How are sales leads received by a franchisor distributed among its network?

Generally speaking, a lead will be allocated to whichever franchisee covers the area of responsibility in which the enquirer is based. A simple check of the postcode will establish this and the details will be emailed or phoned through to the franchisee or even automatically flagged up on the franchise management software used by the network. This is a better system and more likely to result in a sale than where the franchisor simply tells enquirers to refer to the website where there is a full list of franchised outlets.In some cases the allocation procedure may be more sophisticated; for example, if the enquiry needs to be handled by a franchisee with specific skills, experience or equipment, or if the enquiry falls outside a currently allocated area of responsibility.How the trading territories are initially decided depends on a number of relevant criteria such as total population, population of a certain age profile, number of owner occupied homes of a certain type, total number of small businesses, number of a particular type of business or even number of households with gardens, young children or pets.Once the franchisor has worked out how many potential customers they need to enable a franchisee to meet their targets, then they know how many potential territories there are in the country, and these can then be mapped out by specialist contractors, most often to coincide with postcode areas to make distribution easier.