Franchise software is pivotal in helping you succeed with your franchise development and management efforts. It aids you and the entire franchise team in developing and expanding your brand in a systematic fashion through the management of all aspects of productive engagement between franchisors and franchisees.

The software gives you the capability of seamlessly integrating your franchise operations with other existing software. Therefore, when you choose a franchise software system or assess the performance of your existing one make sure it’s facilitated with the following seven key features.

• Automated workflows

When it comes to workflows, they’re considered integral to lead management. Through the design and implementation of franchise software automated workflows, you’ll be empowered to get your system custom-tailored to meet your unique needs. Automated workflows from the franchise software system also help ascertain the number and type of activities that take place at every stage of the sales cycle to amplify lead conversion.

With the feature in place, you can automate mundane, low-value jobs for creating optimal efficiency and enabling your sales teams in spending extra time on relatively high-value core tasks, for example, grasping the motivation of franchisee candidates and going ahead with the rewarding process.

With the automated workflows feature in tow, you can map a process, set triggers, define follow-up tasks, and send and record communication together with histories. Through detailing and automation of workflows, you can methodize reporting activities throughout the brand and evaluate franchise performance.

• Marketing campaigns

In a typical franchise, the crossing point of the development and marketing aspects is a campaign. Franchise software sets the seal on creating robust email campaigns by apportioning automated workflows. This is done to effectively cause the movement of leads via the sales cycle.

See to it that you can generate delivery schedules based on triggers, make use of personalized links, and automatically innovate customized email responses without the need to take off from the CRM framework.

Franchise software ensures that details of all campaigns are put in the record within the communication history of the franchisee candidates. The software also enables you to send text campaigns.

Even though campaigns need resources in the form of money and time to be initially set up they’ll eventually lead to lots of savings thereby letting you shell out additional resources to bring those franchisee candidates on board that are willing to enter into partnership with your brand.

• Status tracking of your leads

As far as franchisors are concerned, the existence of a typical lead management system integrated with franchise software becomes imperative.

By and large, the lead management system constitutes the software platform of the franchise CRM.

The system is developed particularly to aid the franchising process that shows franchise-specific statuses of leads besides keeping track of the activities which those particular statuses put forward.

Read on to be aware of some of the statuses franchisors are in need of:

• The status of a candidate being noted as a “new lead” and is not yet been put into engagement by the sales team

• The status of a candidate while being in the course of the qualification process

• The status of a candidate after the franchise agreement document is signed off

• The status of a candidate being marked as qualified yet the candidate isn’t responding

• The status of support provided to certain sales processes

In addition, you’d need to make the most of the ability to distribute the franchise disclosure document (FDD) electronically and monitor its receipt as well, also taking into account the filing of item 23 receipt containing vital records of the candidate.

Brandwide – Franchise Software

In general, when the status of a lead gets changed, it should prompt the automated formation of workflow tasks. These include the following.

• Sending information to franchisee candidates appropriate to the sales cycle stage they’re currently in

• Defining the key tasks that have to be accomplished at this sales cycle stage

Furthermore, the status tracking feature allows you to keep track of the amount of time that has been spent by each candidate while passing through each status. This enables you to regularly analyze the performance of the sales funnel especially of candidates that are falling behind and modify the tactics in proper relevance.

• Smart groups

When franchise software is supported by a “smart groups” feature, it enables you to carry out dynamic segmentation of leads in accordance with commonly observed characteristics. The main aim of segmenting leads is to simultaneously reach out to multiple leads and maximize effectiveness.

For instance, you may differentiate franchisee candidates based on buyer personas or messages and put them on topmost priority on the sales funnel. Also, perchance, you may work as a sales manager in a given geographic location and intend to connect with the leads inside your territory.

In this context as well, you can get the most out of smart groups. One more advantage of smart groups is that you can do tagging of those leads you don’t wish to collaborate with at that particular instant of time. This can be owing to financial or geographical reasons.

However, you may still have interest to contact them in the future. Obviously, when your franchise software helps you in creating groups depending on the source of your leads, it’s helpful as it results in the configuration of the next feature called source tracking.

• Source tracking of leads

The source tracking feature of franchise software is useful in the sense that it can be determined where exactly you need to spend the capital resources you have set aside for marketing. It’s all-important to gain the ability to figure out the sources wherefrom your leads have been discovered or in other words how your leads got to know about the brand. The source can be any of the following.

• A paid marketing campaign

• An event

• Social media

• Referral

The source tracking feature ensures that all leads showing keenness on your system are tagged with their corresponding source information upon entry. The data entry can happen manually or automatically.

Once the sources of the leaks are detected, you attain the competence of drawing a comparison of leads obtained from each source. Moreover, the feature gives you insights as to how much progress is made by each lead within the sales cycle.

Since you’re also aware of the amount of money invested in each source you can find out the cost per lead and the revenue generated per lead or per source. Another supplementary component of franchise software is the facility of automatic addition of leads from direct sources as franchise portals and brokers.

• Integration

You need to know the following.

• The sequence of events that follow once a franchise is awarded to a franchisee

• The extent of smoothness with which other existing software integrates with franchise software in every stage of the sales lifecycle

• The ease with which information can be transferred from the sales process to compliance management, recruitment, onboarding areas

Franchise software for development should be able to seamlessly integrate with the remaining operations and bring about improvement in the whole process for your employees and franchisees. Seamless integration also involves tools as well as data utilized beyond the main CRM.

Powerful systems come up with APIs that drive external data within the system or out of it for it to be used elsewhere. Finally, franchise software should also incorporate other entities such as lead profiling systems, digital signature software, etc. to let you make good use of those systems at the same time as gaining access to resulting data from a single centralized location.

• Reporting

Franchise software must be capable of providing good, insightful reporting. If truth be told, the features discussed above are all useless in case you’re not being able to comprehend their impact. Franchise software enables you to have in-depth information about workflows, marketing campaigns, lead sources, sales funnel, and communications. Reporting gives you information about:

• The number of ideal, qualified candidates attracted

• The number of opportunities created and deals closed by empowering your sales team to convert qualified candidates

• The areas where your franchise is doing well

• The areas where your franchise needs improvement

• The extent to which your financial objectives are met

The reporting feature of franchise software can be easily and regularly accessed, understood, and analyzed to do course correction. Usually, you can consolidate franchise software with a business intelligence tool by virtue of which you can derive and distribute reports that are real-time and delve deep into key franchise business aspects.