Cameron Herold shares a 40-year-old tactic from College Pro Painters: when presenting a 65-page franchise agreement, create a FAQ answering the ten most common legal questions upfront. By surfacing objections before prospects read the document, you guide their thinking and speed up agreement.
Chapters
One of the really impactful lessons that I learned when negotiating contracts or putting legal agreements in front of somebody, I learned 40 years ago at College Pro Painters. The reality is anytime you put a legal agreement in front of someone, they're going to have questions. Back at College Pro, we would put a 65-page franchise agreement in front of these students who were inevitably going to take that franchise agreement home to their parents. Their parents were going to get nervous. Their parents were going to send it off to some lawyer who'd never looked at a franchise agreement before. So what we did was we realized that pretty much everyone looking at the franchise agreement had the normal 10 questions. So when we sent the agreement to them, we said, hey, before you read the agreement, here are the 10 big questions you're going to have. So basically we gave them the questions that we knew that they were going to ask, and then we gave them the answers to those legal questions that they were probably going to have. The really important part of this is you're showing the person the objections they're going to have, and you're bringing up the objections before they have them, and then you're helping them answer those objections before they even have them. It's like my friend Joe Polish says, you want to enter the conversation that the person is already having in their own mind.
