You’ve got your diligence process running like a top. Your broker networks are engaged. You’ve got leads flowing. The way Candidates evaluate your brand has changed a lot in the last 3 years. You have to give them more tools to work with the AI they’re using so they have all the context they need to make informed decisions. AI Native brands are going to win.

Give Your Candidates Context

If you’re using AI a lot, you’ve heard the term Context. In the world of ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI tools it means (in brief) the details you bring that you want the AI to focus on instead its general knowledge which is often confused and out of date.

At the FranDev Lab I’m hearing 9 out of 10 Candidates are using AI. Which means they’re asking AI about franchising in general, how to evaluate brands, about markets and models, and about your brand specifically. No AI has as much context about your brand as it needs to be a great diligence partner. If the only thing you give them is your FDD, their AI doesn’t have what it needs to help your Candidates make a good decision.

Where to Start

The good news is that AI is a more thorough reader of your brand materials and content than any Candidate will ever be. AI is going to be the only person outside your marketing team who reads every word. So give your Candidates a huge (and I mean it) packet of Context to give their AI.

You can (and maybe have) put some of this on your website but you can’t rely on AI to find it and you want to go deep for Candidates.

What you should provide:

A single document full of all the relevant information about your brand that qualified Candidates can download and drop right into their AI. I suggest adding it to your Sales Room (I recommend Arrows) right after your Intro/Discovery call.

It should be on-brand but don’t focus too much on design. The top priority is deep, well structured content easily digestible by AI. A simple PDF or even a Word doc is fine.

You should be able to easily get to 50 pages of highly relevant content. (And get AI’s help to write it!) Their AI will love it.

Sections I suggest starting with:

• A Diligence Process Guide: break down your entire diligence process from Intro to Discovery Day and signing. When, what, where, why, and who of each stage. What questions get answered, what' they’ll learn. Set their expectations on the timeline.

• Brand Story & Industry Overview: Give a detailed narrative and timeline about your origin story, your leadership team, and the industry you operate in. Size, growth, demand drivers, even competitive landscape. Give AI something better than whatever it scrapes from the internet when a Candidate asks “tell me about [Brand].”

• Your Support & Infrastructure: what you provide on an ongoing basis — field support, marketing, technology, operations, vendor relationships. Everyone talks about this, ,go deep and specific. Reiterate what’s in your FDD. Talk about the why for everything you offer. Include testimonials about how useful your tech is. Answer the questions they’ll never ask about how they operate.

• Roadmap to Open: Detail the full journey from signing the FA to opening day for a typical Franchisee with both a narrative and a timeline. From the immediate next steps, to any location/site search, build out, acquiring equipment, training, and launch. Tell them who they’ll be working with. You want AI to be able to answer their questions and build them a plan.

• Who Thrives at [Brand]: personality traits, backgrounds, skills, motivations. Include real owner snapshots that show the range. Be specific enough that AI can pattern-match against the Candidate’s own self-description and start connecting them to your brand. You want their AI to say “It looks like your background is a great fit!”

• Day in the Life of Ownership: what does a Tuesday look like? What the owner does, what you hire for, what the franchisor handles. How do they spend their time? Candidates are making a lifestyle decision — give AI something concrete to anchor that conversation.

• Decision & Validation Tools: any tools you already give them or use. Self-assessment, Excel workbooks, territory definitions, etc.

You’ll notice a lot of this is what you’d cover on your milestone calls in your diligence process and at Discovery Day. Your Candidates’ AI isn’t hearing these things so you need to give it the information your Candidates need.

So…now what?

Compiling that information feels overwhelming.

But you should have Discovery Day recordings and materials and call transcripts to use as source material if nothing else.

Collect all that and use AI to organize it into the documents I suggest above. It will probably take longer to collect the materials than create the documents.

And if you need help, I’m happy to talk. And…if you don’t have solid Franchise Diligence Call transcripts, we should talk about Call Catalyst AI, the AI tool built specifically for franchise diligence calls.

HubSpot has all the tools you need to create projections and reporting on the Deal in your Franchise Sales pipeline that are expected to close. The setup and tools are simple and easy to use. You just need to process and diligence to use them well.

Why This Matters

The whole point of lead reporting, pipeline reviews, even CRMs comes back to the answering the question: what’s going to close? If you can’t answer that confidently from your CRM data, what are you even doing?

Close Date, Deal Probability, and FDD Cooling Off Ends give you the foundation for weighted pipeline Reports to answer that question using data. Add Units/Territories and FA Revenue and you have real, data-backed understanding of whats in your pipeline.

The Three Data Points

Close Date

This is an obvious one. Close Date is a built in property. While a Deal is open, its the expected close date. When its closed, is the actual close date.

This is the property that tells you the when. If the Deal could close this month, the Close Date should reflect that.

To manage Close Date you need:

• To set a default Close Date based on your actual sales cycle for Closed Won Deals.

• Reps to maintain it

• For it to reflect the reality of the FDD Cooling Off period. (see more below).

Setting a Default Close Date

Set a default number based on your data. Not what you think your sales cycle should be. Review the at least twice a year. You can set a default in Deal settings or for more control you can calculate it and set it when a Deal is created with a workflow.

Maintaining Close Date

Closed Dates in the past on open deals are bad data which gives you bad reporting and leads to bad decisions. Close Dates should be maintained throughout the sales process as the decision evolves. When are they coming to Discovery Day? When does the Cooling Off period end? When is the candidate going on vacation? As reps check in on the process the should update the Close Date.

Conditional Properties can prompt reps to check and update the date whenever the Deal Stage changes and Deal Tags that flag lapsed Close Dates for review bring reporting visibility to the pipeline.

Deal Probability

No Deal is 100% likely to close, not matter how excited the Candidate is. That’s what Deal Probability is for.

You can set default probabilities on your Pipeline Stages. A Deal at the Application stage is statistically less likely to close than one at Discovery Day. That automatic assignment gives you a baseline without asking reps to set it manually on every Deal.

Review your stage-based Probabilities twice a year — same cadence as your Close Date defaults. What percent of Deals that reached that stage went on to win? There’s your default.

You get pretty good data is Reps do nothing.

They can also override the value based on their judgement, patterns, rules, etc. If a Candidate is more likely to close, they can adjust the number. Of course you will want to check in on this over time, but you’re probably asking Reps this question in your pipeline reviews anyway. Let the dat answer the question.

FDD Cooling Off Ends

Here’s were you need a custom property. The FDD Cooling Off period governs when you can close a Deal. So create a property in HubSpot to automatically calculates 15 days from FDD signing.

Then if your Close Date is before your FDD Cooling Off Ends for the Deal, you can automatically push the Close Date out with an automation. It’s a little more configuration but the accurate reporting you get out of it worth the minor effort.

Build some Reports

You’ll want:

1. a report that is weighted Deals (Probability x Deals)

   

2. a report on Units, Probability x Units/Territories they’re considering stored on the Deal

   

3. a report on Revenue, Probability x Deal Amount.

So…now what?

You know what to do:

• Set a good default Close Date.

• Make sure it’s being maintained (use a tag on Deals with Lapsed Close Date, have reps update as the Deal advances)

• Set good default pipeline Probabilities.

• Allows reps to set it on a per-Deal basis as warranted.

• Use FDD Cooling Off Ends to make sure your Close Dates aren’t in the wrong window.

• Build the reports.

Reply if you need help, happy closing!

There are 3 main archetypes for Franchise Sales Pipelines and HubSpot needs to be configured to align with the archetype you’re using otherwise you’ll have friction and frustration in your process and your data.

3 Franchise Pipeline Archetypes

If your frandev sales approach doesn’t match your HubSpot setup you’ll have trouble tracking leads and opportunities, you’ll probably drop the ball on qualification because you’re working against your own system, and reporting will be a mess.

There are 3 pipeline archetypes that can be defined by how qualification is handled. The archetype you’re operating determines how HubSpot should be configured — Lifecycle Stages, Lead Status, Deal Pipeline stages, automation triggers, reporting, even views.

You’re probably running one of these right now. HubSpot should be configured to support the archetype your operating. If it isn’t, you’re fighting your own system.

Archetype 1: Basic Pre-qualification

This is probably the most common archetype in franchise sales: get a lead, an SDR or Appointment Setting does a first pass pre-qualification books a Discovery Meeting with a Franchise Director with pre-qualified leads. At that point the director would work a Deal through the rest of the sales process from Territory, FDD Review, Discovery Day and Closing. If you use a Franchise Application if comes after the Deal is created.

What this means for HubSpot: You’re working Contacts and Deals. That’s feasible it just means you need to be on top of your data model, your Lifecycle Stages, and how you manage records—your Leads can’t just be a big pool of names. You need process and systems to support the qualification workflow.

You also need a good handoff from the Appointment Setter to the Director so the process doesn’t feel clunky to the franchise candidate. You also need clear qualification criteria and a feedback loop from the Director back to the Appointment Setter.

Archetype 2: Heavy Pre-qualification

A lot of Franchises will nurture leads but require a completed Franchise Application before a Lead can meet with a Director. Brands with a high lead volume (especially if they have attracted a high level of unqualified leads in the past), high capital requirements, or with limited territory availability will often use this approach.

What this means for HubSpot: Your filtering and nurturing engine has to do heavy lifting here to drive qualified candidates to the application without alienating or losing them. Use a custom object in HubSpot for the Franchise Application to more effectively manage the process of reviewing, scoring, and accepting them.

Strong research content, a solid nurturing/retargeting strategy, and Brand recognition will help your out massively. An application is easy for a qualified candidate to “remember to do later” and never come back to, especially if similar concepts don’t require the application up front and the candidate can talk to other Directors with less effort.

Archetype 3: In-Pipeline Qualification

This is a streamlined approach that tracks the frandev process from inquiry to Closed Won using the Deal record even though information may be stored on the Contact record, Application Object etc. Most Brands using this approach still use an SDR or Appointment Setting to qualify up front they just always create a Deal to work. This isn’t a wrong approach. It has a lot to recommend it. But it does take some care to measure correctly.

