Has A Franchise Candidate Ghosted You? Here’s Why, And What To Do Next

Rejection is a daily struggle for anyone who works in franchise development.

Imagine how many of your franchise candidates, who seemed like they’d make solid owners at first, suddenly disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be reconnected with again.

Probably too many to count, right?

You’re not alone. Ghosting, a term that has been officially added to the dictionary, is the practice of suddenly ending all contact with a person without explanation. It’s most common in romantic relationships, but it happens in business equally as often. 

And in my experience, it can be all the more devastating when it’s in a professional context, as there are potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line.

Today we’ll talk about why ghosting happens in franchising, along with tips on what to do next.

Motivations for ghosting franchisors

After you’ve had a great initial conversation with an excellent franchise candidate, it’s hard not to get excited about the possibility of closing a deal. Especially if that person meets all of your brand’s capital criteria, has strong chemistry within your team, reads over your FDD, and so on. One would think all that’s left to do is iron out a few details and get things wrapped up.

Yes, one would think. 

But then that candidate stops taking your calls, answering your emails, blocking your texts, and so on.

Wow, was it something you said? Something in your teeth? Why all the radio silence?

Well, before you start beating yourself up, or call The Ghostbusters, consider the top ten most common motivations for ghosting in franchising:

• Fear: They got cold feet after one call when things got a little too real
• Power: They didn’t tell you they didn’t have decision making authority
• Avoidance: They don’t like conflict and didn’t want to reject you
• Diligence: They did some digging and got turned off by a negative brand review
• Incident: They became ill, had a death in the family or some other traumatic event
• Value: They couldn’t reconcile their capital output within your value proposition
• Support: They weren’t able to gain the sponsorship of their family or partner or colleagues
• Timing: They contacted you too early in their buying process and felt rushed
• Options: They chose a competitor’s franchise instead, and didn't want to disappoint you
• Service: They simply weren’t blown away by your response time, product fit or franchise opportunity

Now, there’s rarely a clean answer for ghosting, but considering all the above possibilities might help you be kinder to yourself, and enable you to take action on your franchise’s behalf to approach your candidate more strategically down the road.

Following up with value, compassion and clarity

Here are a collection of franchise sales tactics that are specifically useful for candidates who have ghosted you. Each one includes an explanation, along with sample copy you can use on your email, text, skywriting campaign or carrier pigeon scroll:

1. Lost In The Shuffle: If your emails have been ignored, simply forward your most recent message to the potential franchisee and include contextual language like this to show that you appreciate how busy they are:

“Hey Dan! Did my last email come through? I hadn’t heard back from you in a few weeks, and I know sometimes these messages can fall through the digital cracks. See below. Thanks!”

2. Switching Sponsors: If there are other coworkers, colleagues and partners who are involved in the franchise search beside you main point person, reach out to them. You might write:

“Hey Dan! I’ve chatted with your partner, Charlie, several times about opening a Knockoutz Boxing Franchise, but I’m having trouble reconnecting after we sent our FDD. Can you help me out with this?”

3. Value Forward Creativity: If you want to stand out from all the other franchise development teams trying to close your candidate, go create something. Find a way to blog about your candidate’s story, background or current employer, and appeal to their ego:

“Hey Dan! I blogged about you today. After our last conversation, I was inspired by your story of training with Rocky Balboa, so I wrote an article about lessons learned from your perseverance. Thanks for the inspiration, here’s a link to the post. We’ll share on social media as well. You sure do have the eye of the tiger!”

4. Multiple Choice Test: Another approach is to make it easy for them to tell you what the holdup is, which shows your empathy and mastery of the sales process. You could write something like this:

“Hey Dan! We’d still love to talk to you about opening a Knockouts Boxing Franchise, but hadn’t heard back from you in a while. I understand how busy you must be, so I wanted to make this super easy for you. My guess is, one of five things is going on:

a. You decided to move forward with another franchise opportunity
b. You no longer desire to open your own business
c. You’re taking a vacation and are chilling on the beach right now
d. You’ve been swamped and haven’t had the time to read our FDD
3. You’re annoyed with me and might punch me through the phone if I persist

Simply reply to this email with the one that applies to you, that would be much appreciated.”

Any of these tactics are more effective than writing a resentful, passive aggressive note to your candidate about how they inconvenienced you by declining the invitation. Sometimes you simply have to accept that something outside of your control might be going on in that person’s life, do what you can do to reconnect, and then move on.

Just remember, if you know in your heart that you're selling a valuable franchise and this interaction is not a reflection of you or your brand’s value, then you won’t feel rejected, abandoned and insulted.

It’s just part of franchise development, part of business, and part of life.

Giving up the ghost in franchising

Now that you understand ghosting, and learned several tactics to handle franchise candidates who pull the old disappearing act, here’ one final recommendation:

Approach the sales process in a way to avoid triggering the ghosting response in the first place.

There are many systems you can put in place so that following up with candidates in the franchise search is fast, easy, clear and tech forward. One recommendation is to install text messaging automation through your franchising portal.

Our sister company, FranFunnel, is the industry’s premiere text messaging platform, and they’ve written a helpful post on this topic. Learn about how well their product works to eliminate the ghosting response, namely through their blog post, COVID Changed People’s Relationships With Their Phones. Is Your Sales Team Adapting?

The other recommendation we make to all of our franchise brands is to use proven lead conversion tools you can plug into your existing website, to help you convert more of your existing high quality traffic into high quality franchise prospects.

Check out our recent post called How Much (More) Money Could You Make By Improving Your Franchise Website? Learn several strategic questions to ask your marketing team to make sure candidates ghosting you becomes a thing of the past.

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Ultimately, navigating the franchise sales process can be frustrating and often takes longer than you’d like it too. Purchasing an entire business involves many steps that can take months or even years, so make sure you put yourself in the candidates shoes.

Next time you get ghosted, understand that many forces are probably in play, some of which have nothing to do with you, and follow up accordingly.

The candidate’s motivation might not be as spooky as you think.

Scott Ginsberg is Head of Content at FranchiseHelp. His favorite character in Ghostbusters is Vinz Clortho, Keymaster of Gozer.