Franchise Spotlight with Katherine LeBlanc
Oct 5, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
Doug DeLor of Spherion Staffing and Recruiting and Patrick Conley of Fran Focus join Katherine to map out where AI belongs in the franchise development funnel heading into 2027 — and where it should…
And so tell me when you're talking to brands or thinking about how to implement, what's something that if a brand's not doing today, they really should be doing? You know, it's kind of bottom of the barrel, like the first thing that you should do if you wanted to introduce AI into your FranDev process.
And Patrick, I'll start with you because I know that you've done some of this work already with some of your brands.
That top of funnel is really where we are just taking people in, providing information, providing education, hopefully motivation for them to actually go through the entire process, but also allowing, you know, giving our FranDev folks opportunities a lot more intelligence about who these people are and why they're coming in and what they're actually interested in.
So to Doug's point, AI is great at creating content and is great at being able to track this lead source versus that lead source.
So in my mind, it's the top of the funnel that should be automated and should be repeated time and time again.
And I think that's probably one of the places where a lot of franchisors are failing.
They have their franchise websites, But if that information, if that top of funnel information is not, if you're not going beyond that, if you're not doing more than what AI is doing, people don't really have a reason to visit your franchise website.
They don't have motivation unless you're presenting them with a really amazing lead carrot of some sort that is 42 pages long and gives the whole company history and the last 10 years of FDDs.
There's probably not a lot of motivation for them to actually fill out that form.
And I think that's, as we go into 2027, I think that's probably going to be a big factor for a lot of franchisors is motivation.
Yeah, and let's dig a little bit deeper on that because, you know, when you say top of funnel, tell me more about, like, what's the juxtaposition? What was happening before that should be happening now?
We were saying, okay, if you want to learn more about Franchise X, fill out this form, give us your first name, last name, date of birth, social security number, rights to your firstborn, blah, blah, blah.
And we will send you this eight-page report that we created that tells you about our franchise opportunity.
We know that those summaries, those AI summaries are reducing traffic, click traffic, traffic to your websites that's increasing your cost per lead if you're doing any kind of pay-per-click marketing.
And so tell me when you're talking to brands or thinking about how to implement, what's something that if a brand's not doing today, they really should be doing? You know, it's kind of bottom of the barrel, like the first thing that you should do if you wanted to introduce AI into your FranDev process.
And Patrick, I'll start with you because I know that you've done some of this work already with some of your brands.
That top of funnel is really where we are just taking people in, providing information, providing education, hopefully motivation for them to actually go through the entire process, but also allowing, you know, giving our FranDev folks opportunities a lot more intelligence about who these people are and why they're coming in and what they're actually interested in.
So to Doug's point, AI is great at creating content and is great at being able to track this lead source versus that lead source.
So in my mind, it's the top of the funnel that should be automated and should be repeated time and time again.
And I think that's probably one of the places where a lot of franchisors are failing.
They have their franchise websites, But if that information, if that top of funnel information is not, if you're not going beyond that, if you're not doing more than what AI is doing, people don't really have a reason to visit your franchise website.
They don't have motivation unless you're presenting them with a really amazing lead carrot of some sort that is 42 pages long and gives the whole company history and the last 10 years of FDDs.
There's probably not a lot of motivation for them to actually fill out that form.
And I think that's, as we go into 2027, I think that's probably going to be a big factor for a lot of franchisors is motivation.
Yeah, and let's dig a little bit deeper on that because, you know, when you say top of funnel, tell me more about, like, what's the juxtaposition? What was happening before that should be happening now?
We were saying, okay, if you want to learn more about Franchise X, fill out this form, give us your first name, last name, date of birth, social security number, rights to your firstborn, blah, blah, blah.
And we will send you this eight-page report that we created that tells you about our franchise opportunity.
We know that those summaries, those AI summaries are reducing traffic, click traffic, traffic to your websites that's increasing your cost per lead if you're doing any kind of pay-per-click marketing.
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