What this means for HubSpot: Your Deal Pipeline pulls double duty including unqualified and qualified opportunities. An unqualified lead is one in the first stage and qualified leads are in stages 2 and later. Your reporting needs to account for that.

Handoff between the SDR/Appointment Setter and the Director is more streamlined, your pipeline velocity is easier to measure, and so are your conversion rates. You just have to be careful filtering Deals and how you define leads in conversion because its easy to conflate them. it also require a little more care to automate nurturing and reactivation.

A Note on Franchise Applications

Wherever you use a Franchise Application in your process please use a Custom Object in HubSpot. This gives you cleaner data, a pipeline for tracking the process, and much better reporting. Stuffing application data into Contact properties or using external systems will just make a mess of your process and your data.

What About the HubSpot Leads Object?

I get asked this occasionally by people who have used Salesforce in other industries. HubSpot designed the Leads object for B2B sales. Its designed to track a company and find the buyers inside it. That’s obviously not how franchise sales works. Stick with Contacts, Deals, and Custom Objects.

Which Archetype Are You Running?

Check whether your HubSpot setup actually supports the archetype of your FranDev process. Friction and frustration with your system, process, and especially data and reporting can often be traced to misalignment between your process and how you have HubSpot set up.

In a year where there have been too many HubSpot updates to keep track of, I’m taking this Thanksgiving week to note 25 I’m thankful for because they’ve made managing HubSpot for franchisors better in some meaningful way, large and small.

The 25 HubSpot Updates to be thankful for:

1. Time Since and Time Until Properties

What it is: New calculated property types that count days between today and a date property—either in the past (Time Since) or future (Time Until).

How I use it: I create Time Until properties for tracking days until Close Date, franchise agreement expirations, and onboarding deadlines. Time Since properties track days elapsed since FDD signing, territory selection, or last broker contact. These power aging deal reports, workflow triggers, and executive dashboards showing how long deals have been stuck at critical milestones.

2. SmartCRM Enterprise…for $75/mo!

What it is: HubSpot made some great enterprise features—Sandbox, Custom Events, Custom Objects, and Field-level permissions—available at $75/month instead of requiring full Enterprise Hub licenses.

How I use it: FranDev Lab upgraded immediately. I recommend this to every client who doesn’t have Enterprise Hubs yet. The Sandbox (for building and testing without touching live data) and Field permissions are two immediately useful features for protecting your Franchise data.

3. New Workflow Trigger Picker

What it is: Redesigned workflow enrollment trigger interface with unified search and an explore view that surfaces available trigger options.

How I use it: Some people in the HubSpot community didn’t like this. I love it. It makes finding triggers faster and there are a lot of powerful approaches to triggering workflows that were previously harder to find and that many admins overlooked.

4. Custom Properties on Meeting Records

What it is: Ability to create custom properties directly on Meeting records, treating them more like a standard object.

How I use it: FranDev Lab’s Call Catalyst AI uses these custom properties to store Scoring data for diligence calls, whether a meeting needs to be reviewed, and lots of other data.

5. Data Studio and Datasets Updates

What it is: Major improvements to HubSpot’s reporting infrastructure, with Datasets being the standout feature for creating curated, safe reporting data sources. The power of these updates is hard to overstate.

How I use it: I create pre-filtered Datasets with custom metrics that franchises can use for reporting. It makes building sophisticated reporting faster and far less error prone because it doesn’t require everyone to be experts at filters and data models.

6. Board View on More Index Pages

What it is: Kanban-style board views available on Contact and Company Index Pages, grouped by dropdown properties.

How I use it: Any dropdown properties that you want to see either as a process (Discovery Day registration, Lead Status, etc.) or as “category buckets” like leads by FDD Status (”Not Sent, “FDD Sent”, “FDD Executed”, “Cooling Off”, “Blackout”, etc.) can be visualized as a board and not just a list.

7. Meetings Index Page

What it is: A dedicated Index Page for viewing, filtering, and managing all Meeting records in one place.

How I use it: Admins can use this for reviewing problems with Meeting records or data. Dales/Development leaders can you use it for quick overview of their team’s meetings (Today, last week, etc). Combine with Outcomes and custom properties like the Call Catalyst AI Score for a meeting and you get a powerful way to stay on top of diligence meetings.

8. Breeze Assistants and Knowledge Vaults

What it is: Custom AI assistants that can reference uploaded business knowledge through Knowledge Vaults, making them contextually aware of your specific processes and information.

How I use it: I create franchise-specific Breeze Assistants using knowledge vaults loaded up with process documentation and policies to give teams on-demand sidekicks to help them with their day-to-day tasks and answer questions.

9. The New Theme

What it is: Visual design refresh of the HubSpot interface with improved contrast and cleaner aesthetics.

How I use it: It’s a great design refresh and the increased contrast is easier on the eyes.

10. New Segment Filter Builder

What it is: Redesigned interface for building Segment (List) filters.

How I use it: The new builder and preview make building complex Segments easier. And building Segments is a major part of making HubSpot work for Franchisors.

11. Index Page Report View

What it is: Ability to switch any filtered Index Page view to Report View, instantly creating visualizations of the filtered records.

How I use it: This is my go-to tool for quick pipeline diagnostics. Filter the Deal Index to Aging Deals and visualize the Deal Stage with Pie Graph, for example.

12. Brand Context for AI

What it is: Centralized location to define brand voice, positioning, and guidelines that AI features can reference when generating content.

How I use it: This is a “checklist” implementation item, but the more you use HubSpot for content, the more important this is. Its the foundation I hope to see HubSpot build on so we can provide even more context to tailor AI for franchisors using HubSpot.

13. Conditional Center Column Cards and Tabs

What it is: Ability to show or hide Record cards and tabs based on property values, creating dynamic layouts that adapt to record uses.

How I use it: The easy win here is to create different Contact and Deal record experiences not just for Teams (which was possible before) but for the state of record. If a Contact is a broker, show the “Broker” tab with data and reports about their leads and relationships. If a Deal has made it past Territory selection, show a card with their Territory data.

14. Create Properties with Breeze

What it is: AI-assisted property creation that can generate properties from natural language descriptions.

How I use it: Right now this works best with simple properties (eg not Rollups, Calculations, etc.) but I’m looking forward to this improving.

15. Phone Number Validation in Workflows

What it is: Built-in workflow actions to validate phone number format, set country codes, and standardize formatting without external tools.

How I use it: I set up workflows that validate phone (and mobile) number data any time it changes to minimize bad data and make sure the records are SMS-ready.

16. URL Property Type

What it is: New property type specifically for URLs, with proper formatting.

How I use it: No more unvalidated Single List Text props for URLs. I commonly create URL properties in HubSpot for mapping relationships to documents or records in other systems.

17. Highly Sensitive Data Properties

What it is: Enhanced security for properties containing highly sensitive data like tax IDs, this provides additional access controls and excluding them from certain features.

How I use it: HubSpot properties can store “normal” data, sensitive data, and highly sensitive data. It’s a violation of HubSpot terms and a big legal and security risk to store your data incorrectly.

18. Color Coded Dropdown Options

What it is: Visual color coding for dropdown property options, making them easier to scan and select.

How I use it: Color code dropdowns anywhere it makes sense. FDD Execution Status is a common one.

19. Meetings Data in Custom Report Builder

What it is: Meetings available as a data source in Custom Report Builder.

How I use it: This is an ideal way to build build reports on meetings: Meetings created this week, scheduled for this week, outcome by Rep, etc.

20. New Stage Properties: Date Entered Current Stage and Time in Current Stage

What it is: Automatic system properties tracking when a Deal record entered its current stage and how long it’s been there.

How I use it: These make aging deal identification and lot easier and give us a lot more flexibility for automation in Deal stages.

21. Generate Calculated Property Formulas with AI

What it is: Breeze assistant within calculated property creation that generates formulas based on natural language descriptions.

How I use it: It doesn’t always get it perfect (it is AI after all) but any time I need to create a new formula field I try this first. The most common error it makes on basic formulas is picking the wrong properties, which is easy to correct and faster the writing the entire formula from scratch.

22. Rename HubSpot Defined Objects

What it is: Ability to rename standard HubSpot objects using terminology that fits your business.

How I use it: Probably 75% of portals I work in renamed at least one object the week this was released. Aligning HubSpot with your internal terminology makes every conversation less confusing.

23. Deal Metrics Customization

What it is: The metrics appear on the Deal Index Page header can now, finally, be customized.

How I use it: Add metrics to see things like “Total Territories” in the pipeline at a glance.

24. Enroll Records in Workflows from a Card

What it is: One-click workflow enrollment to trigger specific automations without navigating to the workflows tool.

How I use it: Think about any automation that could or should be triggered by a User. It could be turned into a “quick action” like this. Creating a Deal, Disqualifying a Lead, Sending a Contact to Non-marketing status, etc.

25. Property Fill Rate in Settings

What it is: Visual indicator in property settings showing what percentage of records have values populated in that property.

How I use it: I use this constantly when auditing franchise portals or reviewing properties. Are they really being used? Is the data as complete as we think it is?

We’re halfway through Q4. You’re focused on closing the year, it’s also time to think about 2026 and what to do differently. Here are 4 reports most Franchisors don’t have that will help start your analysis and thinking about what you can do to improve your 2026 results.

Why this matters

What do you want out of your 2026 Franchise pipeline? To award a lot of great territories and qualified applicants, obviously.

There’s a lot to that.

You can’t fix what you don’t see and day-to-day reporting that franchisors typically focus on doesn’t give you the insights you need to improve your diligence process overall.

Today we’re going to focus on two important aspects of managing a franchise diligence pipeline:

• Deals staying on track

• Mitigating needless losses

4 Reports for Reviewing 2025

Average Time in Stage: Lost vs Won Deals

First question for you: do you actually know how long your Won deals spend in each stage? Most franchisors don’t.

