Scaling Franchise Growth: Why Lead Generation Alone Isn’t Enough
At Franchise Ventures, we work with brands that are focused on scaling growth across multiple locations, where marketing success depends not just on generating leads, but on how those leads turn into real business outcomes.
We sat down with Joe Yakuel, founder and CEO of WITHIN, a leading creative and marketing agency. WITHIN helps brands like The North Face, Foot Locker, and Ben & Jerry’s connect marketing efforts to measurable business results across channels and markets.
In this conversation, Joe shares how franchise brands should think about lead quality, measurement, and building marketing systems that scale consistently across locations.
What makes marketing for franchise or multi-location brands different from traditional ecommerce or DTC brands?
Joe Yakuel: You’re not just responsible for generating demand, you’re responsible for how that demand gets handled.
In DTC, everything happens in one place. Same site, same experience, same conversion path. If something isn’t working, you can usually identify it and fix it.
In a franchise model, that’s not the case. The same campaign can drive very different results depending on what happens after the lead comes in. How quickly someone follows up, how the conversation goes, whether the experience matches what was promised.
That means marketing doesn’t really stop at the lead. You have to think about what happens next.
How do you balance national brand consistency with local market needs across franchise locations?
Joe Yakuel: You standardize what matters and leave the rest flexible.
What needs to be consistent is the core offer and the type of customer you’re trying to attract. If that’s clear, you can run the same approach across markets and expect similar results.
Where you want flexibility is in how that shows up. Different markets respond to different messaging, different channels, and different timing. If you lock down the “who” and the “what,” you can be flexible on the “how.”
How should franchise brands think about measuring marketing performance beyond just cost per lead?
Joe Yakuel: You have to look at what happens after the lead comes in, not just how much it cost to get it. Cost per lead can look great on paper, but it doesn’t tell you if those leads turn into anything. The real question is how many of those leads actually become customers.
Where it gets tricky in a franchise model is that performance can vary a lot by location. The same campaign might work well in one market and fall apart in another, depending on how leads are handled.
So instead of just asking “what did this lead cost,” you need to ask “what did it turn into, and where did it fall off?” That’s how you start to see if the issue is the marketing, the follow-up, or something happening at the location level.
What’s the risk of over-optimizing for short-term lead generation?
Joe Yakuel: You create a pipeline that looks full but doesn’t convert.
In the short term, optimizing for lead volume works. Costs go down, numbers go up. But the leads coming in are less qualified, which creates more work for the sales team and leads to lower conversion.
What usually happens is the team ends up spending time chasing people who were never a good fit in the first place. Follow-up takes longer, response rates drop, and it becomes harder to tell which leads are actually worth prioritizing. So even though volume is up, efficiency goes down. You’re putting in more effort to get the same result, or worse.
That’s where things start to break. Not because there aren’t enough leads, but because the pipeline is filled with the wrong ones.
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, June 10th, 2026.