A drive-thru pad brings the best callers you will get, buried in the most speculative ones.
A pad with a drive-thru is one of the few things in retail where the demand is structurally larger than the supply, and it shows up on the phone. The good news is that the best callers in the business are in that volume. The problem is finding them in it.
Who is on the other end
Broadly three groups. A real estate manager for a national or regional brand working a map. A local operator or multi unit franchisee who has been waiting for this corner. And a much larger group working out whether a drive-thru concept is something they could do.
The first two are worth calling back within the hour. The third is worth a polite record and nothing else, and the distinction is usually clear in the first three answers.
What to capture on a pad call
- The brand or concept, by name. A real estate manager says it immediately.
- How many units they operate today, and whether they are a franchisee or corporate.
- Whether they need the drive-thru, or it is a preference. This changes the entire deal.
- Their site criteria: traffic counts, corner or interior, signal, stacking depth.
- Timing, and whether there is a committee date behind it.
That last one is the tell. A caller with a committee date has an approval process and a deadline. A caller without one has an interest.
Why these calls come at odd hours
Site selection people are frequently in another time zone or in a car in a different market, and a pad site call at 7am or 6:30pm is normal rather than unusual. Those are exactly the hours a cell goes unanswered, and a real estate manager working a list will move on to the next site without a second attempt.
What the line does with it
It answers at 7am, gets the brand, the unit count, the drive-thru requirement, and the timing, and texts you before they have finished the next call on their list. A named brand with fifty units and a committee date in October is a text you want to see immediately, whatever else you were doing.
Everything else gets logged so you can see what the pad is drawing without any of it interrupting you.
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