Its surprising how many brands don’t know exactly what it costs them to recruit a franchisee, or how many meetings they need to appoint a suitable franchisee etc etc. Let’s cut to the chase and list out the key KPI’s that Andy Cheetham and his team measure with our clients:
1) Average Cost Per Lead (ACPL) – this is the total marketing spend divided by the number of franchise enquiries. When you first start measuring this you’ll get some odd results as you input a new advertising expense that hasn’t generated leads yet, it skews the kpi’s but once a Franchisor is rolling with a regular pipeline then the figures settle down and become a key measure. e.g £25/lead
2) Total & Average Leads In Month By Month: You need to keep the leads rolling in and when it drops it’s time to change things or commit more budget.
3) Average Leads To Meetings (ALTM) – This is the ratio of how many of those leads you need to generate to result in a meeting and it is an indication of how well received your franchise offering is and how well the leads are being pre qualified. e.g ALTM 1:25 means 1 meeting from 25 leads
4) Average Cost Per Placement: This is the total marketing cost divided by the number of appointments and this is important to be built into the franchise fee. Remember too that the cost of third parties who assist in the recruitment process should be incorporated into this figure. e.g ACPP £4000/franchisee
5) Net Network Size (NNS) – Note the word net here! Mature franchisors shrink as well as grow and the net network size in a mature franchisor can show where the happiness factor is. Over time the impact of franchise departures or terminations becomes sobering reading for a franchisor and so this is a key number to measure. However, elite franchisors look carefully at the number of departures and aim to introduce strategies to minimise losses or even change the overall fee structure or support levels if there is a problem with franchisees leaving the network.
6) Number of Resales: We would think that if 10% of a network changes hands each year there’s nothing too worrying about that. But if 20% of the network is up for sale or changing hands then something is amiss. Analyse why this is because too many resales flags up non renewals down the line so it’s time to act if this % becomes too high – did you appoint franchises to people that you wish you hadn’t, is the model unprofitable for too many?
7) Leads & Placements Per Media: When you accurately track where your leads and sign ups truly come from it can steer your future marketing decisions in the right direction rather than assuming that you need to be at THAT show or in a certain magazine. e.g £x on Website A, £X on magazine B, £X on PR, £X on Expo 1 etc etc. Lime Licensing Groups multi brand / multi sector experience provides valuable insights for our clients as to where the elite franchisors are active/successful/unsuccessful etc etc and whether or not our clients should consider following suit.
If you’re still in the dark ages and aren’t using a CRM system then for goodness sake start doing that and set up keywords and catagories that make it easy and quick to log all of the above.
Lime Licensing Group provides it’s clients with extensive kip’s and expert interpretation of those kpi’s because remember that there are lies, damn lies and statistics! We then benchmark those against what the best in the industry are experiencing and can provide reassurance that you’re on the right track or suggest new activities and direction to move a brand back into a productive phase that helps both the Franchisor and also it’s franchisee network to prosper.