Recently, I attended an event at Dairy Queen’s headquarters.
The Women's Franchise Network Twin Cities hosted an event there, and we got a rare look at how new products actually get built. A cross-functional panel walked us through the whole process, from the first spark of an idea to a menu item hitting locations across the country.
It's far more complex than most people expect.
A new product idea can come from anywhere. Marketing. A franchisee suggestion. A social trend. Product R&D. But getting from idea to menu means touching legal, sourcing, product development, operations, and marketing. Every single function has a role. Every single aspect has to work.
And one of the biggest challenges? Creating a product that can be replicated consistently at thousands of different locations. It’s the very essence of a franchise brand.
People assume franchising means "copy and paste." DQ reminded me that the “copying” takes an enormous amount of aligned effort to get it right. It only works when the right people are pointed at the same goal.
A former client of ours learned that lesson the hard way.
They brought us in to implement a CRM and build out their revenue operating system. Both teams worked hard and put in time and effort, the investment was real, and most of the team showed up for it. Marketing got on board. Other functions engaged. The project was completed. Denamico delivered what we were hired to do.
But the sales leader, who'd been made the primary point of contact for the project, never got on board. Not really. He wanted to keep doing things the old way, where leads came in and no one tracked what happened next. Accountability into activity and outcomes wasn't something he was interested in.
Here's what that looked like in practice: he kept finding fault with ‘the system.’ Everyone else on the sales team watched their manager. And they took their cue from him.
The system was there. His input helped design it. The training happened. But the sales team never fully adopted it, because the person who was supposed to champion the project was the one quietly working against it.
Nobody on the rest of the team was going to move past their manager.
The project didn't fail. But it never produced what it could have. And that's a different kind of hard to sit with.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions, Marcus Sheridan put a name to exactly this pattern.
Marcus built River Pools into the most highly trafficked swimming pool website in the world during the 2008 recession, went on to franchise it, and has spent the last decade helping franchisors and multi-location businesses think about what modern buyers actually need. He's also watching AI reshape search and lead generation in real time through his companies PriceGuide and AI Trust Signals.
When asked about franchisors who resist adopting new tools, Marcus described sitting across the table from two private equity-owned home improvement franchises in the same week. Both heard the same pitch. Both saw the same data about the potential impact and huge ROI. The cost per franchisee: $25 a month.
One team said, "We'd be crazy not to do this. Let's just roll it in."
The other said, "I'm not sure how we'll get buy-in. I'm not sure how we'll cover the cost."
Same industry. Same data. Same price. Different leadership.
Marcus was clear: the job of a franchisor isn't to wait until everyone's comfortable. It's to get clear on what needs to happen, then do the work of bringing people along. You lead from the front. You mandate when you have to. And then you commit to the adoption, because the decision alone doesn't get you there.
"If you're not pissing off your franchisees sometimes," he said, "you're not innovating like you should."
The real failure in both stories isn't a tool problem or a timing problem.
It's a people problem.
At DQ, they put the right people in the room and built something that works at scale. At our former client, someone put the wrong person in charge of a cross-functional initiative, and no one addressed it when it became clear he was working against the goal.
In Marcus's comparison, one leadership team got clear and moved. The other let the fear of pushback make the decision for them.
Every system, every rollout, every initiative you're trying to move through your organization will hit this point. Someone will resist. That's not a surprise. The question is whether that person is in a seat where their resistance caps everyone else.
Leaders set the ceiling for their teams. If the person you put in charge doesn't want the outcome you're after, no one below them will get there either.
This is the work we do with franchise brands and multi-location businesses every day at Denamico. Not just the implementation, but helping leadership teams think through who owns it, who has to be bought in before go-live, and where the resistance is likely to surface before it quietly costs you the whole project.
We've helped brands roll this out across hundreds of locations. The technology is rarely the hard part.
If you're planning a CRM rollout or Revenue Operating System implementation and want to talk through the leadership alignment piece before you start, I'd love to connect. There's a link below to grab some time.
Cheers to leading from the front and doing the work to bring people with you,
Kristin
 |
Kristin Dennewill
|