Sales reps spend a disproportionate amount of time hunting down unqualified leads in exchange for meagre closing ratios. If doctors and lawyers produced similar numbers, entire industries would crash. The problem has been, until now, franchisors have had few alternatives. The average sales rep takes nearly two days to respond to a single lead. That’s two days waiting for their interest to melt away or find a more responsive alternative.
The franchising industry is desperately in need of a better route to success, and automation is clearing the way. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are the brains behind the solution. They carry prospects through intelligent conversations and prepare them for human interaction. They qualify franchise leads and assess bot-led conversations to gauge interest. By the time a lead appears on a rep’s desk, they’re ready to buy. Better yet, they’ve provided valuable information about their sales-readiness so that your reps know precisely where to push.
Nurturing Leads
The franchisor, Managed Maintenance, executed its lead qualification strategy to impressive effect. It introduced automation and a robust customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, synchronizing its automation software with its marketing program. This way, it could absorb leads from its existing marketing relationships. It also created a lead scoring process to qualify every lead with
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Email clicks
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Blog and site visits
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Event participation
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Forms
Rather than qualifying leads based purely on interest, it established a point-based system that gave large companies and high-ranking business leaders a higher score. The fleshed-out buying funnel it created was followed by a lead nurturing process for sales that had failed to close. The franchise increased its lead generation by 75% over a year. The cost of the strategy? A mere 18% of its marketing budget. CRM software and strategy are two of the most powerful tools at your disposal. They’re so potent that they can give businesses a 451% increase in qualified leads. They also shorten your sales cycle while boosting your initial leads.
Analytics and Lead Qualification
Lead qualification demands just the right timing and content. AI can analyze your sales calls to generate data on your best odds of success. Not all times of the day are effective, for example. Call in the late afternoon, and you can suffer a distressing 114% reduction in sales. Qualify a lead five minutes after your initial contact, and you can raise your success rates by 21 times. Every detail of your approach can raise or sink your return on investment. Luckily, you have machine learning by your side. It will guide you through your key metrics until you’ve developed an airtight strategy to qualify franchise leads profitably.
Coping with Shortened Attention Spans and Smaller Pockets
Today’s prospects expect instant responses to queries, but they’re far less tolerant of obvious attempts to sell. This leaves franchisors with a box of blunt tools that can do little to carve out a successful path forward. You must qualify franchise leads precisely so that your reps can engage with their authentic curiosities and doubts. AI-driven conversations are quickly replacing manual sales work, and they’re achieving it more intelligently than humans ever could. With the economy ailing and unemployment rates soaring, quality leads are thinning out. The only solution is to achieve profitability with reduced numbers, and that means every lead matters.
Tracking leads is like trying to sort sand grains by color and shape, but that’s precisely the kind of challenge CMR software adores. With Synuma’s AI at your side, you’ll make better choices that push your recruitment results to their highest level. Closing success is finally yours to celebrate.
