The picture in one page
Tom represents Another9 and Menchie's today, with a third expected. Brands rotate roughly every two years once a territory is sold out, so the setup has to expand without being rebuilt.
Tom
Eight to ten one-to-one calls a day. Needs meeting links, his Outlook connected, follow-up handled for him, and one place that shows what has not been touched.
Monique
Sweeps behind every call, owns reporting, imports and exports, and updates FranConnect. Needs conversion rates, time in stage, stall alerts, and the ability to send as Tom.
Cammie
Picks up the repetitive follow-up, and owns moving leads and deals through their stages. Needs templates, tasks and the ability to send under Tom's address while logged in as herself. She is working out her own way of running behind Tom in the meantime, on the understanding that it changes when HubSpot lands.
FranConnect stays live. Brand One has renewed it until August 2027.
Roughly 950 records owned by Tom across two brands, of which 75 to 150 are active at any time and the rest are dormant. Five to ten new enquiries a day, heaviest on Mondays when brokers release their weekend leads.
The goal, in Tom's words: nothing falls through the cracks, nobody stalls, and the follow-up stops eating nights and weekends without slowing the top of the funnel down.
Terminology mapping table
Franchise language and HubSpot language describe the same record with different words. This is the table we all work from, so nobody is guessing what a candidate, a developer or a lead means in a given sentence.
| Their term | What it actually is | In HubSpot |
|---|---|---|
| Candidate, prospect | The human being pursued | Contact |
| Co-applicant | The second name on an application. Usually a spouse, sometimes a business partner, and they go into the business too. Fewer than half of pursuits have one, there can be as many as five, and they often do not appear until the second or third meeting | Their own contact, associated to the primary’s lead and deal with a Co-applicant label |
| Interest, enquiry | An active pursuit, not yet a real opportunity | Lead, one per pursuit |
| Real opportunity | Funds, timing and intent proven | Deal, one per pursuit |
| Developer | The salesperson representing a brand | Contact, Company, Lead and Deal owner (Tom today) |
| Brand | Another9, Menchie's, and the ones that follow | A dropdown on the Contact, the Lead and the Deal. Multi-select on the contact, single select on the other two |
| Broker, consultant | The individual who introduces candidates and earns commission on a sale. Two words for the same role, and the same words get used for the firm they work for | Contact, sitting under the broker company |
| Broker network | The firm the broker works for, which pays for the lead generation behind the introduction. Always a broker network rather than just a network, because the word on its own means something else. The Perfect Franchise, TPF, carries more than a hundred brokers and Tony Carrella is one of them | Company, type Broker |
| Independent broker | A broker who has set up their own consulting firm and works on their own domain. Some affiliate loosely with IFPG, which is a network by name but does not put its brokers on its own domain | Contact under their own company. This is why the email domain cannot be used to work out which network someone belongs to |
| CQ | Confidential Questionnaire, the qualification application. It only ever comes from a broker, so a candidate who comes to Brand One direct never fills one in. Quality varies and the best of them run to four pages | The document downloaded and attached to the record, plus a Yes on the contact to say one came back |
| FDD | Franchise Disclosure Document, gated by state registration | Property and task. Sending stays in FranConnect for now, though replacing it in HubSpot matters and sits with Brand One |
| Discovery Day | An in person event held at the brand, roughly once a month per brand, that the candidate pays to attend. They register with the brand beforehand and usually fill in a questionnaire. Tom goes when he has enough candidates going. Nine times out of ten the brand’s offer follows within 24 to 48 hours | A meeting with its own date on the deal, plus the offer letter and its expiry. Section 7 has the full run of it |
| Offer letter | The brand’s written offer to become a franchisee, issued 24 to 48 hours after Discovery Day and open for 30 days | Date on the deal, with the expiry driving its own follow-up |
| Franchisee | A candidate who signed. Once legal is finished they leave Brand One and go to the brand | Contact with a closed won deal |
| Dead | Not deleted. Dormant and still reachable | Closed lost or parked. Nobody leaves the database |
| Remarks | Free text notes on the FranConnect record | Notes on the activity timeline |
| Status | Where they sit in the process | Lead stage or Deal stage |
| Status emails | The branded emails that fire when a deal moves stage | Stays in FranConnect, driven by the stage the deal sits in, which is why stage changes are keyed back |
| Standalone emails | Tom's own one-to-one follow-up | Moves to HubSpot as sales templates |
| Add, change, delete | Adds are new leads and deals, changes are stage moves on existing ones, and a delete is really a closed lost or disqualified. Nothing ever leaves the database | Import file spec, matched on record ID |
| Territory | The state being sold into | Property, plus the state registration check |
FranConnect field mapping
Filled in as we work through the exports together.
| FranConnect field | What it holds | Object | HubSpot property | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| To be completed as we work through the exports | ||||
Three things that hang off it
- The stage map. The HubSpot stages are built around how you actually sell, so they are not a copy of the FranConnect ones. That makes the mapping table the important piece: each HubSpot stage to its FranConnect status and back again, so the update into FranConnect stays a lookup rather than a decision.