Second question: could you handle leads more effectively if you could spot slowdowns sooner?

This report shows you both Won and Lost time-in-stage, side by side.

Look for significant gaps. If Won deals spend 4 days in Territory Selection but Lost deals spent 12 days there, you’ve found a place where deals stall before they die. That 12-day mark is a leading indicator of failure.

Use what you find to implement aging deal tags and processes based on Won deal timings. If Won deals move through FDD in 5 days, any deal that hits 8 days is off track.

Days to Close by Month: Closed Won and Lost Deals

This shows velocity for Won and Lost deals across every month in 2025.

Look for seasonality in Won deals first. Do you close faster in January than July? Then check for acceleration or deceleration trends over time. Are deals getting faster or slower?

Compare what you see to what you think your velocity is. Do you think its 90 days but the data shows 120? Do you think you’re consistent but then find 25-day swings between months?

Closed Lost Category by Stage

You should have normalized categories for why you lose Deals…and your team should be using them correctly. If not, fix that before analyzing.

Look for qualification failures showing up late. Are you losing late-stage deals to net worth or liquidity requirements? That should’ve been caught earlier. Same with disinterest in the concept—why are leads making it to Discovery Day if they’re not interested?

Are you seeing ghosting or failed to contact after Discovery calls? What’s breaking down in your process that leads disappear at that point?

Late-stage losses to early-stage problems mean wasted time and burned credibility.

Closed Lost Category: All Deals

Set the date range to Close Date is This Year and you have an overall breakdown of why deals died in 2025. Compare it to the by-stage report for context.

Focus on Bad Fit and Failed to Contact volume first. If they’re high, break down by lead source. Where are you getting leads you can’t contact or that aren’t qualified?

Any category over 20% of total Closed Lost requires investigation. That’s systematic.

For example: If a big slice of your Lost Deals are due to financing falling through, what should you be doing differently earlier in the pipeline? Losing 25% of late-stage deals to financing is a huge problem and a lot of misplaced effort.

So…now what?

Create these reports for 2025. If you can’t or don’t have the data, let’s talk. Look for the patterns. Identify your opportunities, then figure out what you’re changing in 2026 to fix them.

Sales rooms are standard in B2B sales, but most franchisors aren’t using them because franchise-specific CRMs don’t offer the feature and can’t integrate with modern tools. If you’re using HubSpot, you can set yourself apart by giving prospects a branded home base for diligence—and getting visibility into who’s actually engaged.

Why this matters

A branded sales room that walks prospects through diligence gives them a home base and sets you apart from franchisors sending scattered email attachments. It shows prospects the kind of organized support they’ll get as franchisees.

For your team, you get visibility into what’s actually happening between calls. You’ll know if prospects are engaged…or not…long before they no-show the next call.

Franchise Sales Deal Rooms in HubSpot

Arrows Sales Rooms

Arrows is a tool for creating best-in-class deal rooms with a native HubSpot integration so good that HubSpot uses it for their own customers.

Its a fantastic tool for doing this for your prospective franchisees.

You’ll create a template once with your branding, documents, resources and entire diligence process. Use automation to generate a deal room for each qualified lead. The integration handles everything: it pulls in Contact data, logs activity in your Deal timeline, creates new Contacts when stakeholders appear, and syncs over 60 data points into HubSpot properties you can use for workflows and reporting.

What Should You Include?

A FranDev Sales Room is a continuation of the lead gen and qualification process and your prospect’s home base throughout diligence. Include resources and inform, engage, and excite your prospects.

• In depth information about your franchise and model.

• Automatically-created links to the next scheduled meeting in your process.

• A profile and video from the rep they’re working with.

• Workbooks and other resources you use on operations calls.

• Testimonial videos from owners.

• Testimonial videos from customers.

• Links to specific content (articles, podcast episodes, YouTube videos) for each step of the diligence process.

• Territory descriptions and requirements.

• Profiles of the brand’s target customers.

• Links to any forms they need to submit (your Application, Discovery Day event registration, etc.)

• Tasks to collect documents (PFS, Discovery Day travel receipts for reimbursement, etc.)

• Example development timelines.

• A link to download the FDD for review.

• Executive profiles.

• Brand history.

Anything that is part of your diligence process.

Share

What Prospects Get

Your prospect opens a professional, organized space with your branding. Documents and resources are organized, easy to find, and up to date. The whole process is laid out step by step. Engaging brand content like videos, podcasts, owner and customer testimonials are always front and center.

When they need to show the FDD to their spouse or share information with partners, they forward one link—not a chain of emails and attachments.

Subscribe now

Arrows surfaces engagement in HubSpot

I already said it: Arrows syncs over 60 data points into HubSpot. That dat can be used for reporting, automation, notifications, and you can see all that activity right in the Deal timeline.

You’ll know when someone opens the room and when they engage with content. When they share the room with someone else, Arrows automatically creates a Contact in HubSpot and tracks their engagement too.

So…now what?

Do your prospects have a central, branded home base for you diligence process? If not, let’s talk about how you can do this with Arrows and HubSpot.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Your HubSpot data model determines what you can track, report on, and automate. Get these right and the rest of your HubSpot setup has something solid to build on.

Why this matters

Your HubSpot data model governs everything else. It determines what data you store, how you access it, how you can use it, what you can automate, what you can report on, and how useful it is in the AI era. A bad data model and bad data make it really challenging to get good results.

This isn’t just true of HubSpot. It’s every business system your Franchise uses.

A data model that mirrors your Franchise’s business makes everything else possible.

If your Franchise implemented HubSpot without planning out your data model needs, you’re making your data messier every day. Its like building a house with no blueprints.

This isn’t every object you’ll use in HubSpot. It’s the core set that makes franchise development work. Get these right and everything else becomes easier.

The primary Objects you should be using in HubSpot.

Contacts: Track All Your Critical People

Obviously, your leads need Contact records. You should also have Contact records for Brokers who bring you deals. When your leads become Franchisees, you need their Contact records to reflect that. You should also have key operational contacts like your franchisee’s managers in HubSpot. Even if you use another system for managing those communications, having these in HubSpot ensures your systems are in sync and your records are up to date.

Make sure you’re identifying and tracking all these critical people. They all belong in Contacts and they need to be distinguished from each other and properly associated with other records like…

Deals and Pipeline: for Your New FA Opportunities

Also obvious: this is how you track your diligence process. A well-designed Deal pipeline enables good reporting and automation.

When do you create the Deal for a lead?

This decision depends on your sales approach and lead volume. The decision is: before or after the discovery call? Its also be related to whether you use an Application (see below) and how much you’re nurturing Leads pre-discovery.

Subscribe now

You should also use Deals for Transfers/Resales

Resales and Transfers are infrequent compared to new FAs, but they’re high-risk and high-effort. They’re multiparty transactions with more moving pieces than a new FA sale. They need more attention and have a completely different process.

Create a dedicated Deal Pipeline specifically for handling Resales and Transfers. Different process, different data needs, different pipeline.

Companies: Owner Groups

Use Companies to keep records and data for the legal entities your Franchisee Owners establish once they’re in place. The Company will often have different information than the Owners and Locations (legal address, entity name and type, etc)

You’ll also use Companies for other records like partners and vendors, but make sure you’re using them to organize Owner Groups and associating all the Owners and Locations (see below) with the Company record.

Custom Object: Applications

Not all franchises have a long form application as part of their diligence. If you do—and it’s an in-depth form collecting lots of details—you should create a Custom Object for it. Contact properties and forms are not sufficient.

Here’s why Contact properties don’t work:

• Applications have distinct reporting and automation needs.

• Applications have different data needs than other records.

• Applications have a review and approval process so they need a pipeline.

• One Contact may need to submit an application more than once so Contact properties cause problems.

• Multiple Contacts can be involved in one new FA so you need discrete Applications for each partner.

Share

Custom Object: Agreements

Critical information your teams need gets locked inside Franchise Agreement PDFs. Your team needs that data to do their jobs, but most of them don’t have—and don’t need—access to the actual contracts. Capture the critical data like Agreement Terms, Development Timelines, etc. on properties on the Agreement record.

Plus, Agreements get renewed and amended. They relate to multiple objects: the Contacts who are parties to them, the Locations/Territories they cover, the New FA Deal they were part of, the Owner Group entity. If you’re tracking all that data in scattered properties across different records, you’re making it impossible to find.

Here’s what works: Create a single record for each Agreement. Associate it with all the related records—Contacts, Locations, the Deal, the Company.

This makes the data easy to find. It also lets you use rollup and sync properties to surface Agreement data exactly where your team needs it, without duplicating it everywhere.

Custom Object: Locations/Territories

You need to capture the relationships between individual franchise Locations/Territories and the Contacts and Owner Group Company. You also need to track Agreement data that relates to specific Locations/Territories.

Without this in HubSpot: Tracking is manual and painful. Something as simple as emailing all Owners in specific states becomes a project instead of a quick filter and send.

With a Locations Custom Object: You create a record for each Locations/Territories Associate it with the franchisee Contact, the owner Company, and the Agreement. Now tracking is automatic, and tasks like state-specific communications are easy.

Wondering why a Custom Object and not the Listing from the Object Library? Most integrations don’t support the Object Library yet, so using the Listing Object limits what you can do for now. That will change one day, but for now a Custom Object is the best choice.

So…now what?

Review your HubSpot data model. Look at what you’re tracking and what you’re not.

Where are the gaps? What data do you need that’s currently scattered, buried, or missing? What relationships between records aren’t captured?

Fix those gaps now. The longer you wait, the more manual work you’re doing and the more opportunities you’re missing.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Technical audits of HubSpot—checking what features you’re not using, what’s configured wrong, what you’re paying for but not getting—are useful. But they’re not the most important audit.

The most important HubSpot audit is one you can conduct without any help: Asking whether it is delivering the business value you need. Here are 10 questions you can ask to start your own audit.

