Mystery Shop Your Sales Force

Most franchisors make a $100,000 investment in each franchise salesperson they hire.  If they are lucky, their investment will yield 12-20 franchise sales per year. And each franchise can yield a lifetime of royalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  So just one extra franchise per salesperson can mean $50,000 or more in the first year, with royalties, advertising, and purchases for years thereafter. The present value of one extra franchise sale can easily exceed $500,000.

Moreover, one franchise salesperson who does not know what they are doing can easily create havoc within the system.  Selling franchises to unqualified franchisees can cause the franchisor years of grief and potential litigation.  And one franchise lawsuit caused by misrepresentations can easily erase years of profitability. 

By mystery shopping your sales force, not only are you potentially increasing your ability to sell franchises, but you can potentially uncover problems before they occur.  And the mere fact that you have mystery shopped your sales force can help you to mitigate damages in a lawsuit by demonstrating that you took measures to ensure proper compliance and accurate representation.

The iFranchise Group recommends that major franchisors mystery shop their franchise sales forces approximately once per year, and that smaller operations do so less frequently, to demonstrate this commitment to accuracy in the sales process and account for salesperson turnover.

Mystery shopping your sales force will help you:

• Ensure compliance
• Check sales force follow-up
• Refine sales techniques
• Improve closing percentages
• Ensure that only qualified franchisees are targeted
• Ensure that you are not making illegal earnings claims or misrepresentations
• Build a defense should you ever find yourself in litigation

The iFranchise Group offers two different types of mystery shopping services: Covert and Overt. 

Overt mystery shopping compresses the process into about three to four weeks by allowing the franchise salesperson to compress weeks into days.  In overt mystery shopping, the salesperson is aware that the caller is a mystery shopper.  Thus, Overt Mystery Shopping is best when the overriding concern is improving franchise sales as quickly as possible.

Covert Mystery Shopping, on the other hand, will typically be done without identifying ourselves as mystery shoppers, and will thus take between 12 and15 weeks to complete.

Call us today at 708-957-2300 to learn how we can assist you with this service.