A retail recruitment pipeline is a repeatable process. You find realistic targets, back them with local data, reach the people who make location decisions, and track every conversation until it becomes a deal or a clear "not now." Cities that wait for retailers to call usually keep waiting. This guide walks through the full path, from market data to site selection, and shows where the work tends to stall in small and mid-sized communities.
Southwind Marketing serves organizations and growing businesses of all sizes nationwide, across rural, suburban, and urban communities throughout the United States. We work with businesses, economic development organizations, local governments, chambers, tourism organizations, Main Street programs, nonprofits, and community organizations. Most of what follows applies whether you are a town of 3,000 or a suburb of 60,000.
Key takeaways
- Recruitment is outbound work. Retailers and their brokers do not browse small cities looking for a place to open, so you have to put your community in front of them.
- Start with data that lowers a retailer's risk: trade area demographics, traffic counts, spending and leakage, and visitor patterns. Incentives matter less than proof of demand.
- Package the data in a short recruitment packet and a web page, not a generic brochure.
- Track every contact in a CRM so follow-up does not depend on one staff member's memory.
- Keep retention in the plan. Keeping a business is cheaper than replacing it.
Table of Contents
- Why waiting for prospects does not work
- The pipeline at a glance
- Step 1: Identify realistic retail targets
- Step 2: Evaluate the gaps in your market
- Step 3: Research brands, franchise groups, brokers and developers
- Step 4: Create recruitment materials that retailers actually use
- Step 5: Conduct direct outreach
- Step 6: Track every conversation
- Step 7: Follow opportunities through site selection
- Keep retention in the plan
- Our perspective: recruitment should run all year
- Where Southwind Marketing fits
- FAQ
- Sources
Why waiting for prospects does not work
Many communities operate on a quiet assumption: if the town is a good place, retailers will notice. Real estate strategist Bobby Boone of &Access pushes back on that idea, arguing that communities need to meet retailers where they are and use brokers and professional networks to match concepts to local trade area realities.
Main Street America describes the same trap as an "if you build it, they will come" mindset. Storefronts can sit empty for years when nobody validates demand with sales data, visitor insights or pop-up performance and turns it into a business case for retailers and property owners.
Municipalities are acting on this. CoStar reported that roughly 80 municipalities had booths at the ICSC show in Las Vegas in 2024, as local officials increasingly court retailers and developers directly.
The pipeline at a glance
| Stage | Question it answers | What you produce |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Targets | Which retailers could realistically succeed here? | A ranked target list |
| 2. Gaps | Where is demand leaving town? | Leakage and trade area analysis |
| 3. Research | Who decides for each brand? | Brand, franchise group, broker and developer profiles |
| 4. Materials | What proves the case? | Recruitment packet and web page |
| 5. Outreach | Who hears from us, and how often? | Emails, calls, meetings, event follow-ups |
| 6. Tracking | Where does each conversation stand? | CRM records and a pipeline report |
| 7. Site selection | What stands between interest and a lease? | Site tours, property data, incentive answers |
Step 1: Identify realistic retail targets
Start by being honest about what your market can support. A town of 4,000 with one highway exit will not land a department store, but it may well land a regional pizza chain, a quick-service coffee concept, a dollar store, a hardware franchise or a clinic-adjacent retail user.
Build the target list from three inputs:
- Fit with your trade area. A trade area is the zone where most customers are expected to come from. It is not your city limits. For a rural town it may stretch 20 or 30 minutes in every direction.
- Fit with your existing mix. The best recruitment tool a city has is a healthy collection of existing retailers and restaurants. Look at what already thrives and what would complement it.
- Fit with available space. Match concepts to real buildings and pads. A 2,000-square-foot concept cannot use a 12,000-square-foot box, and a drive-thru concept needs the right lot.
Sort targets into three tiers: ready now, plausible within two years, and long shot. Spend most of your effort on the first two.
Grocery is its own case. If that is your priority, read our guide to rural grocery store recruitment, which lays out the two files to build before you pitch.
Step 2: Evaluate the gaps in your market
A gap is demand that exists but is being spent somewhere else. Retail leakage analysis compares what residents are estimated to spend by category with what local businesses actually capture. A large gap in a category suggests unmet demand, and it is the figure retailers and developers want to see.