Why This Matters

The 10 questions in this Brief let you audit your own HubSpot implementation by diagnosing where you’re getting leverage and where you’re not. Answer them honestly. Investigate the “no” answers. That’s where you’re missing business value.

This is far more important than whether you have a specific setting configured correctly (which is what most HubSpot audits focus on).

Some gaps you can fix yourself. Some need franchise-focused HubSpot expertise. But knowing where the gaps are is how you start getting real value from the tool you’re already paying for.

The 10 Question Self Audit

For Franchise Sales

Is there a single report that captures signings projected for this month that everyone uses and agrees on?

There should be only one source of truth in your sales process. The data. Not 5 different spreadsheets. Not guesses. Not feelings. And no “that report is wrong” allowed. If the data is right, the report is right.

A well defined process that is being followed produces franchise sales outcomes and data that tells you exactly what is going on.

Without that, you end up with 10 different stories about how things are going, no accountability and no ability to forecast outcomes.

Does the sales team have actionable insight about the state of the pipeline?

Knowing how many open leads you have in each stage of the pipeline is important but not enough to run an effective due diligence process.

If HubSpot is well configured, you’re automatically collecting all the data your Reps need to understand what’s going on in your Franchise Sales pipeline:

• Which Prospects are actively engaging in the diligence process

• Which Deals have stalled

• Where your Deals are bottlenecking

• Which Prospects in your pipeline are the best fit for your Franchise

• etc.

Without that data at their fingertips prospects fall through the cracks, your process becomes reactive, your pipeline is black box, and your leadership has no visibility into what is impacting your signings.

Can you see the contributions of Broker networks and individual brokers and are you nurturing relationships with those Brokers?

Developing mutually beneficial relationships with Brokers requires more than the occasional update about a current lead. And you need more visibility that how many current leads are sourced from Brokers.

• How leads has an individual Broker brought your Franchise?

• How many of those have you Won?

• Which Brokers have the most Wins? The highest Win Rate?

• Have any consistent producers gone silent?

• Are you regularly communicating with your Brokers?

• Are you regularly communicating 1:1 with your best Brokers?

If you don’t have the data, you have to go on guesses. That’s no way to grow your Franchise or to develop strong, mutually beneficial relationships with Brokers.

Share

For Marketing

Can Marketing see Lead volume by Lead Source, Vendor, and critical dimensions?

Hopefully you have new leads coming in from lots of different sources. Your Franchise website, paid search ads, paid social ads, AI, LinkedIn, organic social media, etc. You also have vendors managing some or all of those channels.

You need to know a lot about lead sources to understand what is happening, diagnose problems, and find opportunities. It isn’t enough to just know a lead is from a paid source or not. Or which vendor. Getting a picture of how a lead interacts with your marketing isn’t optional.

If you haven’t done the foundational work to collect this data, you’re going to struggle the second anything changes.

Can Marketing see the Won Deals and Conversion Rate by Lead Source and by Vendor?

The comprehensive visibility into lead source, vendor, and other critical dimensions we just discussed also give you the ability to report on which of them produce the most Won Leads. Its an obvious connection, if you need to be doing both of these things well.

• Which Sources or Vendors have the best Win Rate?

• Which have the best Cost per Won Territory?

• Which contribute the largest percentage of your signings?

• Which are the fastest to Win? The slowest?

Lots of Franchises struggle to connect specific lead data to signings or settle for only reporting on whether a Closed Won lead was Broker or “Organic” (e.g. not Broker). That’s not enough data to make decisions that can drive growth.

Can Marketing see Qualified Leads by Geography?

Your Franchise probably has geographies where you’re focused on growth. This strategy needs to make it into Marketing strategy and into your HubSpot implementation and data.

Once a lead has been qualified and their Territory of Interest has been vetted, reporting this data back to Marketing can help them focus their nurturing, geotarget ads and campaigns, and evaluate which approaches work best in specific geographies.

This is an area where Franchises often fail to close the loop and miss opportunities to target their campaigns more effectively.

Can Marketing dynamically tailor website, email, and nurturing content and experiences for Leads?

Personalization rules the world of modern marketing. HubSpot can dynamically personalize what prospects see and receive based on their profile, market, engagement history, where they are in the sales process, and a lot of other data and that is how you engage modern franchise prospects:

• Landing pages that reflect the market the lead is in

• Targeted “next steps” content for prospects on your website

• Forms that adapt to what you know about leads

• Dynamic emails that address where they’re at in their journey

If you’re treating your best-fit prospects exactly the same as your worst-fit prospects, you’re doing your leads and your franchise a massive disservice.

For all Teams

For your teams operating in HubSpot, are their Top 3 KPIs available in HubSpot Dashboards?

The systems that teams work in should always collect the data that (1) is necessary to do their jobs and (2) reveals their outcomes. All data essential to your teams’ work should be in HubSpot for easy reporting.

A Dashboard for each team that displays their top KPIs and drill downs with supporting materials (trends, historical context, breakdowns) gives your Franchise to tools and visibility to keep everyone on the same page.

If your teams don’t have HubSpot Dashboard that reflect their top KPIs, that’s a signal that your data and process is disconnected, messy, and unreliable.

Is the unstructured and qualitative data that predicts outcomes being captured in HubSpot?

AI tooling gives your Franchise massive power and leverage when combined with data like call transcripts and summaries, emails, notes, etc. Useful data used to be buried in those places but can now be used to drive outcomes for your franchise sales:

• Content personalization

• AI lead scoring

• Updating records automatically

• And a lot more

If you’re not making sure this unstructured data is getting into HubSpot and adopting new AI tools, you’re losing leverage in your diligence process, missing out on opportunities to improve your outcomes, and falling behind.

Are team members using HubSpot AI every day to work better?

HubSpot has LOTS of AI features that improve day-to-day work. Breeze Assistants can answer questions about your FDD or explain processes and policies. AI tooling can create landing pages and content. It can help summarize the status of records. Agents that help with repetitive tasks. The list gets longer every week.

If your team isn’t AI-savvy and adopting time-saving tools, you’re going to face real challenges.

How to Conduct Your Audit

Go through each question.

Answer honestly.

Dive in with your admin or get help from me at FranDev Lab to uncover why you aren’t getting what you need from HubSpot. Sometimes the fixes are simple, but sometimes they belie and deeper problem with how HubSpot is setup and used.

I’ll cover 4 Breeze Assistants you can create inside HubSpot to level up your team’s AI tools right now. If you have the documentation already (and you do for at least a few of these) you can give your team custom AI tools right where they work in less than 15 minutes.

What are Breeze Assistants?

Breeze Assistants are like a Claude Project or ChatGPT CustomGPT that runs inside your HubSpot portal. They have access to your HubSpot settings and records.`

Why this matters

In short: better results, even for people new to AI.

Working with AI is the most effective when it’s in your flow of work and when it has the right context. Breeze Agents are a way to provide team- or task-specific tools in HubSpot with all the context your team needs.

This makes it a lot easier for people to use AI and get consistent results—they don’t need to understand how to create and bring the right context to an external chatbot. It also prevents your team from having to take your data to an external chatbot (which can also be a data exfiltration risk).

The 4 Assistants

Start in Breeze Studio

To build these, you’ll need to enable Breeze in your portal. Here are some instructions to get started and you may need to enable a Beta feature, depending on your setup. Reply to this if you need help and we can talk. Once your settings are in place, go to Breeze Studio in your navigation, find the Assistants tab and get started using the Create assistant button.

An FDD Helper

Give your Fran Dev reps quick answers to anything in the FDD, including approved language and recommendations and things they shouldn’t or can’t say. You don’t always want Reps going deep on FDD content, but they should have it at their fingertips.

How to build it:

1. Create a knowledge vault with a PDF of your most recent FDD.

2. If you have (or want to create) additional information like how to answer specific questions or questions they should not answer, just include those documents in the knowledge vault too. It accepts a lot of common file types like PDF and Word.

3. Attach the Knowledge Vault to the Assistant.

4. Name the Assistant, give it a description, initial welcome message and icon.

5. Give it instructions to answer questions from the FDD without making up information or referring to any sources not in the Knowledge Vault.

6. Publish it.

Tip: Have Breeze write your Assistant Instructions for you

Give Breeze a high-level description of what you want the assistant to accomplish. I like to use voice dictation to describe my requirements and preferred behavior. Generally you don’t need more than about 250 words to start. Then ask it to "give me a prompt that will be fast, accurate, and precise every time." Use that in the custom Assistant you’re creating.

Share

A Process Explainer

Provide real time answers to your Teams’ “how do I…?” questions right where they work so they don’t have to guess or go to outside systems to search for process documentation—which we know just means they wouldn’t do it.

1. Download your process documentation into PDF, Word, or Markdown format. Most tools support an export like this.

2. Create a Knowledge Vault with all these files and add it to your custom Assistant.

3. Provide instructions that tell it to use the information in the Knowledge Vault to answer users’ questions about how to complete tasks.

4. Name the Assistant, give it a description, initial welcome message and icon.

5. Publish it.

A Sales Response Helper

Turn your sales training and artifacts into a dynamic assistant that can help reps while they’re on calls. Reps can focus on the call and still get backup to questions—hard or easy, rare or common—in seconds. When you have updates to any of your materials, you can roll them out to the team immediately.

1. Collect the sales reference and training materials you provide to you Reps.

2. Create a Knowledge Vault and upload the files, adding it to your custom Assistant.

3. Provide instructions that tell the Assistant to answer any question using the information in the Vault and to be clear, concise, and brief because the user may be asking for quick information while on a sales call and can’t read a long response.

4. Name the Assistant, give it a description, initial welcome message and icon.

5. Publish it.

A Brand Bot

This is the perfect assistant for anyone on the Team to get help improving their copy. Whether its marketing landing pages, sales emails, social media posts, your brand bot can make every Team member a Brand Voice master.

