Salesforce CRM for Onboarding Franchisees

If your business is built on the franchise model for expansion, how quickly and smoothly you onboard and train new franchisees is a key factor for growth. Onboarding new franchisees in most organizations involves a number of departments working together – Franchise Development Teams, Operations, Legal, Finance, Technical and Training teams. Other teams may be involved for cases of franchises in new countries that you are expanding into.

The workflow that a new franchisee goes through lends well as a candidate for enablement on the Salesforce platform.

A typical workflow you may have in place for a new franchisee may include steps along the lines of:

1. The prospective franchisee inquires about franchise opportunities. The prospective franchisee could be responding to a campaign or an advertisement that you may want to track
2. The prospect fills out the application forms and submits required documents
3. Your organization may have an internal workflow for various approvals before scheduling interviews for the candidate franchisees
4. The franchisee signs the contract agreements
5. Your organization may have relationships with various entities such as real estate agencies, attorneys, marketing and promotion firms, technology partners to get the franchisee up and running
6. The new franchisee and employees go through training on back office and front office functions
7. The effectiveness of the onboarding process is gauged by both the satisfaction levels of the new franchisees and their business performance
8. The new franchisee sends in various sales and operations reports on an ongoing basis

Manage the prospective franchisees as leads from the time they fill in their applications to when the franchisee agreements are in place. Managing the leads ensure you are following up with inquiries diligently and proactively managing their applications. If you use a robust CRM system like Saleforce for the onboarding process, you find patterns over time and identify success factors for a successful onboarding process. Intelligence on what early stage activities ensure that a new franchisee breaks-even sooner is invaluable for you.