Solutions to the Enigma of Failed Initial Contact With Prospects

By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights

April 15, 2026 – In the first three months of 2026, only 40.2% of individuals submitting inquiries to franchises said they were contacted within seven days by all of the (one or more) franchises they expressed interest in via an inquiry form. These results were from surveys conducted by FranchiseInsights.com from January through March 2026.

In this same period, another 16.6% of prospects said they were contacted by “at least half” of the or or more franchises they submitted inquiries to. 

But surprisingly, those who reported being contacted by “none of the franchise(s)” within seven days after inquiry were 29.0% of the respondents. With an additional 14.2% of respondents reporting contact by “less than half” of franchises they inquired to, that means that about one third of lead generation budgets in the first quarter of 2026 were poorly utilized by some franchise sales teams, assuming that the survey respondents are representative of the total population of prospects.

This is especially concerning given that over 56% of all prospects made inquiries to only one or two franchises from relevant research.

The lost opportunity of low initial contact rates (prospects who say they weren’t contacted within seven days of request) remains a mystery.  The “mystery shopping” survey is directed to prospects from 7-14 days after franchise inquiries are made, so any initial contact efforts made after two weeks are not counted in this analysis.

From January through March 2026, only 40.2% of franchise prospect survey respondents said they were contacted by ALL of the concept(s) that they inquired about.

Why aren’t all prospects approached promptly?  Rather than blaming it all on insufficient effort or inadequate responsiveness of franchise sales teams, here are a few hypotheses:

• Inquiries received outside normal business hours or on weekends are more than two-thirds of all inquiries, making the lag time of different time zones and weekends likely factors in inadequate follow-up. Sending a prompt or automated email and/or text (with proper consent) as a precursor to a voice call is always a best practice, based on consistent respondent feedback from these surveys.
• Mobile phone platforms, in attempting to reduce spam calls, disfavor calls from unfamiliar numbers. Apple’s “silence unknown callers” feature likely hinders many initial voice conversations before the caller is in the prospect’s phone contacts. This again underscores the importance of emailing or texting before calling. In fact, according to Apple, calls will not be silenced from “people that are saved in your contacts list, recent calls list, and from Siri Suggestions to let you know who’s calling based on phone numbers included in your emails or text messages.” These are the “maybe: contact name” caller IDs you see when receiving calls from individuals who are not in your contacts but appear in emails and texts.
• Email service providers (ESPs) are aggressively blocking emails that look like spam or have been reported by users as spam, or from sources that routinely email to abandoned accounts. Purging lists of targets that have not opened emails within 180 days is a good practice, and email hygiene providers will flag bad addresses for you for pennies.

Further, Apple introduced a new call screening option with iOS 26 (September 2025) which answers unknown callers in the background, asks the caller to explain the reason for the call, and then translates that to text so the call recipient can decide whether to pick up or not. 

This underscores the value of an introductory email or text to keep follow-up sales calls out of the “unknown callers” bucket.

It is easy to employ a few simple tactics to improve these results. Make sure that you are implementing best practices for initial prospect contact from years of feedback and benchmarking.

The Mystery Shopping survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise prospects that have submitted inquiries on the Franchise Ventures lead generation platform. The data presented is from January through March 2026.

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.

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Published on Wednesday, April 15th, 2026.