1. Start with HubSpot’s Brand Assistant template.

2. Preferably make sure your Brand Kit is setup in HubSpot, but creating a Knowledge Vault with your in depth Brand Tone and Voice guidelines, brand terms and definitions, positioning, messaging, etc. will help a lot.

3. Provide instructions to the Assistant specifying that it should help the user identify the ideal way to apply the brand guides to a communication they need help with.

4. Name the Assistant, give it a description, initial welcome message and icon.

5. Publish it.

So…now what?

Pick one assistant that solves some daily friction for your team and build it this week. Try it out. Your instructions may require some fine tuning, but these are usually more production-ready than you think.

In This Executive Brief

HubSpot’s annual conference is called InBound and it just wrapped up in San Francisco. They announced more than 200 features at InBound. I’ve been evaluating the betas of many of these features for weeks to see where they can help franchises.

In the FranDev Lab we don’t believe in chasing what’s new. I focus on features that unlock new capabilities for Fran Dev and that can move the needle.

Here’s what I’ll cover:

• Clear, immediate wins

• Big wins, but will take time and investment

• What I’m watching

So let’s do it.

Subscribe now

What I’m Focused On:

Clear, immediate wins:

Breeze Assistants

Breeze Assistants are AI helpers that appear in Copilot, right inside HubSpot where your team works. If you’re familiar with LLM features, these are a lot like Projects in Claude. There are pre-build, customizable Assistants and the ability to create your own.

Use cases:

• Create a “Process Assistant” with all your SOPs. Employees can ask “How do I…” and get answers in seconds, right where they work.

• Tailor the “ICP Assistant” template with in-depth documentation of your ideal Franchisee Profile. People can bounce ideas off it—but always filter the outputs against reality.

• Create a “Brand Assistant” to help team members with tone and voice when they’re crafting emails, texts, etc.

The Smart CRM Enterprise plan

This new plan at $75/mo is the cheapest way to get access to Enterprise features if you don’t already have them:

• Custom Objects

• Custom Events

• Lots of teams and permissions features

• Property-level access permissions

• 200 Calculated Properties

• Sensitive Data properties

• A standard sandbox environment

• and a lot more

I upgraded FranDev Labs on Day 1.

View customizations

These features have been rolling out for a while and there are a few not yet available, but these are small changes that make a big difference.

• Conditional Center Column Tabs and Cards on Records.

• A new GANTT View for Index Pages.

• A (still in private Beta) Map View for Index Pages.

• and a lot more

These fix some long standing annoyances and make creating an awesome heads-up-display view of a record—whether its a New FA Sales Deal, a Development Project, or an existing Location—easy and powerful.

Big wins, but will take time and investment

Data Studio

I’ve been using a beta of Data Studio in client portals for a while now. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It a huge upgrade to HubSpot datasets, which you can use to build even more sophisticated reporting on your HubSpot data and unlock answers to questions it used to be very hard to answer.

It also lets you bring external data into HubSpot without huge integration costs. That can be data you want to use for reporting or data you want to add to your HubSpot records. For example, you could use it to bring in performance data and associate it with your Location or Owner data in HubSpot.

It is a more technical tool and so might require upskilling your team or outside help to make use of it.

AEO - AI Engine Optimization

This is on everyone’s mind. Prospective Franchisees are using LLMs like OpenAI, Claude, and Perplexity in their research long before they talk to you.

In the big picture, this whole space is in massive flux, but it is clear that AI needs your content to understand you. The same content that you use in your marketing and sales needs to be available to AI crawlers on your website sooner rather than later. This tool isn’t widely available yet, but with some oversight by your marketing team (see below) this should help you get coverage in the big LLMs.

Agents inside HubSpot

HubSpot announced an Agent Studio and Marketplace that put Agents right inside HubSpot. We’re in Day 0 of this transformation so it will be some time before there is a big catalog of Agents in the Marketplace.

There are some built-in Agents available now. Some of them are focused on B2B sales and won’t provide great outputs for fran dev, but there are some that are ready for your team to start testing and tuning in their workflows right now:

• Blog Research Agent

• Social Post Agent

Remember, no “off-the-shelf agent”—HubSpot or otherwise—”just works”. They always need to be tuned and adapted for your franchise.

Marketing Studio

This is a big upgrade to Marketing Campaigns that makes it easier to set up, organize, manage, and report on your Fran Dev lead generation efforts, even if you use external vendors to manage your ads. This is a far-reaching and powerful tool. It takes some re-orientation if your marketing team isn’t already using it. It’s a tool for a strategic, organized approach to your lead gen activity.

What I’m watching

AI Personalization and the Personalization Agent

This feature is only freshly available by special request in private beta. I’m just getting access to in production portals so I don’t have any indicators yet on how “fran dev ready” it is, but I’m optimistic.

Why I’m excited:

Producing content for fran dev campaigns, emails, and websites is time consuming and even franchises who do this well usually settle into a “one size fits all” workflow. This means you’re not serving your prospective franchisees as effectively as you could be. You’re probably leaving franchise growth on the table.

AI and agents that can help your fran dev marketing team produce content that is better tailored for your prospective franchisees can help you do a lot more with the team and tools you have.

Why I’m cautious:

Using generative AI for fran dev content also has inherent risks. AI cannot yet be safely prevented from producing content that is not “FDD Compliant”.

To get a little bit technical, the non-deterministic nature of LLMs means that even if your instructions include guidance to always create content that reflects your FDD and to never give you content that violates franchise laws, it’s still possible that AI could promise prospects ROI, tell them they can make a lot of money, or promise things that aren’t in the FDD. That doesn’t mean this feature won’t work for franchises using HubSpot. It just means that AI personalization needs at least as much review and rigor as you apply to your marketing content produced by trained franchise marketers and that this feature needs to be tested and proven.

Built-in Data Enrichment

HubSpot announced new, revised enrichment features that tie into the Data Studio and can be used to fill in data in the Smart CRM automatically using specialized data sources and AI. This might bring you better data without requiring additional tools or data entry by Reps.

Why I’m excited:

Good decisions, good reporting, and getting good results from AI require good data. This feature could help franchises get good data at a reasonable cost that they didn’t have access to previously.

Why I’m cautious:

HubSpot’s data sources and strategy here are not yet clear, but their enrichment strategy has always been B2B-centric. It is focused on Company data first. Data about prospective franchises in these sources are related to the company they work for, which is not your focus. It doesn’t capture the things that franchises are focused on when selecting franchisees during their diligence process: their leadership skills, their drive, their goals, their dedication, their interest in an industry, etc.

I’ll be digging into these and other new features more on LinkedIn and here in the Lab Report over the coming months, so stay tuned for updates and reach out if you want to talk about any of them.

See you in the next Lab Report.

As this arrives in your inbox, we’re just a couple days from a TON of AI announcements at HubSpot’s annual InBound conference. There will be a lot of buzz and excitement, but you need to keep your head about you. To be successful you can’t just “Do AI”. Here are FranDev Lab’s Guidelines for successful AI projects.

What you need to know

There is a lot of excitement (and pressure) to adopt new AI tools and features. Franchisors should absolutely be looking for ways to improve their businesses with AI. Turning on every new AI feature and hoping it will solve all your problems is not a strategy for success.

Dedicated, thoughtful projects to use AI to improve what works in your business is a strategy for success.

You should get excited, but you should also be smart.

One thing you should take away from this is that AI is a tool. Like any tool, you need to be in control and know how to use it to get good results.

The Guidelines

ABC - Always Bring Context

In AI, Context is what we call the things you bring to the table to make AI work for you. AI will assume anything you don't tell it and AI doesn’t “understand” your business. The more blanks AI has to fill in, the worse its outputs will be. If 20 people in your business are using AI differently, with different context or no context, the outputs and outcomes will be further from the truth of your business.

You need to define context at each level of your business and for each team. Your team members need to know this and be equipped with your business’ shared context and their unique context to be successful.

This includes:

• Your franchise’s products and services

• Your franchise’s Target Market

• Your franchise’s Brand Tone and Voice

• The unique Policy and Regulatory constraints of franchising

• Each teams’s goals, focus areas, processes, and methodologies

• Each team member’s Role, Responsibilities, priorities, and constraints

• Each task’s outcomes, requirements, and inputs

Keep your tools where you work

There’s a reason you don’t keep your hammer in the refrigerator. We keep our tools where we use them. AI tools that work where your team works, with consistent context, and with good training, are more secure, save more time, and produce better outcomes.

This means:

• You should prefer native tools in the systems you use when have the choice.

• It’s better if your team doesn’t have to stop and switch tools to use AI.

• External tools always risk your data ending up somewhere it shouldn’t.

• Native tools are preferred over integrated tools and both are preferred over going out to an external chat tool.

Sculpt your data and tell AI what matters

AI doesn’t really “understand” what’s important in your data or your business unless you tell it. You need give AI data that is sculpted to focus on what’s most important. You can feed AI a lot of data, but it won’t be able to figure out what is most important. It can tell you what’s there but not what isn’t there that should be.

If you don’t sculpt your data, every single AI request will be no different than asking a brand new employee with no information or training to complete a task. You wouldn’t ask that new employee to wade through a mess of data and figure out for themselves what matters and you shouldn’t do that with AI either.

This means:

• You can’t just hope AI will “figure out” what matters.

• You need to collect the data that’s important to your franchise in the systems where you’ll use AI.

• That data needs to be reliable.

• Your team needs know when and how to bring that data to the table.

• Doing this well informs the context your teams will use.

So, now what?

How you put these guidelines into practice will depend on your tools, your franchise, and how prepared your team is to work with AI. Any time you start an AI project, big or small, you should be thinking about these things.

And of course FranDev Lab is always here to help. I’m happy to talk about this any time, even if you just need some perspective or someone to talk it out with.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Get instant, automatic visibility into which Deals are in Registration States so you’re ready when FDD Season arrives. You'll be able to create targeted lists, pipeline views, and dashboard reports that show your Registration State Deals at a glance.