- Everything other than stages stays close. The properties themselves mirror FranConnect as closely as HubSpot allows. The stages are where we improve on it, the fields are where we deliberately do not, because that is what keeps the ongoing updates between the two systems simple.
- The unique identifier. None of the exports carry a record ID. They are names, emails and dates only, which means matching on email plus brand. That works, but it is fragile in a way an ID would not be, so it is worth pushing FranConnect for one before the first load.
Remarks come in as notes. They are their own export, roughly a dozen per active lead across 309 active leads. They land on the timeline as notes rather than becoming properties. One thing to watch: the remark text contains line breaks, so the file needs handling carefully or the rows run into each other.
Leadership Call Notes come in as notes too. This is the broker’s write-up on the candidate and it is the richest thing in any of the exports: the bio, why this franchise, employment status, and the financials. The prose belongs on the timeline, but net worth and liquid capital are worth lifting out into real fields on the way past, because they are the numbers qualification turns on. They are written differently every time, so someone checks each number rather than trusting a rule to find it.
- City / State arrives as one field, for example “San Francisco / California”. It has to be split into the two HubSpot fields on import, or the state is unusable for the registration check and every geographic report.
- Prospect’s Name arrives as one field on the lead summary export. First and last name have to be separated, and the usual caveats apply to anyone with a middle name or a double-barrelled surname.
Option lists we need from FranConnect
The exports only show the options that happen to be in use. Anything defined but unused is invisible, and if it turns up later the import fails on it. These are the picklists to ask for in full.
| Field | Seen in the data | Do we need the full list? |
|---|---|---|
| Lead Source Details | 96 values, 45 of them used exactly once | Yes, this is the important one. So many singletons means the export is nowhere near the full picklist, and it grows every time a new broker appears |
| Lead Killed Reason | 15 values, only one used once | Yes. Probably close to complete, but the unused options still need to exist or a later record cannot be mapped |
| Lead Source Category | 7 values | Answered. Monique is giving us the short list Burgess Media will actually use rather than everything FranConnect defines, because most of those options were never theirs and there is no way to hide them over there |
| Brand Name | 2 values, Another Nine and Menchies | Yes, but a different question: which brands could Tom be assigned, given a third is coming and Brand One carries 20 to 24 |
| Lead Status | 23 in use | Already have it. The pipeline report gives all 32 defined statuses, so this one just needs confirming as complete |
72 of its 96 values are a broker and their network jammed together, like Franzy (Caleb Clayton), across 15 networks. The other 24 are genuine marketing sources: Podcast, Menchie’s Website, Newsletter, Social Media, Word of Mouth, Online Search, Visited a Location.
Those are two different things sharing one field. In HubSpot they are better separated, with the marketing sources staying as a source property and the broker becoming an association, which is where it belongs anyway. Otherwise the dropdown has to carry a new option every time a broker joins.
How the import will run
All of it manual for now. Nothing writes back to FranConnect on its own, and nothing needs to.
- The export list. We give you a list of exactly what to pull out of FranConnect, so nothing has to be guessed at.
- The mapping table. The table above tells us what each field holds and where it lands in HubSpot.
- The import file spec. The columns to add, how the owner, brand, state and broker association are expressed, and how the active and dormant records are handled differently.
- Four imports, in order. Contacts first, then brokers as their own deduplicated set, then the deals that came in direct, then the deals that came through a broker so each introduction lands against the right one.
- Then it repeats. The full base comes out of FranConnect each time. Leads and deals match on the FranConnect ID, contacts match on email, because FranConnect works one record per enquiry rather than one per person. Of roughly 950 rows only 20 to 30 will have moved, and only those do anything.
- And back the other way. A list of the stage changes made in HubSpot since the last run, keyed into FranConnect by hand, around ten a day. This one stays manual on purpose, because that stage change is what fires the branded emails.
The full loop is drawn end to end in section 10.
