How successful are your franchise assignment efforts? A robust franchise management software, fully charged with potent features is a major determinant towards branching out in business and growing and expanding your brand in a well-ordered manner. It not only manages all aspects appropriate to your franchisee candidate engagement but also incorporates the remaining of your operations in a smooth-running mode.
In case, you aren’t already leveraging the benefits of franchise management software, or you’re in want of an evaluation of your existing operational one, here are 5 noteworthy features that you should scout for prior to settling on your final choice.
Workflow Automation
When it comes to defining your lead management solutions, workflows are viewed as critical components. Outlining, designing and implementing finely detailed and innovative workflows empower you to create a tailor-made system aimed to address the purpose of your specific processes and gather information about the different activities that occur at every stage with intent to augment lead conversions.
With automatic workflows, you can convert the repetitive or low-value job tasks into free-running operations to maximize efficiency and qualify your sales team to invest more energy and time on high-value jobs and endeavors like understanding your franchisee candidates’ motivations and directing the lead generation process ahead.
You can map processes and set triggers to automatically transmit and register communications and follow-up assignments. By automating and detailing workflows, you’ll be able to not just formulate standard activities and reporting throughout the expanse of the brand but regularize performance measurement as well.
Campaigns
The precise spot of convergence of franchise management and marketing is a campaign. A sizeable part of your workflow should be apportioned to generate email campaigns to efficiently push leads through the sales cycle. Ensure that your campaigns are supported with options to make use of personalized links, create trigger-driven delivery schedules and fabricate automated email responses without requiring you to leave the bounds of your CRM.
Every campaign should be registered in the records of the franchisee candidate’s communication history. Your franchise CRM tool should also have the capability to send text campaigns. Campaigns call for some preliminary setup expenses, yet they’ll eventually save your time and money by enabling you to put more resources into engaging to a large degree with your prospects that are expected to partner with your brand.
Source Tracking
You should meticulously track the source of your leads. Because this directly decides where you should invest your funds designated for your marketing efforts without flaws. It’s basic to have the capacity to keep an eye on the avenues from where your leads discover your brand. These sources usually range from social media, a paid campaign to a referral process or an event.
You must ensure when a lead enters into your CRM, its source, be it an automatic or a manual ingress, should be immediately tagged. When you track origins of all the leads, you empower yourself with an ability to draw up a comparison of the number of leads generated per source. In addition, you can determine the headway made by each source into the sales cycle.
On top of that, source tracking feature allows you to keep tabs of the total amount of money expended for the utilization of each source. This will be useful in determining important metrics like cost per lead and ROI generated per source. Another unique element which a CRM developed particularly for franchising has is the automatic addition of leads straight from franchise portals or brokers.
Integration
Despite the fact that here we’re primarily concerned about franchise management, we should likewise put efforts in understanding the course of action that follows once you award a franchise. You should see to it that your CRM gets smoothly integrated with the subsequent stages of the franchise lifecycle. Also, make sure that information can be effortlessly transferred from the different franchise sales processes to the areas related to onboarding and compliance management.
Your management software should’ve got the flexibility to be integrated by including all your operations and optimizing the overall process to facilitate your teams and franchises. Besides, a compelling integration feature must incorporate various tools and data external to your CRM by offering coherent APIs that input/output external data to be used somewhere else.
The franchise management software should also have built-in digital signature software and lead profiling systems to capacitate you with their productive usage and applications while availing the resultant data from one centralized location.
Reporting and analytics
Although this particular aspect comes at the last in order of our mention, yet it’s very important. Your franchise management software must have exemplary skills of reporting and analytics. The features mentioned in the previous sections lose all their impact unless you derive comprehensive and valuable insights from your campaigns, workflows, sources, communication channels, and the sales funnel.
Primarily for your business growth, it’s imperative to find out if you’re attracting a lot of the right target audience, if you’re being able to convert qualified leads into gainful opportunities and successful deal closures, if and where you’re performing well, which are the areas you need improvement and if you’re actually meeting your financial goals.
All these pertinent questions need to have justifiable and easily accessible answers which in turn can be frequently reviewed and evaluated for necessary course corrections. In the best possible way, you’ll need a powerful business intelligence framework that collaborates with your franchise CRM tool to provide you a real-time tracking and sharable reporting architecture offering in-depth information about the vital aspects of your business.
So, are you planning to grow your business and scale up into franchising? Do you need help to manage all the affiliations with your franchisee candidates? Do you want to seamlessly integrate your CRM with the rest of your operational framework? You must ensure that you’re utilizing all the accurate tools and franchise management software to effectuate your goals into a whopping success.
Read More: How Franchise CRM Systems Help Increase Customer Retention