Subscribe now

Why this matters

It’s not FDD season as I write this Lab Report—and that’s why I’m writing it now. The best time to prepare for your FDD Blackout is when its not FDD Season. That way you’ll be ready when it comes, which is always sooner than you think.

Tagging Deals makes it easy to automatically find and act on Deals that are in Registration States.

Here’s how Franchisors can tag Registration State Deals

Create a Deal Property for the State

Make this a “Multiple checkboxes” property since prospects may be interested in more than one state. In the FranDev Lab we call this property “Desired Territory/Location State”. Here’s what this property would look like.

Useful tip:

If you’re creating a State property, you can automatically load all the states without typing them all in by using the Load options feature of the property builder.

Set the property on Deals after your Discovery Call.

You should collect your prospect’s interest on your website forms or other conversions, but don’t slow the down by making them choose states from a list.

Your Reps should set this property using Playbooks, AI, or a conditional property on your Deal Stages so you have confirmed serious interest in the State and to cut down on mistakes where cities or markets in different states have the same name.

Use a Deal Tag to show Registration States

Set up a Deal Tag that uses the Desired Territory/Location State property to include only Deals with Registration States included. Here’s what a Registration State Deal Tag would look like in your sales pipeline:

Create a Deal Tag in your Pipeline Settings. Settings > Objects > Deals > Pipeline > Deal Tags > Manage deal tags. Here’s what that Deal Tag configuration would look like:

So…now what?

If you don’t have a Desired Territory/Location State property, create one along with the Deal Tag.

Then you can use the Deal Tag to do all kinds of useful things. Here’s some examples:

• Create lists of Prospects with open Deals in Registration States so you can plan prioritize leading up to blackout.

• Create views of your pipeline of Deals in Registration States so you can see before FDD Blackout how your pipeline will be affected.

• Use the Deal Tag to create Reports for your Dashboards showing which Registration States you have open Deals in.

See you in the next Lab Report.

There are two ways to schedule meetings in HubSpot. Using them wrong muddies up your prospect’s engagement data. Which makes your reporting and targeting less useful. So make sure your team is using the tools the right way to get the Meeting and get good data.

There are two primary ways to book meetings in HubSpot:

1. The Meetings Scheduler tool. This is for prospects or non-Users to book meetings for themselves. This is you meeting links found at Sales > Meetings Scheduler. You embed these on website pages, link to them in email, put them on your social profiles, etc.

   

2. Log/create a meeting on a record (there isn’t a specific name for this feature). This is for HubSpot users to create meetings for themselves (or for other Reps) with the Contact, Deal, or Company record in HubSpot or from their schedule in a Workspace.

   

Why this matters

Both of those tools can be used to book a meeting with a prospect. Using them wrong muddies up your data.

• The Meetings Scheduler tool should only be used by prospects/customers.

• The Log/create a meeting tool can only be used by HubSpot users/employees.

Do not book meetings like this: Reps should not use the Meetings Scheduler tool to book meetings on behalf of Prospects.

Where this usually happens is an SDR booking a meeting with a Sales Rep or Account Manager for a Prospect.

The Rep or SDR should have used the Log/create a meeting tool NOT the Meetings Scheduler.

When Reps use the Meetings Scheduler:

• they are telling HubSpot cookies they are Prospect

• engagement data about your Prospect gets confused

• your Sales Activity reporting gets confused

• data like your prospect’s location gets confused

• Contact history gets confused

• HubSpot can think your Rep is every Prospect they book a meeting for

All because a Rep chose the wrong tool.

Note: Booking a meeting for a Prospect with a different Rep (like an SDR would) requires a Sales Hub Pro or higher Seat for the Reps.

Here’s how you should be booking meetings:

When Prospects book meetings for themselves: Meeting Scheduler

Prospects always use the Meetings Scheduler. Send them a link in an email or SMS, embed it on Landing Pages or Thank You Pages, etc.

When SDRs, Reps, Employees, etc. book the meetings:

Reps should book meetings in HubSpot using Log/create a meeting. Show everyone how to do it from the Contact or Deal Record, from their Schedule in the Sales Workspace, put buttons in Playbooks, etc.

Good process, clean data, better reporting.

So…now what?

1. Make sure you have the right Meeting Links set up and and getting them in front of Prospects directly.

2. Check with your Reps. Are they using the Meetings Scheduler interface or links to schedule meetings?

3. Train your Reps the right way to book meetings.

4. If some employees need to book meetings for Prospects with other employees, make sure you’re on Sales Hub Pro or higher.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Meeting shows don't predict Closed Won Deals and sales of new territories. Deals advancing through your sales pipeline does. Your executive reporting needs to surface KPIs that reflect actual performance and Meetings are not that.

What you need to know:

Meeting metrics belong at the operational level, not the executive dashboard.

Showed meetings (Discovery Meetings particularly) used to be the best visibility franchises had into their pipeline. That isn’t true anymore.

Your executive reporting should include KPIs that reflect and predict prospects advancing to a Closed Won Deal for a new territory.

Meeting data like books, shows, and show rate is valuable for managing day to day, coaching, reps and analysis but not for executive reporting.

What to do:

Replace meeting data in executive reporting with:

1. Counts (count of qualified leads for example)

2. Conversion/advancement rates by Pipeline Stage (% of Deals that advance from Discovery to FDD for example).

3. Use meeting data for operational analysis.

Let’s Drill Down

HubSpot Improves The Power of Your Data and Reporting

Your HubSpot implementation should track prospect progression through your entire sales process. Measuring meetings is not the visibility you need into pipeline performance. The data you have access to is VAST so don’t limit your success.

Show Rates Don't Predict Closed Won Deals

Consider this scenario:

• Last week your booked Discovery Meetings were twice your previous best week. Great!

• All of them show. Amazing!

• All them are Closed Lost. None advance to your next step.

Your Shows and Show Rate look amazing.

Your pipeline is a disaster.

If you report on Meetings your executive dashboard tells you things are great. If you see zero advancements, you can act immediately. Why did this happen? Why did we lose them? Where did these leads come from? All questions a good HubSpot setup for FranDev can answer.

Meeting Data Has Operational Value

Meeting metrics are valuable for day-to-day management. You should collet books, shows, etc. and you should use that data:

• Evaluating lead source quality.

• Why are No Shows happening?

• Automating No Show recapture.

• Identifying coaching opportunties.

• Diagnosing pipeline bottlenecks.

• Understanding prospect exit points.

Managers need this data for coaching and process improvements. Marketing wants this data to better understand good leads.

Instead, Report on What Predicts Territory Sales

Your executive KPIs should reflect progression toward Closed Won Deals:

• Count of Leads reaching critical milestones, whether you call that MQL, SQL, Qualified Candidate, Applicant, whatever.

• Conversion of advancement rates by Pipeline Stage

These metrics directly correlate to your territory development targets and reveal systemic issues affecting growth.

So…now what?

Check executive reporting. Is reporting on Meetings, not metrics that predict success blinding you to the true state of your pipeline?

See you in the next Lab Report.

These Executive Briefs are available to Paid Subscribers to The FranDev Lab Report. Thanks for being one.

Discovery Calls make or break your Fran Dev Pipeline. A good Playbook makes sure you’re covering all the critical points and collecting useful information for lead scoring, nurturing, and analysis. I’ll walk you through a good starting point for a Franchise Sales Discovery Call Playbook.

Why this matters

Discovery Calls make or break your Fran Dev Pipeline.

Good information about your Prospects is important for winning Deals, but it’s also essential for understanding and improving your sales and marketing performance.

You need to equip Reps with simple tools to conduct great calls and capture all the information that you need to serve that current Prospect. Playbooks serve as an in-meeting agenda and guided notetaker to capture critical information directly on records without a lot of fuss.

Here’s what a Playbook for your Discovery Calls should look like

A full annotated screenshot of an example Playbook is included at the end of this email. I’ll walk you though the elements here, but skip to the end if you want to see the whole thing.

Note that the most some of the most incredible features of Playbooks require an Enterprise subscription.

But, here’s a secret tip that we HubSpot Pros know: if you don’t use HubSpot for Help Desk, then buying 1 Service Enterprise Seat (that you don’t need to use) gives you very cheap access to Enterprise features.

Your Discovery Call agenda

Include your internal agenda items at the top of the Playbook. Every call in your sales process will have a different agenda, so it’s a good idea for each Playbook to reiterate it. It’s particularly useful to new Reps as they’re getting up to speed on your sales process.

Intro/Overview Questions

One of your first objectives is always to understand why the Prospect showed up to the call. They connect with the Prospect and try to get at why they scheduled a call, what their goals are, and information about their personal and professional information.

Capture this in Contact Properties for future reminders and analysis.

Recommended items:

• Freeform Goals note field

• Editable Personal Background Multi-line text Property on the Contact

• Editable Professional Background Multi-line text Property on the Contact

Franchising and Your Brand

Exploring and capturing their familiarity with Franchising helps figure out how much education is needed during the sales process and their connection with the industry and your brand are critical. You can us this in Lead Scoring, in automations (which emails your send them), in your Closed Lost reviews, and in AI analysis.

This is useful for Lead Scoring and prioritization as well as gauging whether a Prospect is conducting serious research.

Recommended Items

• Editable Franchise Awareness Drop down Contact Property with a note field for context

• Editable Brand/Concept Awareness Drop down Contact Property with a note field for context

• Editable Brand Affinity Drop down Contact Property with a note field for context

Location or Territory Discussion

Reviewing the general or specific locations they’re interested in is an important part of the call. If you conversion form has a field for the Prospect to describe their desired location, you can display that for the Rep so they have context for the conversation.

If you have sophisticated properties for normalizing states, markets, or other dimensions you can include editable properties for the Rep to set too.

I often recommend leveling up with properties to capture whether the Prospect is open to Resale, other territories than the specific ones they have identified.

Collecting this data us very useful for nurturing Prospects with initial interest in saturated, unavailable, or non-operating markets. It also allows you to filter Deals by State.