Half of this is now answered. The broker export carries Broker First Name and Broker Last Name as real columns, 184 rows covering 70 brokers, so the people come across cleanly. The network is messier. In the main export it sits inside Lead Source Details in the form The Perfect Franchise (Emily Anderson), so the firm name and the broker name have to be separated. The lead summary export gives the same field as a clean network name with no brackets at all, so it is worth asking whether that version can be produced for the full base instead. The deals still load in two passes so each introduction lands against the right broker.
Anything that will not come across cleanly can be keyed in by hand rather than engineered around. Manual entry into FranConnect already happens every day, so a short list of records to enter once is cheaper than building import rules for the exceptions. Worth saying plainly, because it keeps the import spec simple and stops us solving for edge cases that only affect a handful of rows.
Data notes
Everything worth knowing before the first load, from going through the five exports. Some of it is good news, some of it is work, and a few things need an answer from someone who knows the history. Tick them off as they are dealt with.
Already solved, no need to ask
Work to do on the way in
Records that need a decision, not a rule
Questions nobody here can answer
Custom properties to create
A starting list of the fields that do not exist in HubSpot out of the box and that this business needs. The full specification comes out of discovery as a spreadsheet, with the field type and the options behind each one, but these are the ones we already know are coming.
Contact
| Property | Type | From | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand | Dropdown | FranConnect | Convenience only, so you can see a brand on the person. It overwrites itself when someone is chasing two brands, so it is not reported on. The lead and the deal are the trusted ones |
| Broker | Dropdown, Yes | New | Marks this person as a broker rather than a candidate, so they never land in the wrong list |
| Broker status | Dropdown, Active or Inactive | New | Whether this broker is still sending you candidates. The export only carries lead statuses, which belong to the candidate rather than the broker, so there is nothing today that says whether a broker is live |
| Net worth | Currency | From the call notes | Sits inside Leadership Call Notes as free text, in formats like “$ 3,013,728.00” or “Approx. Net Worth: 1000000+”. Worth pulling into a real field, because this is what qualification actually turns on |
| Liquid capital | Currency | From the call notes | Same source, same reason. “Liquid: 300000+”. The two numbers together are what decide whether someone earns an hour of Tom’s time |
| CQ completed | Dropdown, Yes | New | Whether a CQ came back. That is all the field needs to say. The questionnaire itself is downloaded and attached to the record rather than linked, because the links in the notes may not last |
| Co-applicant | Dropdown, Yes | New | Marks this person as the second name on someone else’s application, so they are never counted as an enquiry of their own |
| Veteran | Dropdown, Yes | FranConnect | Barely used, so worth asking whether it is still used before building it |
The CQ is downloaded and attached to the record rather than held as a link. The links in the FranConnect notes sit on the broker’s system and there is no reason to assume they will still resolve in a year, which is exactly when someone goes looking for one.
On getting HubSpot to read it: attaching a document puts it on the record, but as far as we know HubSpot does not read the contents of an attached file into the record on its own, so the AI summary will not pick up what is inside a CQ. To check at build, since this moves quickly. What works today is lifting the few things worth having out of it, which is what Net worth and Liquid capital above are for, and pasting anything else worth keeping into a note so it sits on the timeline where the summary can see it.
Name, email, mobile, work phone, home phone, address, city, state, postal code, company name and LinkedIn URL are all native, so nothing needs building. The lead summary export does carry LinkedIn, and some of the call notes have a LinkedIn line inside them too, so the native field can be populated on the way in. No FranConnect ID either: FranConnect holds a record per enquiry rather than per person, so email is what collapses those rows into one contact.
Company
| Property | Type | From | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broker | Dropdown, Yes | New | Marks the firm as a broker network, so broker companies segment away from everything else |
| Broker status | Dropdown, Active or Inactive | New | Whether the network is still active for you. Thirteen networks in the data, and most of them are a long tail of one or two leads, so knowing which are live is worth more than the count |
The broker set is already extractable. Deduplicating the broker export gives a clean list of broker and network pairs, with The Perfect Franchise well ahead, then Franzy and Franchise Consulting Company, and a long tail of networks on one or two. A handful of rows have a network but no named broker, which is the sort of thing to hand back rather than guess at.
