Lead Gen 2015: Sport Clips Moving to Geo-Targeting

We asked Pete Lindsey, Vice President of Franchising at Sport Clips, what changes he's planning for the brand's lead generation practices in 2015. Here's what he had to say.

Lead generation is an area of constant change, and identifying new opportunities remains the most critical challenge in franchise development. As Sport Clips has been successful in our development efforts, we are migrating from a national lead generation strategy to a geo-targeted approach. In many cases, this can be more expensive and complicated.

As a consequence, we are significantly adjusting how we test going into 2015.

Our objective is very specific: we need to know that we have done everything we can to maximize the opportunity of a lead source before determining whether a test was a success. Goal-setting is conducted so all parties are on the same page. Monitoring is critical and is established and agreed to by all parties up front.

We will have a rule going into 2015 that tests will be limited to a period of 90 days. If the test is going well, we will extend it; if not, we will move on to another opportunity. We "optimize" our tests frequently as we work with the testing partners to make sure we are reacting properly to the result coming in. If we are working on a campaign and we are not seeing the result, we may need to look at our messaging or consider changing the target demographic to get a better return.

During tests, monitoring is conducted daily. This sends a message that we are looking for results and are willing to work in any way to get to the goal. You have to get into the detail. If the vendor/partner we are working with has a call center to qualify the lead, we want to speak with those in the call center to understand how they will represent us, and how we can provide them insight about Sport Clips so they can be more effective. We will make sure that their representatives have a direct contact at Sport Clips who they can call at any time for assistance. The bottom line is that the more we align in execution, the more likely we will achieve our goals.

At Sport Clips, it will be critical that we enhance our tests going into 2015. My goal is to not second-guess after the test in saying, "We should have tried this." At the same time, it is important to identify the learning from any test conducted and apply the intelligence going forward.