The (Not So) Secret Metrics to Franchise Sales

Sales team leaders are always searching for new ways to improve processes, shorten the sales cycle, motivate their teams to close more deals and generate more revenue. That being said, a big part of these efforts is knowing which metrics to track. However, franchise sales is different and the overall sales cycle is drastically longer compared to that of other industries. 

New and potential franchisees are often seeking a “once in a lifetime” investment to start their own business and begin a new life path. Now more than ever, we live in a content-first world where people need significant amounts of information before deciding to purchase or invest. While some standard metrics like costs per lead are important, leads aren’t always the most important indicator of success. 

Today, smart franchisors are investing more in marketing because by nature, the process nurtures good leads and eliminates bad ones — ultimately shortening the sales cycle. Sharing the right content and messaging that communicates opportunities to buyers instead of consumers peaks the interest of potential franchisees before they’re connected with a sales team.

Here are two essential marketing metrics that franchisors are now constantly tracking in correlation with their franchise sales.

Marketing-Originated Customer Percent 

The ratio expressed in marketing-originated customer percent shows what new business the marketing team is generating by determining how many new acquisitions began as marketing leads. This is a pretty straight forward formula: new franchisees who started as marketing leads; divided by the total amount of new franchises in a given time period; equals the marketing-originated customer percent. This is a crucial metric for franchisors to follow as they invest more and more in their marketing efforts to sell franchises. 

Marketing-Influenced Customer Percent

Marketing-influenced customer percent considers how many new franchisees one’s marketing team interacted with as leads at some point during the sales cycle. This metric is an effective way to show the influence that marketing has on leads during the long, and often strenuous, franchise sales process. This, like the previous metric, is also extremely quick and easy to calculate. You take the number of new franchisees in a given time period and divide the number of those who interacted with your marketing team. 

For franchisors, it’s becoming more and more important to remember these (not so secret) metrics, as they are now vital components of their reporting process. That said, you can’t simply ignore softer metrics like cost per acquisition, site traffic and conversion rates. However, marketing metrics are now a huge focus in the space of franchise sales. They show how your marketing strategy and approach is affecting your bottom line results. Having an effective and robust marketing strategy, and executing that strategy, is now part of the foundation of franchise sales. These metrics can help franchisors realize just how well their marketing and sales team is performing. If these metrics show more leads are being introduced and influenced by your marketing team, and you have a reliable and capable sales team to convert these leads, then you undoubtedly have a formula for success.