Lead
| Property | Type | From | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand | Dropdown | FranConnect | Which brand this pursuit is for. Single select, because one lead is one brand. Another Nine or Menchie’s today, with a third coming |
| State / Province | Dropdown | FranConnect | Texas, California, Florida and Georgia lead it |
| Lead Source Category | Dropdown | FranConnect | Internet, Brokers, Co-Applicant, Referred By, Existing Franchisee, Import, OLD Leads. The referral split you wanted already exists here |
| Lead Source Details | Dropdown | FranConnect | Everything from Menchie’s Website and Podcast through to the broker networks. Also where the network name is buried for broker leads |
| Lead Killed Reason | Dropdown | FranConnect | Why a lead died. Set when it goes to Dead Lead, and the same options as on the deal so the two count together: No Response, Not Interested, International, Fishing Expedition, Financing Not Available, Not Registered in State, Bad fit for brand, No Territory, Bought A Different Franchise, Declined by Franchisor, Deferred Decision, Test Lead |
| Inquiry Date | Date and time | FranConnect | When the enquiry actually arrived, which is not the same as when the record was created in HubSpot. The time matters as much as the date, for the reason directly below |
| First contacted | Date | New | When somebody actually got hold of them, which is a different question from when the enquiry landed |
| Days in the system | Number, calculated | New, replaces the FranConnect counter | A running total from the inquiry date, whatever stage they are in and whether they are open, won or lost. The second half of the (x/y) FranConnect shows today |
| FranConnect ID | Text, unique | New, if they can produce it | The sync key. Nothing in the current exports carries one |
The two counters. Time in stage is native on both the lead and the deal, so the first half of the FranConnect (x/y) comes for free. Only the running total has to be built, and it carries through the lead to deal conversion rather than resetting. Between them they are what the stall alerts read from, with a different threshold per stage. Per stage history beyond that, how long someone spent in each stage they have already left, is deliberately not being built. Worth revisiting later if the reporting asks for it.
If two developers are both working a candidate for Another9 in Austin, and both candidates are offered a franchise off the same Discovery Day, the one who gets to lock that territory is decided on inquiry date and time. So it is not a reporting field, it is the tie breaker, and it has to come across with its time intact rather than being flattened to a date.
Deal
| Property | Type | From | What it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amount | Currency | Native | The total that comes to Burgess Media on the deal. Gross, before the broker is paid |
| Broker commission | Currency | New | What goes out to the broker on a win |
| Net to Burgess Media | Currency, calculated | New | Amount minus Broker commission, worked out by HubSpot rather than typed, so it cannot drift from the two numbers it comes from. What actually comes home, since broker deals are worth less and the gross on its own is misleading |
| Brand | Dropdown | FranConnect | Which brand is being sold. Single select, and the same option list as the lead so it carries across on conversion. This is also what decides whether the deal opens at Founders Call or Pre-Discovery Day |
| State / Province | Dropdown | FranConnect | The state being sold into, and what the FDD check measures against |
| Lead Source Category | Dropdown | FranConnect | Where the deal came from, carried across from the lead so conversion can be split by source. Same options: Internet, Brokers, Co-Applicant, Referred By, Existing Franchisee, Import, OLD Leads |
| Lead Killed Reason | Dropdown | FranConnect | Why a deal died. Same name and same options as on the lead, so the two can be counted together: No Response, Not Interested, International, Fishing Expedition, Financing Not Available, Not Registered in State, Bad fit for brand, No Territory, Bought A Different Franchise, Declined by Franchisor, Deferred Decision, Test Lead |
| Inquiry Date | Date | FranConnect | Carried across from the lead so enquiry to close is measurable on the deal itself, not just the chase |
| Franchise Awarded Date | Date | FranConnect | The real close date on an awarded deal |
| # of locations | Number | FranConnect | Only present on awarded deals. Mostly 1, occasionally up to 5 |
| FDD sent | Date | New | Compliance record as much as a sales one. FranConnect implies it through the status rather than storing a date |
| Discovery Day date | Date | New | Which event they are going to. The whole prep week hangs off this one date |
| Discovery Day registered | Dropdown, Yes or No | New | The brand runs its own registration and questionnaire, and the candidate has to get through it before they go. This is also what the brand’s attendee list is built from |
| Offer letter issued | Date | New | The brand’s offer, which lands within 24 to 48 hours of Discovery Day nine times out of ten |
| Offer expires | Date, calculated | New | Thirty days after the offer letter. A hard deadline that is not ours to move, so it drives its own follow-up |
| Days in the system | Number, calculated | New | Carried through from the lead so the running total does not restart when the deal is created |
| FranConnect ID | Text, unique | New, if they can produce it | The sync key |
One thing the net calculation needs. Put 0 in Broker commission on a direct deal rather than leaving it blank. Then the net always equals the amount on a direct deal and the field is never empty, which keeps it safe to total in a report and safe to sort on.
