will tell you, I went for my value proposition to quote, my core story, which is my initial Discovery sales meeting proposal and within 20 minutes. He signed up for our sales training bootcamp here in Florida. He’s flying in. All right, and the biggest thing that impacted him was response time and follow-up. Absolutely. You know, there’s another statistic 90% of people never follow up after the initial call. Whether somebody answers the phone or not. They never follow up. So

In your business, you’ve got so many different things going on. Okay. Can you tell us how you find your leads for people who want to have a franchise first?

(CW):

So find them a couple different ways. We use paid lead service, who kind of patrols the internet looking for folks, to click on franchise related information and then they send those leads to franchise Brokers, like myself. I have found that
Those leads, you get a lot of Tire kickers, you get a lot of people who are just doing research and may or may not be great business owners or even looking forward to move, but it’s important to get those leads and I enjoy teaching. So, if I can do that through there, that’s awesome. The second part of it, and probably the biggest part for me is through Linkedin. So a lot of outbound conversations contacting people who expressed interest in franchising or just look like they might have some skills that might resonate. Nicely in that area and then just internal Network. As I run these businesses myself, you talk to people who say, hey, that’s interesting. How did you do that? Can you teach me how to do that? And so through those three mechanisms, I get a decent amount of leads and follow up on all of them, like we touched on in the first segment.

(JP):

Now you have access to, you said, 500 franchises. Are you part of an association?

(CW):

Yes. I’m proud of a part of a network called friend, serve and so we train ourselves.
And learning all of the franchises that we represent meeting with the franchisors in person and virtually, of course, talking with people in the network. And that’s really how we handle. I do have some franchises that are not inside that network, but you know, that’s the majority of them for sure.

(JP):

I read an article the other day and franchising used to have a massively successful, just retention rate, success rate. And I read an article that said even franchising is now equaled, two failures in business and used to be a turnkey. You stepping, you do what they tell you to do, you follow their system and you will Win, but now, you know, 90 90 percent of business startups will be gone in eight years and that includes franchises. Why do franchise owners fail?

(CW):

I think the biggest reason that we’re seeing is under capitalization. And so you need to have a decent amount of money to start up the business and sustain it, right? So as with anything I call it the on ramp, right? When you start a business, you know, you’re starting on the ground, kind of like a plane taking off and you need to have
Enough Capital to make sure that you can get some leads in. You can spend money on marketing. You can build out the establishment. If you need it. You can pay your staff or pay a sales team. And so what we’re seeing is for people who are not as capitalized as they would like to be. Those businesses are failing at a higher rate.

(JP):

Do you think they also think it’s going to be easy? Because they think, you know, I have a franchise and and I’m not going to face the typical business challenges.

(CW):

Yeah, so that’s the one thing I tell all of my clients about this is this is business and there’s no guarantees. Right? So anyone who says this is a can’t can’t lose operation. I just run away from them, right, because, right. So and the other part of it is you can have to do some work, right? You’re not just going to just open up your
Some people are going to flood in, you’re going to have to pay for some sales and pay for some marketing and, you know, cultivate those leads as they come in. So you got to be ready to do the work and and it’s not easy. So it’s easier than coming up with your own idea and coming up with your own business model. The business models already set from you. So it’s easy from that perspective, but the reality is, if it was easy, everyone would do it. I don’t know where I heard that quote, but it’s one of my favorites.

(JP):

It’s true. I mean, my experience Because I do some training with some franchise, small medium and large. And when I get to them, when it, when I finally get to the table, their capitalized out, they’ve they spent money on it. The equipment, the product of this two that, but the one question they had not embraced is how you going to get clients. Correct and most franchise owners walk in with an inbound mentality and the franchises I’ve worked with and it’s been very successful is
Having an outbound approach to bringing in client’s, which reduces their advertising budget. I’ve actually gone in with clients. And and I know we have a mutual friend from Lakeland. We actually installed live outbound calls where we bring potential clients in for their discovery, which it’s always and whether it’s a traditional business or franchise, whatever. I think people before they sign, the paper should ask themselves one question. How do I get clients?

(CW):

Yep. Now, that’s a great question Joe because it’s, um, it’s pivotal to your business. If you don’t have clients, you don’t have anything, right? And a lot of times we think that, you know, people like franchising because of the the name recognition and things of that nature, but at the end of the day, you still have to bring you have to do what was done at the national level, in the local level. And outbound is a great way to do that.

