The presence of a franchise software system is important to ensure your franchise development and management efforts bear fruit. It comes to the aid of the franchisor and franchisees in systematically developing their brand. It’s in charge of all aspects of engagement with franchisees. It’s capable of getting seamlessly integrated with the rest of the operational capabilities of your franchise.

When you embark on choosing a franchise software or carry out an assessment of your current one make sure it has the following 7 key features in its possession.

• Franchise software system facilitates automated workflows

Workflows form an integral component of the franchise software system as far as managing your leads and conversions are concerned. When you design workflows in your software system and put them into practice you’ll be empowered to tailor the operations in conformity with your unique needs and processes. You’ll be able to find out the various activities taking place at every step.

All these efforts will guarantee an increase in your franchise’s lead conversion. The software helps in the automation of low-value, recurrent tasks to bring about maximum efficiency. Consequently, the software enables your sales and marketing team to devote extra time to core tasks like gauging how motivated are your franchisees and who to reward for outstanding performances.

The software maps process flows and sets triggers that are automatically sent to record customer correspondence and decide on follow-up tasks for resolution. Since the software puts forward detailed workflows and extensively uses automation, it’s feasible to get several activities, reporting, and analytics standardized throughout the brand and measure performance in regular periodicity.

• Franchise software system helps deliver campaigns

It’s already proven that franchise development endeavors and marketing efforts meet at the confluence of campaigns. A section of the workflow laid down by the software has the ability to create and discharge email campaigns for effectively moving leads via the sales funnel. The software makes sure you can fabricate delivery schedules prompted by triggers, make use of personalized links, and generate automatic responses to emails without the need to move away from your CRM.

The franchise software system facilitates the recording of all marketing campaigns in the communication history of the recipient prospect or customer. The software also qualifies you to send text campaigns. Even though setting up campaigns may be a slightly labor-intensive process, in the long run, they’ll save your time and money. They’ll allow you to spend additional resources on the prospects/candidates willing to get into partnership with your brand.

• Franchise software system makes status tracking possible

The franchisor is recognized as the leader in a franchise management system. The system is generally an important part of the franchise software platform. The franchise management system is built particularly for franchises. It’s capable of identifying and keeping a track of franchise-specific leads, the statuses they represent, and the actions they pursue.

Read on to learn some important statuses franchisors find necessary to know.

• The time of the candidate being a fresh lead

• The time of the candidate to have not been contacted by the sales team

• The time of the candidate being involved in the qualification process

• The time of the candidate to have signed the franchise agreement

• The time of the candidate being identified as qualified but still it hasn’t responded

• Other statuses supporting specific sales processes

The franchise software system has the capability of electronically distributing and tracking receipts of the Final Disclosure Document (FDD) of your franchise brand. This takes in filing for an item 23 receipt alongside the candidate’s record. When the status of a lead changes, the software sends a trigger for automated workflow tasks to begin.

There are many stages of a sales cycle where a candidate may be present. The software gives this precise information at any instant. It also helps in the completion of key tasks during the particular stage. The software gives you information about the time used up for each of the above-mentioned statuses. It will help you to regularly assess the sales funnel especially for candidates who are catching up to be done and amend the tactics with relevance.

• Franchise software system can be enriched with smart groups

A franchise software system has the “smart groups” feature. It permits you a dynamic segmentation of your leads based on common characteristics. So, it’s possible for you to secure maximum efficiency by reaching a multitude of leads at a single time. By way of an example – you may create buyer personas for franchise candidates and send messages according to the persona, being in charge of the sales funnel. Alternatively, if you’re a sales manager working in a certain geographical location and want to have all your leads to be tagged, you can resort to the smart groups feature offered by the software.

The feature can also be used when you don’t want to tag leads in your territory at a given time. You may put the tagging activity on hold because of financial or geographical factors. But you may be interested to contact them later. Obviously, you can create separate groups conditional on the origin or source of your leads. This leads us to another important feature which the software comes up with – source tracking.

• Franchise software system expedites source tracking

When you source-track your leads, it directly has an effect on your marketing spend. Your leads may come across your brand via different channels, namely:

• Social media

• Online event

• Referral

• A paid media campaign

It’s all-important to find out which of the above-mentioned channels helped your leads to connect with you and your brand. The franchise software system is designed to tag the source of all leads upon their entry whether automatically or via manual import.

Once the software tracks the source, it enables you to do a comparative study of the leads obtained per source. It also gives you added insights into the progress of each source-tracked lead in the sales cycle. What’s more, the software furnishes details of expenditure incurred on each source.

This will help you in determining the cost per lead and the ROI per source. The software is equipped with one additional component that has the function of directly adding leads from franchise portals or brokers.

• Franchise software system assists in integration

The franchise software system can be easily integrated with your existing architecture. Once you’re awarded a franchise, and after its installation, the software aids in consolidating all the stages involved with the franchise lifecycle. It lets you effortlessly pass on information related to the sales process to areas such as onboarding and compliance control.

In addition to getting incorporated into core operations, the franchise software helps optimize and streamline team and franchisee collaboration. Powerful franchise systems provide APIs that are capable of extracting data from or inserting data into the system for it to be used elsewhere. The software also contains features such as digital signature and lead profiling to access all-inclusive data from a single central location.

• Franchise software system provides reporting and analytics

Franchise software system is equipped with a robust and precise reporting framework. Each of the features described above becomes worthless if you’re not able to see and analyze its impact. Thus, the software provides valuable insights into all that we discussed here:

• Workflows

• Campaigns

• Communications

• Sources

• Sales funnel

The software will come to your aid with many benefits in the form of:

• Attracting the right audience

• Converting qualified candidates into moneymaking opportunities

• Closing deals

• Making you aware of the franchise performance

• Highlighting the areas where you need improvement

• Letting you know if you’re meeting your financial objectives

The software makes sure all such information can be easily accessed, comprehended, and reviewed to do course correction. Basically, you need to have a co-existing business intelligent tool with your franchise software. What you get in return are shareable, real-time insights into key business aspects.