Franchise marketing hinges on strategic advertising that often comes at an exorbitant cost with lackluster results. Two franchise entrepreneurs, David Stein and Kylon Gustin, founded Sales Chatz and are disrupting the industry with the first and only AI platform in the franchising space.
The co-founders are taking digital advertising to the next level with aiADZ, a platform that optimizes advertising performance with proprietary AI. “We’ve been to many franchise trade shows and have spoken to numerous industry leaders,” said Stein. “What we discovered is everyone is talking on the sidelines about franchise AI, but no one is doing it. We focused on integrating AI to provide our clients with an additional tool to solve their problems and grow.”
With more than 30 years of combined franchise digital marketing experience, the duo has painstakingly poured their extensive knowledge into the platform and written software that trains AI how to find better prospects. Their clients include major franchisors who say they are saving thousands of marketing and advertising dollars previously earmarked for expensive trade shows, Facebook ads, and other efforts that yielded minimal results and non-qualified leads in many cases.
Matt Toy, Vice President of Marketing at D1 Training, said he “doubled down” on aiADZ after realizing it was an incredible tool. “Our budget has grown significantly during the last six months and we have seen a significant increase in leads,” he said. “Even better, the quality of the leads is great, and we have closed on many of them from using aiADZ.”
Sales Chatz combines artificial intelligence and data sets to optimize the effectiveness of advertising campaigns at scale for franchisors and multi-unit brands. Utilizing aiADZ eliminates the time and complexity of running multiple advertising campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. The integration of data and machine learning automatically provides insights about the effectiveness of campaigns across all platforms. This not only saves time and money, but also improves the ROI of advertising campaigns for multi-unit brands.
As franchisors continually grapple with ad clutter on social media and ever-changing algorithms, Stein and Gustin are working with clients who believe using AI is a better way to reach and engage prospects.
Mark Ramage, VP of Franchising Development with la Madeleine, an authentic French café franchise, said he continually improves and adjusts his ad spend with aiADZ. “It’s genius,” said Ramage. “Before we started using aiADZ, we had good ads and terrible leads. Now we are getting in front of the right candidates and capturing heavy hitters. I’ve seen digital advertising come a long way, but nobody else is doing what these guys are doing at Sales Chatz. The more we use aiADZ, the better it gets – and it also drives down the cost of each lead.”
Gustin said Sales Chatz runs and analyzes advertising campaigns for approximately 60 clients, but there is also an option for customers to access a dashboard and customize their own ads. He said the user-friendly version enables franchisors to create ads, target audiences, and analyze results.
“We’ve made it easy for customers to understand and target their messages,” Gustin explained. “The enormous benefit of using aiADZ is the longer a customer uses it, the more efficient it becomes. We trained the machine to analyze data and learn what works and what doesn’t work for our clients.”
Scott Mellon, founder of Mellon Franchising for several fast casual and quick service restaurant franchises, said aiADZ has ramped up the growth of several brands he works with. “Every brand has challenges with leads,” Mellon said. “It’s either the volume of leads, the quality of the leads, or both. As soon as David and Kylon showed aiADZ to me, I was on board. It is by far the most narrowly focused and sophisticated platform I have ever worked with.”
Bringing AI to the franchising space was a natural progression for Stein and Gustin, who claim technology is in their DNA. They are continually focused on ways to leverage technology to help clients scale and grow, and currently have multiple AI products in development. AskZ is their version of ChatGPT created to help franchisors with sales and marketing by answering more than 2000 frequently asked questions. Another AI feature, aiAnalyz, analyzes advertising campaigns and offers insights and recommendations for better ROI. An additional product set to launch in a few months will improve ad creative and rewrite ad copy for optimal results.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg as far as what AI will eventually be able to do to dramatically impact the franchising industry,” added Stein. “We’re excited to provide innovative solutions to franchisors and franchisees who need to pinpoint the right prospects and streamline costs with efficient ad campaigns. Our clients are thrilled because aiADZ makes it much easier for them to sell franchises and scale franchise advertising campaigns at the local level.”