To manage leads and opportunities you will find a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system invaluable.

It will help you track each lead and the activities that are performed in the process to convert that lead into a sale and ensure that process is as effective as it can be.

As a franchisor you have to focus on two types of sale – the first finding new franchisees, the second the process of gaining customers for those franchisees.

You may have heard of CRM packages such as Goldmine, or ACT! They’re very popular for small businesses. You could give each franchisee a copy to manage their leads effectively, however going this route means that you have a number of completely independent CRM systems. Once a lead is passed to the franchisee and is entered into their system, you can no longer see how that lead is being progressed. You’ve effectively lost control of that lead and the franchisee can do what they like with it. Even worse – if the franchisee goes, they have all data for the franchise, the client list, the ongoing leads and you don’t.

The ideal solution is a hosted CRM system – this allows you to use a single system for the whole franchise network, franchisees can only see the data relevant to them, but most importantly you retain control of the data and can see what a franchisee is doing with it. If they’re not dealing with a lead, you can pull it back from them and allocate it to someone else.

Finally by having a single CRM system it is easy to feed the leads which come from various sources, such as the website or a call centre to the right person.