In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, franchise-based businesses can no longer expect every Franchisee to execute effectively across a variety of tasks. This expectation inevitably leads to burn out and from an execution standpoint can seriously dilute the quality of the end product, essentially making your Franchisees less effective.
So, how and what can Franchisors simplify, build, or acquire for their Franchisees to relieve the daily realities of location management and refocus Franchisees toward organizational growth? To achieve this level of organizational focus, Franchisors need to provide simplified solutions that switch task responsibility from the Franchisee to Franchisor.
It’s time to retire diverse and unrelated business management software tools and integrate disparate tools into a single-portal, user-friendly data- management system that provides Franchisees with a coordinated and centralized set of daily executable strategies; and Franchisors with the ability to both engage and monitor each unit’s success.
Imagine your Franchisees coming into work every morning and rather than queuing multiple websites and software applications, instead log into a single portal that manages all the tasks and tools they need to perform their daily duties with ease.
How much time could the Franchisee save? How much simplification could the Franchisor facilitate? When you can track in real time where your organization and Franchisees are succeeding and where improvements need to be addressed, how much more effectively could your brand operate?
How elaborate or comprehensive this system should be is up to each organization’s specific needs, but a module-based management-information-system can include:
- Staffing / Scheduling – the ability to organize and schedule staff, rooms, vehicles and establish some common repeatable connections between the team and your resources
- Accounting – ongoing invoice generation, branch forecasting, EFT transfers, revenue acceleration, inventory management, market analysis
- Reporting – building reports on all the key Franchisee performance metrics on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to maximize resource allocation
- Field Audits – documented audits help to ensure every Franchisee is operating at peak performance, combining Franchisees’ audits and financial data into a complete Franchisee Dashboard
- CRM – maximize customer data by tracking relationships and work together to identify and grow the most valuable customers, empowering staff to make quick, informed, insightful decisions
- Marketing & Lead Management – a daily task-driven Marketing Automator to accelerate sales cycle from prospecting to closed deal
- Training Modules – ongoing reinforcement of training concepts and KPI’s through a Web-based, 24/7 comprehensive training database
- Marketing Resource Database – providing email-marketing templates, sales call scripts, ad-requests and ready-to-print collateral
- Call Tracking – provide responsive call-tracking and service performance evaluation
Software centralization provides a powerful resource-management tool, with time-saving benefits invaluable to both Franchisor and Franchisee. For any multi-unit organization seeking steady and profitable growth, the better systems you put into place, the easier that growth becomes.
When your CRM’s customer and prospecting data is directly connected to your finance and audit reports, as well as to your marketing resources and call-tracking tools, the Franchisee is better equipped to coordinate with staff, understand where their leads are in the buying process, when and what marketing collateral to respond with, etc.— all because you have all that data in one centralized location. That is real power.
