Do Business Well

A contact plan describes in specific detail how you will contact prospects and customers over a period of time to meet your specific goals. Each contact plan should contain the following sections:

A Written Contact Strategy

Your contact strategy spells out your goals and describes how ongoing customer communication will be used to meet those goals. When thinking about your contact strategy, be sure to consider the online service imperative. What are you going to offer your existing and prospective customers in exchange for giving you permission to contact them? When Wegmans Food Markets developed its contact strategy, it focused on extending the service and customer-oriented approach that you’ll find in its retail stores to email communication. It has developed a contact strategy that is focused more on delivering relevant content and information than on selling. Its goal is to ensure that it provides its customers with notification of special produce, recipes, health tips, and more in order to simplify their grocery shopping and food preparation tasks. Continue Reading »

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A variation of outdoor advertising would be your own signsand window displays. If you expect to attract traffic because of your store’s location, buy the biggest, boldest sign you can afford (and that the law will allow). If you have a window display, spend some real time and effort making it attractive and interesting. Don’t be afraid to make your window display a bit weird. You want to attract attention! Otherwise, why spend the extra money on that greatlocation?

Mailings. Among the least expensive ways (even in the daysof ever-increasing postal rates) of reaching your specific customer with a very specific message is the mail. You can buy lists of prospects broken out by almost any criterion you can imagine. It may seem farfetched, but you should be able to buy a list of all the single folks between the ages of twenty and forty, with above-average incomes, in the five closest zip codes to your business. Look for sellers of such lists in the Yellow Pages under “Mailing Lists.” Continue Reading »

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It is not at all unusual for newcomers to franchising to go into a state of shock when they first realise the complexity of a typical franchise t agreement. But whilst efforts to draft franchise agreements in plain English, thereby enhancing their user-friendliness, are laudable, attempts to keep them “short and sweet” are generally doomed to failure. The reason for this is that unlike other legal agreements that will deal with one specific transaction, a franchise agreement has to cover an entire portfolio of commercial arrangements of varying complexity that may appear to be almost unrelated, yet, by virtue of the fact that they are part of one specific franchise arrangement, they are in fact closely intertwined.

To illustrate this point, let us look at just one of the areas that are dealt with in a typical franchise agreement, namely the grant of the franchise.

The Grant

A franchise is granted, never sold. Typically, franchisees will be licensed to operate one unit of the franchise, either at a specific address or within a clearly defined territory, using the system’s brand name(s) and corporate mage, sometimes known as the get-up, as well as its know-how as described in the franchise agreement and the operations and procedures manual. Continue Reading »

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