FranQuest provides highly professional and responsive processing of initial inquiries received from prospective franchises by our franchisor customers.

Our role is screening these inquiries to determine which ones appear to meet the minimum qualification requirements set by the franchisor.

We use highly trained, experienced qualification specialists to conduct this screening.

They rapidly reach out to each inquiry via phone and email, to achieve three tasks:

Inquiry Response
First of all, we clearly identify that we are responding to the inquiry that they made to your franchise, so they know why we are contacting them and that FranQuest is a service company hired by the franchisor to do this initial contact work. All email communication contains the logo of both the franchisor and FranQuest and also clearly identifies that we are responding to their request. The initial call usually involves about 5-10 minutes of general conversation to establish rapport and learn a little about the person making the inquiry.
Background Questionnaire
Second, at the end of this initial conversation we explain that the first step to determining if this franchise is the right one for the person making the inquiry is for them to take 15-20 minutes to fill out a background questionnaire, which includes basic financial information. If the person making the inquiry would like to proceed further, we send them a link to a unique and secure web site which has a header containing both the Franchisor and the FranQuest logos. This web site contains the questionnaire for this person to complete. Upon receipt of the questionnaire, our qualification specialist determines whether the inquiry meets the minimum qualification standards set by the franchisor.
Forward Qualified Leads
After this determination is made, we contact the person making the inquiry again. If minimum qualification standards were met, we explain that an executive from the franchise company will be contacting them shortly to proceed with the investigation. If minimum standards were not met, we explain the deficit, show them appreciation for their inquiry and treat them in a responsive and professional manner as they are politely steered away from this franchise opportunity.

We are very attentive to the importance of reaching these people quickly. Our standard is that within one business day after receiving the inquiry we will make at least two attempts via phone and two attempts via email to reach the person making the inquiry. If they don’t respond after that level of effort, we send them a final “close your file” email thanking them for their interest and leaving the ball back in their court to contact us if they are interested.

An added benefit to using FranQuest for this initial processing is that our focus and rapid response, enabled because we don’t have any other distractions vying for our time, often result in a significantly higher percentage of inquiries moving past this initial phase and into qualified candidate status. That invariably leads to more new franchisees being added because more qualified prospects move forward in the process to interact with the franchisor’s sales staff.

During our interaction with the person making the inquiry, we do not answer specific questions about the franchise and we do not deliver any sales materials, FDDs or other detailed information about the franchise opportunity. We defer all such questions to the franchisor’s sales staff. Our role is simply to determine if the inquiry appears to meet the initial screening requirements of the franchise and then forward any such inquiry to the franchisor for further communication.

Service Set Up

The process of getting set up to use the FranQuest system is pretty simple. There are three things that need to be done:

1. Information Exchanges.

As much as possible we need to automate the process of receiving the inquiries from the franchisor and then sending back qualified leads with their completed questionnaires – all in real time. Most franchise leads are received by the franchisor via their web site and/or online advertising portals and it is relatively easy to automatically redirect the delivery of these inquiries to FranQuest in real time. Inquiries received by phone, email or other communication vehicle are addressed by a forwarding system that we establish together. Qualified leads with questionnaires are also easy to forward electronically and we establish the protocols for this transfer with the franchisor.

2. Minimum Qualification Requirements.

Each franchisor we work with needs to establish their own minimum qualification requirements a person must meet in order to be allowed to move forward in the process of investigation. These are usually expressed as monetary factors (like liquidity and net worth minimums) and other objective factors such as experience or licensing requirements.

3. Communication and Script Approvals.

After receiving the franchisor’s logo, we set up a unique communication system for our work with the company’s inquiries. Though the basic call scripts, email and web site verbiage are quite similar from franchise to franchise, we do ask each company to review the communication tools we use to make sure that they are comfortable with exactly how we handle each step in the process.