So, you’ve made the big move, building a franchise from scratch. Now that you’ve already done it, what’s next? Are you ready to scale up your franchise opportunity to a wider audience with franchise development software? Want to increase your sales and hire some more candidates effortless? Fret not! You’re not alone.
In this article, we’ll give you 8 key features you need to consider before you select a franchise development software for your business. So, if you’re considering franchise development, this is the next in your to-do list.
Let’s scan through the must-have features that you need to know before developing your franchise business.
8 must-haves for franchise development software
Building out a successful franchise brand isn’t just possible by building a great product and service. It’s important to have a steady, efficient operation that’s consistent throughout. And finding the best franchise development software designed to the needs of your business is critical to the success of your business. It will not just help to streamline your daily functions but also help to keep everything organised starting from distribution to accounting, making it run like a powered engine.
Here’s let’s lookout for the features:
- Workflow automation and simplified franchise management
A franchise development software should be able to help you convert the repetitive or low-value work into the free-flowing process, thus enabling your team to concentrate on high-value tasks. By creating a detailed framework for workflow, you can easily map processes, set notifications, follow up and register interactions. Also, you can focus on standard work in collaboration with your franchise performance. Automation must further help you to provide simplified management of franchise structure allowing you to organise the supply chain network within a single platform.
- Marketing and email campaigns
So, you must be wondering how franchise development and marketing work hand in hand? Yes, franchise development and marketing interlink with each other at campaigns. A part of your workflow must be able to create email drip campaigns effectively to move the leads through the sales pipeline. Franchise marketing drip campaigns are crucial to the successful lead nurturing. It involved repeated sending of marketing messages to leads through various channels such as email and text messages. Drip campaigns are a set of emails and messages that are sent to the lead’s multiple times according to a pre-defined date. So, the key role of franchise development software is to send relevant marketing messages to your leads based on their online behaviour. That means the main objective of the software should be to educate prospects on your franchise nosiness and instigate engagement.
- Tracking of status
Being a franchise owner, you’re surely going to need a lead management software, as a part of your franchise development platform, that is specifically built for a franchise business. It must have franchise centred lead statuses and franchise tracking tool to follow up on the activities that the statuses represent.
The best franchise development software must be able to electronically transmit and track receipt of your brand’s FDD, that includes a recording of an item receipt with the candidate’s record. Ideally, establishing lead status should be able to automate the workflow tasks such as sending the candidate information to the employees present at the relevant levels of the sales cycle, or it should be able to develop the key functions that are required to accomplish at every stage. A franchise software enables you to keep a track of the time spent in individual statuses so that you can review the sales procedure periodically for the upcoming candidates that are laying behind and develop a proper strategy.
- Inventory levels and optimization of supply chain
Franchise management software allows the franchise owners to have both corporate level view and tools to respond to consumer demand. Such that orders can be done based on the minimum and maximum levels of inventory and stay connected to the supply chain. A franchise development software must be able to provide access to individual franchise unit to stock replacement data and have a complete insight into the supply details. By doing so, all the employees within the retail will be completely aware of the happenings of the business operations. The franchise owner will be able to foresee future shortages or challenges while finding ways to prevent them.
- Increased sales and improved franchise marketing
What do you think a success of any franchise depends on? Believe it or not, irrespective of any market or industry the growth of any franchise business relies highly on the key factors, i.e. quality idea, market size, sales growth and acquiring new franchisees. By having a unique understanding of the needs, the franchise is prepared to sell locally, drive the complete growth of the brand and attract new leads to the franchise development team. When you build a franchise marketing platform, your lead isn’t just going to come. You have to bring qualified leads to join hands with your franchise sales team. Your sales team needs to work with the marketing to qualify and engage with the prospects.
Franchise development software increases your sales by taking care of your final customers and developing customer relations. Franchisees are accountable for increasing the quality of the final in-store customer experience. However, a rightly chosen software can help you to drive more customers to the franchise outlets. Hence, a franchise software must have a customer acquisition tool such as targeted discounts, sales management, gift cards, customer tracking and store credit tracking. In a whole, the more the outlets sell, the higher the share involved amongst all parties.
- Conflict resistant inspection of franchise
Using a franchise software, the head offices must be able to supervise outlets in real-time, and notify any possible areas of concern, as well as confirm management and sales objectives to revise the issues. The use of historical data is important to detect the problem before occurrence. Therefore, the use of inspection is needed to make things work fasters and narrow down repeated inspection tasks.
- Operational Integration with multiple tools
Franchise owners must maintain the track of action that keeps on running once you reward a franchise. Thus, your franchise software must be able to effortlessly streamline with the following stages of the franchise lifecycle. A credible integration feature will help to provide a coherent API. At the same time, a franchise development system must have a built-in digital platform, compatible with the accounting software and payment solutions.
- Training needs
Being a franchiser, it is an essential part to train your franchisees so that they can apply possible knowledge when required and address the deficiencies in skills. A franchise development software must be able to provide training to your franchisees so that they can independently manage everything.
So, you see a comprehensive franchise development software has all the features to manage your retail business. Also, it helps to keep a balance of the cross-chain integrity and helps to maintain the freedom of decision making among the individual franchisees. If you’re interested to learn more about the benefits of using franchise software, feel free to reach out to us. Shall you have any concerns regarding skyrocketing your business using franchise development software, or if you’re seeking expert consultation, we’re always there to help you!
