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There is a tornado ripping through the franchise industry, yet few are willing to address it. Pardon my language, but selling franchises is f***king hard. Let me explain. In a good economy, buyers sit on the sidelines longer. Why? The majority of buyers are middle managers—those who may not make it to the c-suite, are frustrated in their roles and are saving a little money. The middle manager (no offense) doesn’t take as many risks as c-level. They just don’t.

Work smarter, not harder, when reaching out to prospective leads. You have heard it once, twice and a hundred times—“those leads are garbage, they never return calls”. Maybe. But, what if that’s not the case? What if they have a job? Think they will answer their call at work and entertain a new business opportunity? Think again. Also, don’t dismiss them as dead leads. We have started putting a time (or Calendly) on the form to connect. This way, the prospect remains in charge.

With more options available to them than ever, the competition to capture the attention of quality leads is becoming increasingly difficult. If I was given a dollar every time I was asked what is new and working in franchising, I would have enough money to buy my own franchise. Truth is that while some of the fundamentals of how you fish for prospects have changed, much of the foundation has not.

How to build and maintain a thriving franchisee pipeline. That headline, my friends, is called clickbait. If you clicked through hoping to find the magic answer to your franchise-lead woes, then you may still have a thing or two to learn about navigating the internet. There’s no one secret to getting quality leads, of course.

Businesses should remember that landing a sale isn’t about finishing; it’s about starting a journey. Shame on business. We celebrate the sale more than we do the work, the journey, and the relationship. Want to know why client turnover exists? It’s exactly because of this model—the model in which the celebration lives and dies with the sale, versus the journey. This is short-term thinking—when really, the sale is just the beginning. I think about this as it relates to our business.

Why scaling back your budget can hurt the future of your brand. We are conditioned to think that when things get tough, the best move is to scale back. We are also conditioned to believe that if you are not growing, you are dying. Both ideas, in my opinion, are wrongheaded. Usually, the second idea creates a need to scale back the budget. Sales get turbulent, budgets get slashed.

As an emerging brand in 2013, Mosquito Joe didn’t have an especially sexy product or any big celebrity endorsements, but it hit first and it hit often when it came to marketing their franchisees. The leadership team at Mosquito Joe, a 335-plus-unit mobile pest control franchise backed by multi-brand franchisor Neighborly, knew from the beginning that to get any bites on franchise sales, they would have to create buzz.