Recommended Items

• Embedded Token that displays for the Rep how the Prospect described the location they’re interested in on your conversion form

• Optional/Extra: Editable Will Consider Other Territories checkbox Property

• Optional/Extra: Editable Will Transfers checkbox Property

• Optional/Extra: Markets of Interest Drop down Deal Property (using your Franchise’s model for states, DMAs, etc.) with a note field for context

Capital Requirements

Net Worth and Liquid capital are essential of course. Most Franchises collect a PFS and confirm Net Worth later in the process, but an initial qualification here is important. This is a section of Playbook where including suggested or approved language for the Rep is helpful.

This is useful for Lead Scoring and prioritization as well as nurturing leads who are “almost ready”.

Recommended Items

• Suggested or approved language for the discussion

• Editable Stated Net Worth Single-line text Contact Property

• Editable Stated Liquid Capital Single-line text Contact Property

Timeline

Timeline is of course another critical agenda item. Franchises often discuss this to try and set expectations, but often fail to capture it in a usable way.

This is also useful for Lead Scoring and prioritization as well as nurturing leads who are “almost ready”.

Recommended Items

• Editable Stated Timeline Drop down Contact Property with a note field for context

• Optional/Extra: a Projected Timeline Drop down Deal Property

Share

Scheduling the Next Call

For qualified Prospects, the next action is to set up your next call. This can be done directly in Playbook with a Schedule a meeting action button.

Recommended Items

• A freeform Other notes field

• Schedule a meeting button.

Here’s the full, annoyed Playbook for you to look at

So…now what?

• Talk to your Reps about what works for them on their Discovery Calls.

• Create the properties you need to capture better data.

• Take a shot at creating a Playbook for your Discover Calls.

• Set up the Recommended Enablement settings so the Reps are be prompted with the playbook when a Deal is in the Discovery stage of your pipeline.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Time kills Deals so speed to lead is important. Time the most valuable thing you have so you need to invest it wisely. How do spend time on good Fran Dev leads and chase fewer bad leads? By building better bridges between lead conversions and your Intro Call and aligning them with where your prospects are in their journey.

Why this matters

You need to get leads on Intro Calls to start your sales process but chasing leads that raise their hand and then never engage is a terrible use of your time. It’s also a critical reason to track Closed Lost Category of Deals or Lead Status.

There are two major factors that govern whether you can get leads on an Intro Call.

1. Your Prospect

2. Your Systems

If the only way you can handle leads is by calling them 5 times in a row as soon as they submit a form, you’re going to burn a lot of calories and get subpar results.

There are many ways to bridge from a lead converting to getting them on an Intro Call, but the fall into 3 main archetypes. Not everyone who submits a form is ready to talk right now. You need to serve those people while routing the people who are ready to talk to a Rep.

And provide a world-class experience that exceeds everyone’s expectations and builds their trust in your franchise.

Which is to say: Your Systems need to work for you and for your Prospects wherever they’re at in their journey.

So use one of these 3 archetypes to bridge your leads from conversion to booking an Intro Call.

Here are the three bridges

Exactly how you would use these bridges depends on your franchise, the content you have, and the tools at your disposal.

They are also not mutually exclusive. Your prospective franchisees need different kinds of support at different stages of their journey. You can choose the right bridge for the context.

1. Chase Them

When most Franchises say “speed to lead” this is what they mean. “How fast did you try to call the prospect?” In a world without SPAM form submissions, people that never respond, blocking unknown numbers, call screening, and leads who say they never filled out your form, this would be the ideal approach.

But that’s not the world we live in.

If a prospect is ready to talk right now this works, especially if your conversion flow and call to action clearly and explicitly say “I want someone to call me”. Not an ambiguous “learn more”.

Those are usually the minority so Reps spend a lot of effort chasing bad leads.

What this looks like:

1. Prospect submits a conversion form on your website for initial interest

2. Spring into action! Alert your Rep of the new lead in HubSpot.

3. Direct dial them 3 times, email, and text them immediately.

Consider this approach:

• For CTAs deep in research content on your site and that very very clearly ask for a call.

• For other inquiry forms only if:

  • You have a low lead volume

  • You have very low ghost/no contact rate, less than about 15%

  • You don’t have content to support nurturing

2. Convert and Ask for the Call

This is a first step toward being responsive to interested prospects but not wasting time chasing bad leads. You can offer a useful resource (like a research document) for the form submission. You offer engaged, active researchers the ability to book a call immediately. Tire kickers get a resource that can help them decide where to go next. SPAM submissions or leads that never take another action don’t keep your Reps from focusing on engaged prospects.

What this looks like:

1. Prospect submits a conversion form on your website for initial interest.

2. The post-conversion Thank You Page immediately displays a Book a Meeting call to action.

3. The prospect is enrolled in a nurture flow with information about your franchise that also presents CTAs to book an Intro Call.

4. If the prospect is engaged in the flow (opens and clicks emails, visits your website, etc.) but didn’t doesn’t a meeting, the Rep is alerted to reach out.

Consider this approach:

• For first-touch conversions. This is a good starting point.

• If you have meaningful content to support the nurture flow. These can’t be desperate “please talk to us” emails. You have to provide value to your prospect.

3. Support Their Process

This takes the previous approach a step further with additional content and automation tools. It enables in-depth, self service research that helps your prospects self-qualify and gives you the signals you need to identify your most engaged leads and over time, see what content is most engaging for those prospects.

What this looks like

1. Prospect submits a conversion form on your website for initial interest

2. Deliver a Guided Research resource (a document, videos, tools, a “research portal”, etc.). This can be a downloadable or gated resource on your website.

3. Enroll them in a Dynamic Nurture Sequence.

   1. Stay at the top of their inbox with messages that reiterate and highlight the content in the Guided Research. Link back to the resource.

   2. Include CTAs to book an Intro Call in the sequence.

   3. Set a reasonable threshold for the manual engagement triggers so that when prospects are engaging with the Content, they exit to a sequence branch that hands off to the Rep to reach out.

4. Include Call Booking links and “take the next step” forms/links in the resource for interested prospects who are engaging with the content.

5. If you’re hosting the resource on your use frequent or repeated visits to alert Reps that prospects are engaged.

6. If prospects are engaged but don’t book a meeting, add them to remarketing lists, longer term drip campaigns, etc.

Consider this approach when:

• You have high quality, engaging content. Information about your franchise but also customer testimonials, Franchisee testimonials, video, executive interviews, etc.

So…now what?

Which of these is most similar to your current conversion flow?

Which of them would serve your prospective franchisees best?

What’s stopping you?

Looking for help building or strategizing this for your Franchise? Let’s talk.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Are you getting what you need out of HubSpot for Fran Dev? Here are 6 Quick Tests (with some examples, expectations, and suggestions) to help you gauge whether HubSpot is serving your franchise marketing and sales process well.

What you need to know:

HubSpot is a powerful tool. Like all powerful tools, if you aren’t using it well or aren’t using it at all, the best thing you can hope for is that you won’t hurt yourself.

But its really hard to know if you’re getting what you need out of HubSpot.

The quickest way to know if you’re getting true value is this question:

Is HubSpot a source of truth or a source of stress and confusion?

But what does that mean? What does “good” look like?

Here’s a breakdown of 6 Tests you can give your organization to see if your HubSpot setup serving your Franchise Development marketing and sales process well.

The 6 Tests

1. Do your dashboards reflect what you need to see to steer the ship?

For example:

Can you spot where problems are starting accumulate before things become a full-blown emergency?

What you should expect:

• You have an executive-level visibility into every division’s top-level KPIs.

• Your reporting focuses on just a few metrics per division.

• The metrics reflect performance and whether that performance is good and on track or needs attention.

• The data in your dashboards accurately reflect performance—your team is working in the CRM so the data is captured.

• Each of your leaders has a more detailed view of their performance that breaks down metrics even further.

How your franchise might do this:

• One Executive Dashboard that reflects a few metrics for each division that is reviewed each week.

• Include your primary KPI for each division but also a goal or a “co-observant metric” that contextualizes it. For example: Lead Volume and Average Lead Score, Won Territories and average Territories Per Deal, Paid Media Spend and Cost per Qualified Lead.

• An additional detailed Dashboard for each Division and possibly one for each Team within the Division.

• Adoption/utilization reports that helps identify whether team members are using HubSpot. For example: are reps logging meeting outcomes? Are business coaches logging regular calls with your Franchisees? Are people completing tasks and tickets?

2. Do you have good visibility on marketing-sourced leads?

For example:

Where are they best qualified leads that you source from marketing (not referrals, brokers, etc.) coming from?

What you should expect:

• You are collecting detailed Source data about Leads including how they first found you and what interactions led to raising their hand and getting engaged. Just “website” or “google” or the vendor is not enough.

• You can recognize if the sources result from Paid activities (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, ), Earned activities (mentions, reviews, PR, etc.), Shared activities (social media, franchisee or customer content, YouTube content, etc.), or Owned Activities (your website, mailing list, your direct content, etc.)

• You are collecting data about which Vendor activities touched a lead on their journey in addition to the other source properties. Just Vendor is not enough.

How your franchise might do this:

• Reports that breakdown new leads by Source Category, Detail, and Vendor.

• Reports that breakdown the source of re-engagement touchpoints: how did old leads that re-enter your sales pipeline re-engage?

• A Dashboard you can filter by Vendor to any of your marketing Vendor’s total contribution to lead generation, nurturing, and qualification.

3. Do you have good visibility on Broker-sourced leads?

For example:

Which Brokers repeatedly bring us leads that we win? Why do we lose Broker-sourced leads?

What you should expect:

• You know which leads are sourced from Brokers.

• You can see Broker lead volume changes over time.

• Leads are associated with the Broker that brought them to you.

• Broker-sourced leads are easily visible and filterable in your sales pipeline.

• You can see individual Broker’s win rate and total contribution to Won Territories and Revenue.

How your franchise might do this:

• Dashboard and reports that highlight Broker performance over time including lead volume, won leads, and Closed Lost Category.

