Influence without authority
A franchise network partnership I inherited with no training, no awareness, and no leadership buy-in. I had no authority inside their organization either, so every step had to be earned before the next one was possible.
The second bar is the one worth looking at. A contest can buy a spike from almost anyone. Deals that keep arriving after the prize is gone mean the behaviour stuck.
What I walked into
I inherited a partnership with a franchise network. On paper it was a relationship; in practice it was a list of names.
Franchisees had no HubSpot enablement and no training of any kind. Most of them didn’t know what HubSpot was, never mind how to raise it with a client or why that client would care. The ones who did have access were usually on limited instances their corporate office controlled, which capped what they could do with it even if they wanted to. Leadership hadn’t bought in either, for a reason that was hard to argue with: the partnership hadn’t produced anything yet, so why spend their people’s time on it.
I had no authority inside their organization. Every step of this had to be earned before the next one was possible.
Leadership first, franchisees second
The instinct is to go straight to the people doing the work. That would have failed. Without corporate behind it, any training I ran would have been an optional extra competing with everything their franchisees were already being asked to do.
So I made the business case to leadership first, and led with a plan rather than a pitch. Their skepticism was rational and I wasn’t going to talk them out of it. All I could do was show them what the work would look like and what it would take from them.
Working inside their enablement, not beside it
This was the move that made everything after it possible.
Once leadership was listening, I went to their internal enablement team and asked to slot HubSpot training into the onboarding and education structure they already ran. Not a parallel program with my name on it. Theirs, with better content in it.
That changed what I was to them: I stopped being someone asking for extra effort and became someone helping them do a thing they already cared about.
Teaching the part that was missing
Eight webinars across the relationship, built around what franchisees actually needed to know:
- spotting a HubSpot opportunity inside a client conversation
- co-selling best practices
- how and when to bring HubSpot up at all
The bootcamp
Awareness isn’t skill. Knowing HubSpot exists doesn’t help a franchisee work out whether the client in front of them is a fit for it.
So I built a four-week ICP bootcamp from scratch, hands-on, aimed at making franchisees genuinely good at identifying and qualifying opportunities rather than merely aware the option existed. Four cohorts have finished it.
A competition, and the part after it
I wanted one specific behaviour out of franchisees: opening shared deals. So I ran a competition for this partnership where anyone who opened one went into a draw for a seat in the bootcamp with me.
Twelve shared deals came directly out of it.
The number I care about is the ten or so opened since, with no contest running and nothing to win.
The conference
Somewhere between six and twelve months in, they invited me to speak at their global conference, which they hold once every two years. I gave a talk to a full room on spotting HubSpot opportunities and how a franchisee gets started with the partnership.
You can’t ask for an invitation like that. It only happens once enough people inside the organization decide you’re worth their audience’s time.
Where it stands
This network is one of the top-performing partners in my portfolio now. Multiple HubSpot reps have told me, unprompted, that its franchisees communicate better than any partner they deal with.
The part I’d point at is that franchisees open shared deals as standard practice. Not because a contest is running, and not because I’m in the room. The motion runs without me, which was the whole point.