(JP):

Yeah, and when a franchise is just starting up that their brand is nothing there. They have no brand that, you know, they might spend money on what they think is branding but you make your brand, you know, and so, you know, it’s funny because until you really start making your business liquid and growing it. Do you become a business? And they think, well, I’m buying this brand, but in essentially, you still have to get clients.

(CW):

Yeah, and the funny thing is, that’s one thing that we look at when we’re doing our consultations and assessing these Brands. Everyone knows that, you pay royalties to franchising or franchise companies. And part of those royalties include ad spend, right, but that ad spend is on a national level, right? So, thanks mer, McDonald’s or Burger King their neck, their advertising nationally. If you have a location here in Orlando, Florida, you may or may not benefit from that national campaign and you need to have a line item for some local marketing and
From that national campaign and you need to have a line item for some local marketing and local sales as I think. A lot of people miss that Mark. And it’s one of the things that we go over with our clients.

(JP):

Yeah, because, you know, yeah, it’s called home field advantage that, you know, and, and you can have the greatest International brand talking about, you know, like Subway or any of those. Do, you know, McDonald’s Burger King, but at it at the local level, are you part of the community? Correct people, you know do it people see you out and about. Are you growing your local brand right. Now? You’re spot on Joe. I can tell you’ve done this for a while. Well, I look at every business through the sales. I I don’t care how good your product or service is. It doesn’t sell itself. And the reason for that is we are in a competitive world. My wife and I one night. My wife likes to go on the History Channel and she was looking. At the, The evolution of the food industry, okay, Hershey and and Hines, and what a competitive, Cutthroat world. That was when these guys were trying to be number one and just survive competition. Right? Well, you got competition right down the street from you. Absolutely. So when you find that you have a person, tell me something about a Discovery day that you might, you might do for a potential client looking to buy a franchise that you’re representing.

(CW):

So, one of the things that we try to do and you kind of just touched on it is to forget about the product or service and focus on the business model. How do they make money, right? Because that’s what’s important, and if the business model is solid, then you can worry about the product or service later. So we put the business model up front in Discovery days. What we try to do is get as much information from the franchise company as Do a discovery day. I think the bigger Port is the validation, right? The franchise company is trying to sell you something. We need to validate that what we found out in Discovery day is true. And so that’s where another area that I help my clients.

(JP):

And so now we’re going to put Chris on the hot seat. He’s a wealth of information, highly successful, but you know, you’re not born successful. So Chris the question. I want to pose to you today. What is that one thing? You wish you would have known the for you. You got into business before when you went from Corporate America and you started facing and what is the one thing you wish you would have known before you open, your first store that had you known it, you would have been more successful quicker with less challenges.

(CW):

I think the one thing that I take, when I look back at my career and this journey is it’s not going to be perfect. But do it anyway. And I think that sometimes we just, you know, this is a life lesson, right? So, whether it’s about weight loss, or wherever you are in your health Journey, we come up with reasons why we can’t do it. Why we shouldn’t start. We’ll start tomorrow. I’m it sometimes you just have to jump in and and figure it out, you know or jump out and build the plane on the way down. I heard someone say that one day. So the one thing I would take away is that it’s not going to be perfect. But if you can rely on your skills and have a pretty good Network, you can figure it out.

(JP):

Whether you are a person that’s looking for that plan B that other opportunity of income stream or whether you like to go to his Pilates studio to work out. Out or go to his chicken and waffle two games. My all right, Chris tell them how they can reach you.

(CW):

So it’s so the easiest way is to fill out the contact us form on our website. So it’s www.legacyFV.com or you can call or text to office at 689-244-1914.

(JP):

So team that was a great interview, but now two things Global Guru Dot org voting is up. If you would just help us, if you could go to Global gurus dot-org, go to the voting section, get to the sales. And please give Joe Pici a vote and then go over to the workshops and vote for the peachy. Peachy Rapport Mastery sales program. We would appreciate it. We thank you for all of your help over the past four years, but then sell more virtually.com do. Dawn, peachy has created produced edited uploaded and has launched this free webinar. So, if you right now, you can take out your phone and put sales edged in and send the five, five, six, seven, eight, and then we’ll take it to Pichi. Pichi link over to the splash page. That literally the first thing you’re going to see is to free course, 9 Essentials of sales success, or you can go right To to sell more virtually.com website, and it’s the first thing that’s going to pop up. I recommend you go there, take advantage of it. This is going to give you an unfair advantage over your competition. Thanks a lot.

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