Franchise CRM

Most CRM software is built for one company. One sales team, one customer list, one set of reports, one person at the top who can see everything. That model fits almost every business in the country, which is why the big CRM products are so good at it.

A franchise network is not that shape. It is one head office and a collection of separate businesses, each owned by someone else, each with its own customers, its own staff and its own bank account. They share a brand and a way of working. They do not share a customer list, and they would be alarmed if they did.

That difference sounds small. In practice it changes almost everything a CRM has to do. This post sets out what a franchise CRM needs that a normal one doesn’t, and offers a short list of questions to put to any supplier, including us.

One system, many walls

Start with the question of who sees what.

In a normal CRM, access is about seniority. A sales rep sees their own accounts, a manager sees the team, a director sees everything. The data is one pool and permissions decide how deep each person can dip into it.

In a franchise, access is about ownership. A franchisee in Bristol must see every one of their own customers, quotes and jobs, and none of the franchisee’s in Bath. Head office must see across every franchise, but for a different purpose: not to work the leads, but to understand how the network is doing and to help where it is needed.

So the first thing a franchise CRM has to do is put a wall between each franchise and still let head office look over all of them. Every record belongs to one franchise. Every screen, every search and every report respects that. A generic CRM can be bent into this shape with careful permission settings, but it is bent, not built. One wrong setting and a franchisee can see a neighbour’s customers. We have seen that happen, and it does not go down well.

Leads that arrive at the top and belong at the bottom

A franchise brand advertises nationally and sells locally. The website is one website. The phone number on the van is a local one. When an enquiry comes in through the brand site, somebody has to decide which franchise it belongs to and get it there quickly, before the customer rings a competitor.

In a franchise CRM that is a routine job: the system looks at the postcode, matches it to a territory, and puts the lead in front of the right franchisee with a note of where it came from. If nobody picks it up within a set time, head office can see that too.

A normal CRM has no idea what a territory is. You can add a field for it, but the system will not route on it, report on it or notice when two franchisees are both claiming the same street. If you have read our piece on territory management, you will know how much trouble that last point causes.

Two kinds of customer

In a franchise there are two customer lists, and they have different owners.

The franchisee’s customers are the people who buy the service: the homeowner who books a clean, the parent who signs up for tutoring. Those records belong to the franchise, and the franchisee uses them every day for quotes, bookings, invoices and reminders.

Head office’s customers are the franchisees themselves. Recruiting them, onboarding them, supporting them and, eventually, helping them sell on. That is a sales pipeline and a support desk of its own, and it runs on the same system but on a different set of records.

A franchise CRM carries both. The franchisee’s day-to-day tools and the franchisor’s recruitment pipeline sit side by side, and the link between them is the franchise record itself. A normal CRM will do one of these well and leave you running the other on a spreadsheet, or in a second product that never quite agrees with the first.

The numbers head office needs, without asking

Every franchisor needs to know how each franchise is trading: enquiries, conversion, jobs completed, turnover, outstanding invoices. In most networks that information arrives late, by email, in whatever format each franchisee prefers, and someone at head office spends a day a month typing it into a spreadsheet.

If the franchisee’s quotes and invoices live in the same system as head office’s reports, the monthly return disappears. A quote raised in Nottingham is already in the network figures. Head office sees the total, the trend and the outliers without asking anyone for anything, and the franchisee is spared a job they resent.

That matters most for the management service fee. Where the fee is a percentage of turnover, the turnover figure has to come from somewhere, and a figure the franchisee types in once a month is a figure everyone argues about. A figure that falls out of the invoices they raised is much harder to dispute. The same goes for the marketing fund, which is usually calculated on the same base.

The franchise lifecycle

Businesses in a normal CRM are stable. Customers come and go, but the company itself is one thing from year to year.

A franchise network changes shape all the time. A new franchisee opens and needs a clean, empty area of the system with the brand’s price list and templates already in place. A franchisee buys a second territory and needs to see both without the two bleeding into each other. A franchisee retires and sells, and the customer records, the open jobs and the history have to pass to the buyer intact, with nothing left behind and nothing taken that the agreement says stays. Our post on what happens when a franchisee leaves goes into the value that gets lost when this is done badly.

A franchise CRM treats these as ordinary events with a procedure. A generic CRM treats them as a data migration, which is a project every time.

The brand on every document

Every quote, invoice and email a franchisee sends is the brand talking. Head office cares a great deal about how it looks and what it says. Franchisees, reasonably enough, care about getting it out quickly.

A franchise CRM resolves that by letting head office set the templates and the price list once, and letting each franchise work within them. The franchisee gets a branded quote in a minute without thinking about it. Head office gets consistency without policing it. When the brand changes its look, every franchise changes on the same day.

Questions to ask any supplier

If you are looking at CRM options for a franchise, these are the questions that separate a franchise system from a general one with a franchise brochure. We would expect to be asked them too.

1. Can a franchisee ever see another franchisee’s customers? The answer should be no, by design, not by configuration.
2. How do leads from the brand website reach the right franchise? Ask to see it happen with a postcode.
3. Where does head office’s recruitment pipeline live? In the same system, or somewhere else?
4. How does head office get turnover by franchise? If the answer involves the franchisee sending something, the system is not doing its job.
5. What happens when a franchise is sold? Ask for the procedure, step by step.
6. Who controls the templates and price list? And can a franchise be stopped from changing them?
7. What does a franchisee with two territories see?

A general CRM will have an answer to each of these. The question is how many of the answers begin with “you could set up a workflow that”.

Where Franchise 360 fits

Franchise 360 was built for this shape of business and nothing else. Every franchise has its own walled area with a CRM, quotes, invoicing and scheduling; head office sees across all of them; recruitment and support run in the same system; and the network figures come straight from the franchisees’ own invoices. The CRM and operations page walks through it, and if you would rather see it set up for a network like yours, the franchise management software page has a short form.

If you are still weighing up whether purpose-built software is worth it at your size, this earlier post is the honest version of that argument.