Women’s weight loss and fitness centre franchise Healthy Inspirations installed a customer relationship manager system to support its franchisees and has seen marked improvements in conversion rates as a result.

Healthy Inspirations managing director Jamie Hayes said "It's helped us increase our conversion rate across all centres in excess of 15 percent and secondary revenue per member per week has gone up $2. When you have 8,000 plus members that's significant," he said.

The Salesforce.com online CRM system which is based on the internet, rather than a computer or server, allows staff at centres to go online once a week to enter 10 key numbers and get key sales ratios calculated.  

This ‘cloud’ system gives greater access, reliability and lower costs, Hayes said.  It was installed at Healthy Inspirations last September.

“Some franchise systems only look at their numbers monthly. We believe you need to manage your sales constantly and so we show all franchisees everybody’s key numbers weekly. This way we can share the success stories of those with strong numbers and identify those with weak numbers so we know exactly what support they need. As it calculates key performance ratios the franchisees know exactly what to focus on to improve their profits.  

“When we combine this with the simple information systems at the centre, we can drill down to see if the success or the problem is with how one team member is doing one task. This way we can be very focused with our support and training. Many of the Healthy Inspirations centres are in regional country areas across Australia and New Zealand. Without this support, they would feel isolated," said Hayes. 

As the Salesforce cloud computing system is online remote and travelling support staff can also access the data.