Sizing The Lost Opportunity in Franchise Prospect initial Contact Attempts
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
September 10, 2025 – Over the summer of 2025, one third of individuals submitting inquiries to franchises said they were contacted by all of the franchises they indicated interest in within seven days, as reported by the FranchiseInsights.com “mystery shopping” surveys from June to August 2025.
In this period, another 14.1% of prospects were contacted by “at least half” of the franchises they submitted inquiries to, but most surprisingly, the highest percentage said they were contacted by none of them. Those who reported being contacted by “none of the franchise(s)” within seven days after inquiry stood at 39.1%. With another 13.5% of respondents being contacted by “less than half” of franchises they inquired to, that means that something approaching half of lead generation budgets in this summer were underutilized 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 ultimately inquired about only one or two franchises.
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 one to two weeks after franchise inquiries are made, so any initial contact efforts made after two weeks are not counted in this analysis.
From June through August, 39.1% of franchise prospect survey respondents said they were not contacted by any 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:
- June through August is the busy summer travel season, which makes connections more difficult for all parties.
- Inquiries received outside normal business hours or on weekends are more than two-thirds of all inquiries, making the lag time a likely factor in inadequate follow-up. Sending a prompt or automated email and/or text as a precursor to a voice call is always a best practice, based on consistent respondent feedback from these surveys.
- Apple’s “silence unknown callers” feature introduced in 2019 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.
- 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.
Apple is introducing a new call screening option with iOS 26 (expected mid-September 2025) which can answer unknown callers in the background, ask the caller to explain the reason for the call, and translate that to text so the call recipient can decide whether to pick up or not. Again, this demonstrates the value of an introductory email or text to help to keep sales follow-ups to inquiries 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 June through August 2025 except where specified.
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 Saturday, September 6th, 2025.