Leading boutique fitness franchisor employs Zoho CRM to scale its fast-growing business

Key results:

• ROI117.52%
• Payback period3 Months
• Cost-benefit ratio1:9.02

About the company

Boutique fitness studios offer an experience like no other. With that in mind, CEO Anthony Geisler took a courageous initiative to franchise a boutique fitness brand in 2017: Club Pilates. Only a couple of years later, Xponential Fitness Inc. quickly grew to become the parent company to 10 different boutique fitness brands covering a range of verticals, including yoga, barre, boxing, indoor cycling, and many more.

Today, Xponential Fitness stands tall as the largest global franchisor of boutique fitness brands, expanding its business to 12 countries, with its biggest international presence in Australia.

Need for a unified system

Initially, Xponential used eight different systems at a time for franchise management—SharePoint, Google Sheets, FranConnect, and Sugar CRM, to name a few. As the company grew and acquired more brands, Xponential Fitness began its search for a single, consolidated system to manage fitness brands globally. The company needed a system that could scale along with its growing business, could automate daily tasks, and was cost-effective, as until then Xponential was spending a minimum of $100,000 on these systems annually.

That's where Zoho CRM entered the picture.

Implementation and training

The implementation only took a month. An additional two months were used to build on the functionality of the system and to train users. Xponential Fitness employs a total of 250 individuals—220 of whom use Zoho CRM regularly. The company boasts a CRM adoption rate of 100%.

Leveraging Zoho CRM

How Xponential Fitness leverages Zoho CRM is just as unique as the company itself.

The CRM is primarily used by the franchisor to manage fitness studios from the point of sale to the point of opening. Xponential Fitness handles 4,500 franchises and 2,000 open studios in Zoho CRM.

Up until March 2020, Xponential followed an overly complicated process:

• Leads were acquired on Sugar CRM.
• Qualified prospects were managed on FranConnect during the sales process.
• After completing a sale, the accounts were added to Zoho CRM.

Streamlining the sales process

In an effort to simplify the process and cut costs for the company, Executive Vice President of Technology, Chris Neal, developed the company's own Leads module in Zoho CRM. By doing so, all of Xponential's leads—qualified or unqualified—funnel into it. As a lead moves forward to the next stage, it's captured in the Deals module. With Zoho CRM, the entire sales process is captured end-to-end in a single system, eliminating the need for several inefficient systems.

Xponential Fitness' sales team consists of 10 members, all of whom interact with Zoho CRM for their day-to-day tasks, whereas the rest are responsible for assigning leads to the team. Workflow rules are set in place by the company to trigger automated emails to franchisees when they enter specific stages.

Expedition via integrations and automation

The franchisor receives 50 to 100 leads per day, which are generated from Google, Facebook, and its website. On the website, a third party app is used to showcase a request form—a simple, modest form for franchisees to gauge more information on the opportunities offered by Xponential. The responses are captured on Zapier. Through Zoho CRM's integration with Zapier, the responses are instantly converted to leads, and pushed to Zoho CRM. In turn, Zoho CRM triggers an automated email asking the lead to fill out a more detailed, confidential form created using Zoho Forms. By integrating Zoho Forms with CRM, once the confidential form is filled out, the lead gets pushed into CRM.

Based on their responses, an internal team member qualifies the lead, who is then assigned to a sales representative. The sales rep takes the qualified lead through the six-stage process.

• Introduction
• Unit economics
• Validation
• Discovery day
• Paperwork
• Closing

This entire process is captured in Zoho CRM as the company executes a drip campaign of seven emails sent to the lead during each stage by employing workflow automation in Zoho CRM.

The team has also set up custom modules for consultant and vendor rebate management.

Company-wide CRM usage

The marketing team utilizes Zoho CRM to manage advertising budget, vendors, and other marketing activities—driving conversations towards increased efficiency for the overall company.

As a franchisor, real estate is an important aspect of the company's core business that needs tremendous attention to detail in order to file franchise disclosure documents. Digital signatures are collected on all key documents by integrating Zoho Sign with Zoho CRM.

The real estate team handles the input of relevant data regarding a franchisee's real estate into Zoho CRM. The data tracked includes the rent of the location, the broker, the size, the lease, and more. Additionally, this data helps Xponential in calculating and analyzing costs, allowing it to estimate the success of a franchise.

Likewise, the development team centers their attention on the opening of a studio. This process generally involves an architect, a general contractor, equipment installation, and the duration of the development process. Having such crucial information in the same place and accessible to all allows Xponential to accelerate studio openings.

With teams who focus on different aspects of the business using the same unified system, communication becomes seamless for the company, leaving no room for confusion internally.

Visibility into business operations

The Reports feature is a great tool the organization can use to determine which stages leads and studios are at in a pipeline, the number of leads closing in a specific month, and more. Similarly, Neal created a common home page in CRM for all employees so the team can observe the rate at which the company grows, and keep track of the most fundamental KPIs.

In addition to the Dashboards feature, Domo—a business intelligence tool—is also integrated to CRM and helps them utilize the data in Zoho CRM to make company-wide decisions. The team uses the mobile app to access everything on the go.