What Problems Is Technology Solving In The Franchise Industry?

FranchiseHelp didn’t become an industry leading company alone.

Metric Collective, our parent company, is a firm built on a foundation of forward-looking technological tools that are powering the franchise revolution in the information economy.

Because of its unique leadership position in the industry, our company has insights no other company has as it relates to franchising technology.

What lessons can aspiring entrepreneurs take from implementing technology into franchisor and franchisee funnels? What problems is technology specifically solving in the franchise industry? What challenges still exist, and how can tech be used to address them?

Today we’ll be answering those questions.

How Tech Solves Problems in Franchising

The natural first issue to discuss is that of lead contact. Historically, franchise brands were calling their leads manually as soon as they could personally get to them. This proved to be effective to a degree, but it was also labor intensive, aka, hard to scale. It works for ten units, but not a hundred, or a thousand.

One of our products, FranFunnel, can now send automated text messages at any time of day or night to engage a lead and set a time for a phone call. This dramatically improves contact rate (avg. 15-20% to avg. 35%+) and makes salespeople’s lives easier.

Imagine waking up to see that you got a lead after hours yesterday, and now there’s a meeting scheduled on your calendar with them because FranFunnel followed up while you were sleeping!

The second technology issue follows the progression of the user journey, aka, getting solid lead info. Previously, leads would submit their phone number and it would either be passed to the franchise sales team without verification. This led to lots of wasted time on bad numbers, or it would be verified by a manual phone call, which seemed to take forever).

FranchiseHelp’s engineers built an automated system to call and/or text leads before approving the request, so the user could verify their contact info pretty much instantly. This is being picked up by some other portals, but not all. And those who implement it are seeing greater success in closing deals.

The Next Generation of Tech Challenges

Franchising is a hard industry for which to predict the future, but let’s give it a shot anyway. We’ve been around long enough to see the writing on the wall.

In our opinion, the franchise industry has issues that tech has yet to address, and here’s how these challenges can be solved.

Beginning with good pipeline management. Franchise Development CRM’s could be a lot better in terms of making sure each lead was in the correct status so salespeople could get in touch with everyone they need to, and really understand how their pipelines are converting. As is, people lose a lot of leads that never get called, and don’t know how to optimize their pipelines. Good statusing and automation could solve numerous problems here.

Also, weekly/quarterly data reporting would make a huge impact. Currently sales teams are pulling together most of their regular reports manually. If the data was well managed (as above) you could easily build automated reports to give an accurate picture of growth without a lot of manual work. This is true for franchise development and also for franchisees.

These forward looking tools can help take the franchise revolution to the next level, and FranchiseHelp (along with our sister companies here at Metric Collective) are thrilled to be on the ground floor developing the tech.

If you’d like to learn more about how our products power some of the biggest brands in franchising, drop us a line. We’d love to talk about how to turbo charge your company’s growth engine.