Do not stop at leakage. Pair it with:
- Traffic counts on the corridors where you have available sites.
- Visitor data. Main Street America explains that visitor or location analytics show where visitors come from, how long they stay and how often they return. That matters most in tourism and commuter towns, where the people in your trade area are not all residents.
- Workforce and daytime population, which often differ sharply from census residents.
- Local sales and sales tax trends, where your state allows you to use them.
Present the gap as a business question: what would this category earn here? Research on high-end retail location points out that incentives are rarely the main driver for retailers. Expected return in the trade area is. Your most useful contribution is clear data that reduces their risk.
Step 3: Research brands, franchise groups, brokers and developers
Most chains do not choose sites by reading a city website. A broker, a franchise development team or a developer with a pipeline of pads often does. For each target, find out:
- Who handles expansion for the brand in your region: corporate real estate, a regional broker or a franchise development manager.
- Whether it is franchised. If so, who are the multi-unit franchise groups operating nearby, and are they growing?
- Which brokers and developers have placed similar tenants in markets like yours.
- What the concept needs: size, parking, visibility, minimum population, co-tenancy, drive-thru.
Broker Robert Mackowski of Pierson Commercial says that before any site research, you need to understand the concept and its customer, as quoted in ICSC's guide on choosing where to open. Take the same view from the city's side. Read the brand's current locations and learn what its best markets look like.
Record everything as you go. A profile for each target should end up in your CRM, not in a folder on someone's desktop.
Step 4: Create recruitment materials that retailers actually use
Generic brochures do not move deals. Main Street America's coverage of business investment guides notes that recruitment packets work when they carry the metrics developers use to judge return before they visit: trade area demographics, traffic counts, retail leakage and a clear summary of available incentives. The ICSC's dealmaking guide frames the packet as an elevator pitch for site selectors.
A practical packet has these parts:
- A one-page market summary with the numbers above.
- A map of available sites with size, zoning, utilities, ownership and asking terms, where owners agree to share them.
- A short list of recent openings and expansions, which tells a retailer that others have made it work.
- An incentive summary in plain language, including the process and a named contact.
- One person's phone number and email, with a promise of a fast reply.
Put the same content on a dedicated web page, because brokers will check your site before they call back. Look at how other communities structure these pages in our economic development website examples and downtown and Main Street examples.
Short video helps too. A two-minute walk through your downtown, with a business owner speaking about why they chose it, shows a broker things a spreadsheet cannot. If you want a sense of what commissioned executive and brand storytelling video looks like, this video portfolio is one place to start.
If your community brand is thin, fix that first. Our piece on the real role of branding explains why a clear identity makes every later piece of material easier.
Step 5: Conduct direct outreach
Outreach is the step most small organizations skip, and it is the one that creates the pipeline. Practitioners describe the effective approach as targeted and outbound: build personal relationships with site selectors, brokers and franchise developers, including at in-person dealmaking events such as those hosted by ICSC, instead of waiting for leads.
A workable outreach rhythm for a small team:
- Monthly: send a short, personalized email to 10 to 20 priority contacts. One market fact, one available site, one question.
- Quarterly: call your top-tier brokers and franchise developers with an update, such as a new opening, a new traffic count or a site that just became available.
- Annually: attend at least one trade event, with meetings booked in advance. Bring the packet and follow up within a week.
- Always: respond to any inquiry within one business day.
Targeted digital advertising can support this work. Reaching brokers and developers with a message built on facts works better than broad awareness spending. Our article on economic development advertising for rural EDOs shows how to lead with facts. For corporate and industrial prospects, see how to market site selections to decision-makers.
Step 6: Track every conversation
Without a system, recruitment depends on one person's inbox. When that person leaves, the relationships go with them. A CRM fixes this. Set it up to capture:
- Contact, company, role and how you met.
- The target brand or site being discussed.
- Last contact date and the next action with a due date.
- Stage: identified, introduced, packet sent, interested, site visit, proposal, lease negotiation, closed, or paused.
- Notes on what the prospect needs, such as minimum counts, pad size, or a co-tenant.
Then review the pipeline monthly with your board or council committee. Show movement between stages, not only opened stores. Many communities judge recruitment by a single question, whether they landed a new store, but a pipeline report also shows the introductions, site tours and data requests that come before any ribbon cutting.
