Feedback from Prospects on The Franchise Sales Process
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
July 2, 2025 – Individuals submitting inquiries about franchises were mostly satisfied with their experiences, according to franchise prospect surveys over the five months ending in June 2025. Almost half (44.4%) said they were either “satisfied “or “very satisfied”, and only 22.2% said they were “unsatisfied or very unsatisfied.”
Of respondents, 44.4% said they were “satisfied or very satisfied” with the sales process.
But the 22.2% who provided negative responses – and the 33.3% who were neither satisfied or dissatisfied – suggest that there is potential room for improvement among almost 56% of respondents.
An analysis and categorization of five months of suggestions on that question yielded action items consistent with prior surveys if you have been following the “Mystery Shopping” results and franchise lead generation best practices from FranchiseInsights.com over the years.
About 42% of respondents provided unstructured comments which were categorized into buckets of specific suggestions. Over a third (35.5%) of those with suggestions made either positive or neutral comments about their experiences. For example:
One prospect says “Honestly I think you guys all did a very wonderful job so [I offer] nothing to improve. [You] did give me a lot to think about so I want to say thank you for that…”
Almost 11% had comments about representatives not showing up, or showing up late for calls, or reported that they were just never contacted, collected as “more timely follow up.”. This is similar to the 9.3% in our last summary in September 2024. While lack of proper follow up is hard to explain as a business practice, this is consistent with our most recent surveys showing that about 13.2% of inquiries receive no follow up within seven days and only about 60.4% are contacted by all the franchises they inquired about within that same window.
Another 16.2% expressed concerns about the sequence and timing of calls. About 5.4% got calls immediately before receiving any information by email or text, and expressed their preference that they have the time to do a bit of research and prepare themselves before a call, cited by another 10.8%. We regularly repeat this suggestion from years of survey data showing the effectiveness of emailing before calling. This behavior is underscored in the significant share of prospects who go on to visit franchisor’s websites right after inquiring at a franchise directory site because they “wanted to learn more” or “prepare before a call.”
Another 8.1% had their own personal reasons for suspending the search – family issues, concerns about the economy, or personal finances, which we bucketed into “it’s me, not you.”
There were a number of responses relating to the topic of sales pressure. Not “pushing so hard in the early stages”(10.8%), and ‘just wanting information for now “(5.4%) are two examples which either point to the readiness of the prospect or sales pressure. Franchise sales teams have to come to their own conclusions about what level of sales pressure is appropriate for their offering and the stage of the prospect in the sales process.
Another 10-15% of the pie in aggregate saw inconsistencies for required launch capital between what they saw on the internet and later gleaned from the franchise representative (5.4%), or didn’t receive the level of financial detail they were looking for concerning the financial requirements (2.7%), and steps to launching the franchise (2.7%).
Says another prospect “I think a lot of entrepreneurs want initial information and don’t want to be constantly contacted through repeated emails, phone calls, or texts. I think some of the businesses have it right with a webinar or page with videos to answer questions with the ability to invest more time to get more serious about the franchise.”
Note that “N/A” responses were interpreted as neutral (neither bad nor good), and not included in this analysis.
The Franchise Insights monthly “Mystery Shopping” survey collects responses from individuals who have recently inquired about businesses or franchises for sale on the digital assets of the FranchiseVentures lead generation platform.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
Interested in more insights from our proprietary data set? Subscribe here to make sure you hear about them first.
Contact Franchise Ventures to get your share of today’s aspiring franchise owners.
Published on Tuesday, July 1st, 2025.