Franchise Broker Market 101: What You Need to Know and Why You Should Care

FranchiseHelp has historically helped prospective business owners in a simple way:

Quickly build their franchise ownership profile, then present them with a personalized set of franchises they could open. Our portal’s proprietary filtering system via the online quiz is industry leading.

We’ve produced hundreds of thousands of high value leads through our savvy, tech based lead generation system, from the brains of the top engineers in franchising.

This works great for branded lead generation, but once you introduce brokers into the equation it gets messy.

Separating the Branded and Lead Flows

Originally FranchiseHelp sold leads to brokers the same way most other portals do, which is to allow them to buy leads for a brand (or brands). This meant that when a potential franchisee requested information on a brand they were interested in, they had no way to know if instead of hearing from a brand representative directly, they might hear from a broker instead.

This setup wasn’t ideal for the user, and it wasn’t ideal for the brand or brokers either!

Now, brokers have an important role to play in franchise sales, and we know that some buyers prefer to work with a broker. There were certainly plenty of users who completed the quiz on FranchiseHelp, but in the end never picked any brands they were interested in speaking to. Might those users benefit from the expertise of a franchise broker to aid in their brand selection?

As a tech startup, we saw an opportunity to find out.

At first, we added a quiz question just to see if the interest was there. “Would you like a free consultation with a franchise expert?” It turns out, yes, many people do want to speak to a consultant.

Once we knew the interest was there, we set up a new type of lead that would be specific to brokers: generic leads. Generic leads were just leads where there was no brand. They still had a verified phone number, email, capital, and they still just requested info on our site.

Because one of the problems we wanted to fix was brands and brokers having to compete to call the same lead (not to mention the lead being inundated with calls from both), we decided to only sell a generic lead to a broker if that user didn’t submit for any brands. In this way, the branded and broker lead markets were separated.

Leading With Transparency

At FranchiseHelp, we believe strongly in transparency. Users who request information on a brand should receive information from that brand, not from a broker. As a brand, you should be the only one who can buy leads for your brand. You shouldn’t have to compete with brokers to call your leads first. Brokers should be able to buy leads who specifically want to talk to them, not leads who thought they were going to talk to a brand.

That’s what inspired us to become the only lead portal with a separate broker market. We wanted to offer two forms of the same machine working for the two major types of lead buyers in the franchise space, brands and brokers.

Today, BrokerHelp has evolved into a critical part of our business. FranchiseHelp offers franchise brokers a unique lead buying experience. To learn more about it, click here!

In part 2, we’ll talk more about how our existing technology accidentally created an auction system for the broker market.