Step 7: Follow opportunities through site selection
Once a retailer is interested, the city's job changes from persuading to removing friction. Be ready to:
- Provide parcel data, zoning, utility capacity and ownership details quickly.
- Connect the retailer with property owners, and help owners understand what the tenant needs.
- Explain permitting steps and timelines in writing, and name a single point of contact inside city hall.
- Answer incentive questions with specifics: what is available, who approves it, how long it takes.
- Host the site visit. Walk the retailer through the corridor, introduce neighboring owners and show the traffic at the times that matter.
Expect most conversations to end without a deal. A "no" with a reason is still data. Log it, and revisit when the situation changes.
Keep retention in the plan
Recruitment gets the attention, but retention protects what you have. Main Street America notes that it is easier and cheaper to keep an existing business than to replace one, and a retention and expansion plan can help businesses grow. Regular business visits also give you early warning on who is struggling and who may expand.
The most effective downtown recruitment teams are collaborative. Include city staff, volunteers and private sector partners so that more visits happen and more relationships form. For a longer view of the downtown side, see our 12 to 18 month plan to market small city downtowns and the page on DDA marketing.
Our perspective: recruitment should run all year
We see the same pattern in small communities. A city commissions a study, prints a brochure, sends a delegation to one conference and then goes quiet. Six months later nobody remembers who said what. The study was fine. The follow-through is where it fell apart.
We built our approach around closing that gap. Data tells you where to aim. Marketing makes your community easy to evaluate: a clear recruitment page, a tight packet, targeted outreach. CRM tools keep the conversations alive so that recruitment is continuous instead of seasonal. Our work spans data dashboards, website design, outreach and CRM through Southwind Connect, so a small team does not need to stitch four vendors together.
One point for rural leaders in particular: you do not need to look like a metro to compete. You need cleaner facts than the next town, and the discipline to keep calling. For more on how small towns approach this, read how small towns drive real economic development.
— Damien Denmark
Where Southwind Marketing fits
We help communities turn market data into an active recruitment program. That can include data dashboards for trade area and visitor insight, a recruitment-ready website, content and outreach, and a CRM to track each prospect. Southwind Connect plans are published at $97 per month (Starter), $167 (Essentials), $287 (Growth), $447 (Professional), $697 (Civic) and $997 to $1,497 (Enterprise), with a one-time setup fee of $99 to $799. Details and plan contents are on the Southwind Connect page. If you want the whole program built around your market, start with our economic development marketing services.
A note on scope: Southwind Connect can support supplemental crisis communications, but it does not replace official emergency alert systems.
FAQ
How long does it take to build a retail recruitment pipeline?
You can assemble a first version, with a target list, core data and a basic packet, in a few months. Deals take longer. Retailers plan expansion on their own cycles, so expect relationships to build over a year or more before results show up.
Do incentives decide whether a retailer comes?
Rarely on their own. Research on retail location finds that retailers focus on expected return in the trade area. Incentives can help close a deal that already makes sense, but clear demand data does more to get the conversation started.
Should a small city hire a retail recruitment firm?
Some cities do. Portland, Tennessee, for example, issued an RFP for a retail recruitment firm in 2026. Others build the program in-house with a part-time lead, good data and a CRM. The right choice depends on staff time and budget. Either way, define the deliverables: targets, outreach volume and reporting.
What should a recruitment packet include?
Trade area demographics, traffic counts, leakage by category, a map of available sites, an incentive summary and a named contact. Keep it short enough to read in a few minutes, and mirror it on a web page.
Can a chamber or Main Street program run this without city staff?
Yes, and many do. Partnerships work best, though, because the city controls permitting and incentives while the chamber or Main Street group often has the business relationships and volunteer capacity.
Sources
- ICSC Dealmaking Guide
- How to Choose Where to Open, ICSC
- Using Visitor Data to Turn Insights into Action for Main Streets, Main Street America
- Business Investment Guides: Think B.I.G., Main Street America
- Why Business Retention and Expansion Plans are Important for Downtowns, Main Street America
- Where to Put High-End Retail Stores, Vassar College
- Small Towns Join Cities in Stepping Up Efforts To Lure Retailers, CoStar
- Request for Proposal: Retail Recruitment Firm, City of Portland, Tennessee