The challenge
Strickland is a national childcare franchisee network representing more than 150 franchise partners. Their partners needed to present employer-paid childcare tax credits, the Form 8882 strategy, to small and mid-market businesses. It was a strong offer, but a hard one to sell.
The opportunity kept dying for the same reasons every time. The Form 8882 language was too technical and confused prospects. Employers could not see how the credit applied to their specific situation. And there was no shared sales process: every franchisee improvised their own pitch, so results swung wildly depending on who was selling.
New franchisees needed weeks of one-on-one handholding just to learn the motion. Time-to-value ran 3 to 4 weeks per new partner, and each deal carried more than $2,500 in support time.
- Too technical: Form 8882 language confused prospects
- Unclear value: employers could not see how the credit applied to them
- No SOP: every franchisee sold a different way, so quality was inconsistent
- Training friction: new franchisees needed 1-on-1 handholding to ramp
The pitch lived in a few people's heads. When a new franchisee joined, the knowledge had to be rebuilt from scratch.
What we built
We codified the entire sales motion into a system any franchisee could run, then made it impossible to get the pitch wrong.
First, we rebuilt the calculator. We stripped out the in-house childcare facility fields that did not fit their market, changed jargon like contributions to plain language (employer-paid childcare payments to a third-party provider), and reduced the flow to four inputs that produce an instant credit estimate. The output is presented as a Form 8882 preview, exactly what the employer actually files.
Second, we automated the franchisee SOP itself: a 100% templated 8-slide pitch deck each partner can customize, a lead-qualification form that auto-routes prospects by business profile, a 12-minute training video for new franchisees, and a 5-email nurture sequence from discovery to close.
Third, we shipped a prospect-facing web experience. Each franchisee gets a branded, private calculator instance, submissions are auto-logged to their CRM via webhook, anonymized real savings examples provide social proof, and a clear legal disclaimer scopes the offer to third-party arrangements.
- Simplified 4-input calculator with a real-time Form 8882 preview
- Templated 8-slide pitch deck, customizable per franchisee
- Auto-routing lead qualification form + 5-email nurture sequence
- 12-minute onboarding training video
- Branded per-franchisee calculator instances with CRM webhooks
The outcome
The motion went from improvised to repeatable, and the numbers moved fast. Within the first 30 days, 40+ partners were activated, and 85% of them adopted the new SOP, against roughly 20% adoption under the old manual process.
Sales velocity climbed across the board. The average sales cycle compressed from 3 weeks to 8 days, the close rate nearly doubled from 22% to 41%, and average deal size rose from $15K to $28K per franchisee per quarter.
Support load dropped at the same time. Training time per franchisee fell from 180 minutes to 45, and support requests dropped about 60% because the clearer process simply generated fewer questions.
Prospects felt the difference too. Calculator completion rose from 58% to 79%, and the share of prospects who said they understood the value after running the numbers jumped from 41% to 88%.
- 40+ partners activated in 30 days, 85% SOP adoption (up from 20%)
- Close rate 22% to 41%, sales cycle 3 weeks to 8 days, deal size $15K to $28K
- Support requests down ~60%; training time 180 min to 45 min
- Calculator completion 58% to 79%; understood-the-value 41% to 88%
Removing one confusing field lifted completion rate 21 points. Simplification, not more features, won the deal.
Why it worked
Three lessons carried the project. Simplification beats sophistication: cutting a single confusing field raised completion by 21 points. Terminology matters: swapping contributions for payments measurably improved deal quality. And automation does not mean one-size-fits-all, each franchisee still customizes their pitch, but the SOP gives them guardrails so quality holds.
Just as important, pre-recorded training plus an interactive sandbox turned franchisee onboarding from weeks into days, which is what let 40+ partners come online inside a single month.