Following up with Lead Generation - FranFunnel and Lead Qualification

We recently put this article out talking about lead generation with FranchiseHelp and how we do things a little differently. Check it out here.

Being the first in the franchising scene to utilize technology, we tend to do things a little differently when it comes to leads. Now that we’ve shared about how we generate our leads, we’re going to talk about what we’ve created to help our clients work the leads to successfully find franchisees.

FranFunnel

FranFunnel was originally created as a SaaS product that FranchiseHelp offered, but eventually helped so many people that they’re now a company on their own!

We’ve written many articles on FranFunnel in the past. You can read them here, here, here, here, here, here…. Yeah. You can also check out FranFunnel’s bulletin.

So, what does FranFunnel do?

Okay let’s get that out of the way - FranFunnel is NOT a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. A CRM is designed to help you with record keeping. FranFunnel is the franchise industry’s answer to help you get more from the leads you’re already buying.

FranFunnel is texting automation that turns your online leads into conversations, then conversions.

We all know that leads don’t always only come in during working hours - Monday to Friday from 9am to 6pm. What’s more - with different time zones, someone could be submitting as a lead from California while the sales team in New York is about to head to bed.

Rather than waiting to get back to work the next day, checking your pipeline, and finally replying back to set a call FranFunnel does all of that for you automatically, and at the moment a lead comes in!. While you’re away from work the FranFunnel system automatically reaches out to send a personalised message to your leads, and this first touch makes it easier for you to set up a meeting time later on. 

This means one of many things - quicker response timings to leads, giving you an ease of mind to be away from your desk and still getting work done no matter what time of the day it is.

Lead Qualification

Fun fact: Did you know that lead qualification was a service requested by our clients initially?

What is lead qualification?

To understand lead qualification, we need to first understand lead generation and look at the sales processes when a lead gets sent in.

So, let’s go back to lead generation. Under a lead generation plan, we provide you, our clients, with verified leads - users who are interested in and have requested information on a specific brand. These leads are phone verified, meaning we ensure that they’ve provided a working phone number tied to their name. We also verify email and then pass this information to you and your sales team takes over to reach out to these leads. And that’s where lead qualification comes in. (No, verification is not the same thing as qualification!)

Lead qualification is a combination of automation and calls - instead of passing these leads to you for you to reach out, we take the first step in reaching out. (And in case you’re wondering how we reach out… yes, we use FranFunnel!) When a lead for your brand comes in, we’ll arrange for a time to speak to them and make the first call to the lead, and over that call we’ll ask a series of qualifying questions to verbally confirm their interest in your brand, their capital, and geo. When we get a confirmation, we’ll then hand this information over to you with all our notes from the conversation. You will only receive the leads that we successfully qualify.

Okay, so what’s the benefit in having all these services?

We wrote this article a while back that talks about how you can optimize your franchise lead follow up process. After all, franchise lead generation is NOT like the lottery - and follow up processes matter a lot to seeing success with any lead generation program you want to subscribe to. Which is why we created these services to begin with, because we want to help our clients find success in franchising.

When you engage our products to make the first touch with clients, not only does this save you time, but also money. We’re the first in the franchising scene to make use of technology to support our operations, and because we’ve used technology to automate these processes, this also saves us time - converting all of these into cost savings translated to you.

We're putting together a series to talk all about what we do at FranchiseHelp.

EP 1. Lead Generation

EP 2. Lead Qualification and FranFunnel

EP 3. FranchiseHelp and the Consultant Lead Market

EP 4. Custom PPC

Abigail Chloe Chew is the Digital Marketing and Accounts Specialist at FranchiseHelp. She doesn't believe in the lottery either.