Sugar for a franchise operation

[websitedesigner]

Hi guys I am working with a franchise who wants to use sugar as a system to manage their own franchisees and the customers of their franchisees. Getting my head around the best way to do all of this is taking a bit of work but I thought I'd list below my thoughts on how to make it work and see what people thought.

For the purposes of this post I will pretend the client sells surfboards.

Users - The Admin / Users are would be used to add any head office staff who need to access Sugar as well as add each of the franchisees who want to access sugar to manage their own leads and customers etc. We will use the Roles area to set it up so franchisee users can only see Accounts that relate to their Franchise and and Contacts that relate to those accounts (haven't looked into this yet - its phase2 ) But one issue I can see is there doesn't seem to be any linkage between users and accounts in Sugar so we would need to sort that out.

Leads – we will use these for both people enquiring about buying sufrboards from each franchisee and people enquiring about becoming a franchisee. We will include a ‘lead type’ to distinguish between the two and control access using roles (this will be future phases). We will have a different lead form for each type of lead.

Opportunities – we ditch them altogether and re-name the module sales and we use this module for managing financial data inputted by franchisees. The MYOB import I have built already works with the opportunities module so we could potentially use this to enable franchisees to load in their financial data.

Accounts – these are clients of any of the franchisees (anyone who buys a surfboard). (i.e. John Smith from ABC company enquires about a new surfboard in Burleigh)– when leads get converted we can create an account and a contact. The account will be called ABC Company and the contact is John Smith.

I'm undecided whether to also use accounts for the franchisees as there doesn't seem to be any linkages to the users in Sugar so this might need some customising bu if we don't do this we don't have the ability to show who is a current franchisee (only all users which also includes head office and may include more than 1 person from each franchise).

Contacts – these are people who work for one of the companies who has enquired about surfboards. In the example above John Smith would become a contact and be linked to ABC Company but if someone else from ABC Company enquired, they could also be linked to the company.

So for franchisee enquiries they would only ever be managed via the leads area – we would look under Leads then lead type ‘Franchise Leads’ and then we would have a status for them – New / Assigned / Joined / Declined or other words. When people accept to become a franchisee they are entered as a user of the system and the connection to the lead is gone (this will be a manual process unless we build a convert to user feature). When they tell us they are definitely not interested, we mark the lead as Declined.

Customer enquiries (people enquiring about sufrboards in their area) start out as leads and get converted to accounts and contacts – this would be something for down the track for the franchisees to handle.

Let me know what you think.

[Fertico]

The main issue with the approach you describe, is the fact that Sugar is designed more for a B2B environment than a B2C one. In your scenario, the potential franchisees become part of the B2C equation in that they are not participants of the true CRM oriented process intended to assist the day to day activities of the franchising company. You will require an additional application/portal such as the one offered in the Professional edit. There are similar approaches that we have done where we can create an additional application integrated with needed read/write data and related activities into Sugar.