• Views for Reps so they can see (and act on!) all the Broker’s who have brought them leads in the past.

• Tags for Deals in your pipeline that distinguish Broker-sourced leads.

• A Mini-Dashboard for each Broker.

4. Do you have good visibility on leads that slow down?

For example:

Where do qualified leads tend to slow down in your pipeline? What can you do about it?

What you should expect:

• You have real data on how long leads that win spend in each stage of your sales process.

• Leads that spend too long in each stage of your process are easy to spot.

• Your sales team can identify and act on leads that are spending too long in each stage.

• Valid reasons for a slow down (FDD Blackouts, waiting for Discovery Day, etc.) are accounted for.

How your franchise might do this:

• Reports that breakdown time in stage comparing won and lost Deals. Review at least quarterly. Segment using tactics (like Source) and characteristics (Audience Profile, Fit Scores).

• Tags for Deals in your pipeline that spend too long in each stage.

• Tags for Deals in your pipelines that haven’t been touched by a Rep in too long (14 days max).

• Views and reports that surface stalling Deals for the Rep that owns them.

• Views, reports, and dashboards for sales leaders to surface where Reps need support or coaching.

5. Do you have good, usable intel on leads that you lose?

For example:

Are there stages of your process where you lose a lot of qualified leads? Why?

What you should expect:

• You know the real reasons that qualified leads choose not to buy into your franchise and can act on that data.

• You know by pipeline stage where you lose qualified leads both by count and percentage and can act on that data.

• You can see the breakdown of qualified leads lost through abandonment (ghosting, etc.) versus communicated “No’s”.

How your franchise might do this:

• Reports that show normalized Closed Lost Category (Territory, Investment, Fit/alignment with your franchise, Lost to Competitor, etc.). Review at least quarterly. Segment using tactics (like Source) and characteristics (Audience Profile, Fit Scores).

• Reports that surface the stage Deals are lost from. Review at least quarterly. Segment by Closed Lost Category, by Rep, by tactic, by characteristics, and by activity.

• Reports showing the breakdown of qualified leads lost from ghosting versus those lost for “No’s”. Review quarterly. Segment by all the same dimensions as the other reports. Are the categories changing over time?

6. Do you have good visibility on the leads that you win?

For example:

What is working well right now? Can you put more energy into what’s working?

What you should expect:

• You can review the Won Leads in any given month and see at least where they came from, how long it took to close them, and whether they were broker- or marketing-sourced.

• You can review all the Won Leads from any particular Vendor.

• You can review all the Won Leads from any particular Broker.

• You can see total Won Leads, Sold Territories, and Revenue by Source, Vendor, Broker, etc. for any given timeframe.

• You can review changes over time in how these dimensions contribute to Won Deals.

How your franchise might do this:

• A Won Deals Dashboard with reports that surface all these dimensions and that can be filtered by Closed Won Date.

• A dedicated Dashboard for major performance dimensions (Category like Marketing or Broker) and source (Google Paid, Organic, etc.) that that can be filtered by Closed Won Date.

• Data and reports on individual Broker Records that surface how their leads perform.

So…Now what?

Well, take these 6 Tests and see how your CRM—whether it’s HubSpot or not—stands up.

See you in the next Lab Report.

HubSpot can surface your Prospects’ engagement with your sales process for you automatically if you know how to set it up. And that’s how you can engage more effectively with all your Prospects.

Why this matters

You have to know whether a Prospect is engaged or not in order to act on that information. Recognizing good, engaged Prospects is the key to spending more time with qualified leads.

Let HubSpot do the work of spotting engaged Prospects for you and highlighting them in your Franchise Sales Pipeline. Franchise Development Reps can then reach out to Prospects with better intel and more knowledge of what they’re actually doing. You can support unengaged Prospects more effectively with Automation.

Surface Active Prospects with Deal Tags

HubSpot can capture information about lot of things that your prospects do. For example:

• Open or click marketing emails

• Open or click sales emails

• Completed calls or meetings

• Sent you an SMS (depending on your text platform)

• Called you

• Submitted a form

• Clicked an ad

• Visited your franchise website

Create a list of Prospects with open Deals in your Franchise Sales Pipeline that have done any of these things in the last 7 days. You can extend that time to 10 or 14 days if your process is a little slower, but I suggest 7 days so you are staying on top of your sales process.

You do this with a list that contains each of those engagements you want to include as a Group joined together with an OR. As shown in the configuration, you’ll also need a list of Contacts on Open Deals because engagements are connected to the person’s Contact record.

Then use this list to add a Deal Tag to the Deals where Prospects are engaging. Here’s what that looks like:

As well as a Deal Tag for Deals where Prospects are not engaging in anything that can be tracked.

Using these Deal Tags you can highlight Deals in your Pipeline Board View based on their Engagement (or lack of it). That’s what gives us this:

You can also use these Deals Tags for reporting, to enroll Deals or Contacts in automations like Workflows or Sequences to send them email, additional resources, re-activate them in your sales process, filter your views, etc.

So…now what?

Step 1 is to set up the Deal Tags.

Then figure out what can do to keep Prospects engaging in your sales process.

At the very least, make sure your Reps see the tags and use them during your Pipeline reviews to make sure they’re looking for ways to keep Prospects engaged and Deals moving forward.

See you in the next Lab Report.

Understanding which of your efforts are working is an absolutely essential prerequisite to being effective. You can’t focus your efforts on what works if you’re not sure what’s working. Focus on collecting the data makes it easy to see what is working and make better decisions.

Why this matters

You invest a lot of resources—time, effort, and money—to find new prospective franchisees who are a good fit for your Franchise. It’s important to be able to look at a Closed Won Deal and ask how they found, what worked, and how to reproduce it. But its even more important to be able to report on and spot the bigger trends.

One win isn’t a pattern. Ten win start to form a pattern, but you need to be collecting this data on all your leads to be able to report effectively. You need enough accurate data to get a good picture of what is working, but it’s not always clear what to collect or how to break it down. These 3 properties will give you a good picture.

This isn’t everything you need to know. There are other things you should be collecting as well. But they’re a solid foundation and if you aren’t collecting this data reliably, you’ll struggle to see the big picture.

Subscribe now

Here are the 3 Attribution Properties

Deal Lead Category

Lead Category on your FranDev Deals rolls up your efforts into the biggest buckets of activity that generate prospective Franchisees. This allows you to compare the size and effectiveness of these categories and how they they are contributing to your growth.

It also allows you to set and track high level goals for each of these categories.

Set this property on your Deals for the highest level visibility. For clients in the FranDev Lab we recommend these categories:

• Marketing

• Broker

• Outbound

• Referral

• Internal/Upsell

Share

Deal Vendor

It’s not uncommon to have more than 1 Vendor handling some aspect of your Franchise Lead Generation. One vendor handing Google Search, one handling Facebook, a contractor handling LinkedIn, etc. Maybe even some channels or campaigns managed internally.

To be able to segment your leads and see which Vendors are contributing to qualified leads and Closed Won Deals, you need to know which leads they brought.

Setting this property on all Deals that gives you that visibility and allows you to answer questions about which Vendors are the most effective. You can create a Pipeline report showing conversion rate for each Vendor.

The simplest way is a Dropdown select with a value for each vendor you work with.

By the way: this isn’t for Brokers. Capturing which Broker brought a lead requires a different approach. It’s simple but very in-depth. Reach out to talk about it.

There’s quite a bit in the FranDev Lab Report archives about serving Brokers and to support Broker sourced leads better:

• 5 Keys to Scaling Broker Relationships Using HubSpot

• Create a Mini-Dashboard About Each Broker

• Video Playbook: Automate Broker Updates

Deal Source

It’s important to know which specific sources contribute to your prospective franchisee leads.

But it’s not enough just to know they came from Facebook. If a Vendor operates both Facebook and Google Campaigns, you need to know which of those sources a lead came from.

You also need to distinguish if it was Paid efforts on Facebook that generated an opportunity or if it was your organic Facebook content. Or if it was Paid Google Ads or organic search. Same goes for LinkedIn.

So…now what?

Make sure you’re collecting this information on your Deals. We use standardized properties for FranDev Lab clients, but please make sure you’re collecting and reporting on this information somehow.

Set the properties on Deals using automation so no one has to worry about maintaining it.

Add the dimensions to your reports.

Review it regularly.

See you in the next Lab Report.

In This Playbook:

HubSpot can help you track and report on territories, the households they represent, and the Franchise Fee revenue in your pipeline. This Video Playbook walks you through the best approach for most franchises. Plus, a few extras and automations that make it even more useful.

Why this matters

How many Deals are in your pipeline is important. But so is how many total territories are. How many potential new Territories do the leads coming to Discovery Day represent? Which states have the most Territories in the Pipeline? How much new Franchise Fee Revenue does that represent? Deals or leads don’t give you enough visibility, but you also don’t want to make things too complicated.

The FranDev Lab solution follows the 90/10 rule: three simple properties give you 90% of the value and visibility executives need without the complexity that burdens your Reps.

This playbook contains 4 videos:

• Video 1: Introduction

• Video 2: The Approach and Properties

• Video 3: Visibility on Records and in Reports

• Video 4: Automations and Extras

Video 1: Introduction to Territories, Households, and Fees in your Sales Pipeline

Tracking number of Territories, Households, and Amounts is a 90/10 proposition. Don’t over invest.

Video 2: The Approach and Properties

A walkthrough of the approach, the 3 properties you’ll use, and some things you don’t need to worry about.

Share

Video 3: Visibility on Records and in Reports

Make sure these critical properties a visible and getting updated where your Reps work and at critical stages of your sales process.

Video 4: Automations and Extras

Some simple things you can do to level up, make things easier on your Reps and bring some additional visibility to Territories in your pipeline.

So…now what?

Are you doing this in your Franchise Sales Pipeline? Do you have the visibility you need? Is there anything you can automate?

See you in the next Lab Report.