On Lead Killed Reason. It keeps your name on both objects rather than becoming Closed lost reason, so nobody has to learn a second word for the same thing. To check at build: HubSpot already ships a Closed lost reason on the deal, and if its label can be changed to Lead Killed Reason then we use that native field rather than building a second one beside it. If the label is locked, we build our own and leave the native one out of the record layout so there are not two fields asking the same question. Either way it has to be a separate property from the one on the lead, because leads and deals are different objects, and the option list is deliberately identical on both. That matters more than it sounds: the seven holding and exit stages exist on both pipelines, so a candidate can die as a lead or die as a deal, and only a matching list lets you count why people drop out in one number rather than two.
A broker on the deal means the broker earns, so there is nothing to flag. What is not settled is what happens further out:
- If a broker introduced someone three years ago and that person buys a different brand today, does the broker still earn? Is there a time limit on it?
- If the same candidate comes back later through a different broker, which introduction wins?
Both matter the moment anyone markets to a dormant candidate, because that is when the credit question turns into real money. Worth deciding when a live case turns up rather than in the abstract.
Source tells you a deal came from a referral. It does not tell you who referred it, and that is worth having when the referral is the highest converting source you have.
- The thorough version. Associate the referring contact to the deal with a Referrer label, the same shape as the broker. Most accurate, but it is manual on every deal and someone has to remember.
- The lighter version. Flag the referring company at deal level only, and leave the individual out of it. Far less upkeep, and enough to answer where the referrals are coming from.
The heavier option only pays for itself if you are going to act on the individual referrer. Worth deciding before the properties are built rather than after.
Brand, and how it is held
Brand is a dropdown on the Contact, the Lead and the Deal rather than a custom object. It is the simpler thing to live with: the team pick it from a list, it filters and reports the same way every other property does, and there is no second record to open or keep in step. Adding a brand is adding an option, which anyone can do.
| Where | Type | Why that type |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | Dropdown, single select | On the record for convenience, not for reporting. See the note below |
| Lead | Dropdown, single select | One lead is one pursuit of one brand |
| Deal | Dropdown, single select | Same, and it carries across from the lead on conversion |
The option list: Another Nine and Menchie’s today, a third expected, and the list grows as brands rotate roughly every two years. Old brands stay on the list rather than being deleted, so the history on closed and dormant records still reads properly.
A person chasing two brands has one contact record and one Brand field on it, so whichever pursuit was touched last wins. It will keep overwriting itself and there is no version of a single dropdown that does not do that. It stays on the record because it is useful to glance at, but nothing is counted from it.
Every brand split in the reporting comes off the lead and the deal, where there is one per pursuit and the value cannot be overwritten by a different brand. Worth saying out loud to Cammie early, because a contact list filtered by brand will look right and quietly be wrong.
A dropdown is a label, so there is nowhere on it to hold what is true about a brand: the states it is registered to sell in, its franchise fee, and whether it is still active or has rotated out. That was the only real argument for a custom object.
With two brands and a third coming, a reference table kept outside HubSpot covers it, and the FDD registration check stays in FranConnect for now anyway. It only becomes worth revisiting if you want an automation reading registered states directly, which is A16 and is on hold. Worth knowing that is the trade rather than finding it later.
Discovery Day has changed sides. Discovery Day Status and Discovery Day Date are empty across every FranConnect record, so there is still nothing to migrate, but they are now being built rather than dropped. Nothing at all was being recorded against the single most important event in the process. Genuinely left out, all empty and not replaced: Market, Qualified and Post Discovery Day Notes. Buying Percentage is zero on every row that has one, and Pre-Discovery Day Notes has a couple of entries in the whole base, which belong on the timeline as notes rather than in a field. Close date, close probability, owner and time in stage are native.
The relationships to track
This is the part specific to Burgess Media, and the part most setups get wrong. One person can be several conversations at once, whether that is two different brands or the same brand in two different territories, and each one moves at its own pace. The broker who introduced them is a relationship in its own right rather than a source field.
Every lead and deal links to its brand and carries its own state, source, owner and FranConnect ID.
| Relationship | Why it matters | How |
|---|---|---|
| Contact to Lead, one per pursuit | A candidate can be chasing two brands at once, or the same brand in two territories, each at a different stage. FranConnect creates the same person twice | Multiple leads per contact, no duplicate contacts |
| Contact to Deal, one per pursuit | Someone can be under contract on Another9 in California while still being chased on Another9 in Texas | Multiple deals per contact, no duplicate contacts |
| Co-applicant to the same lead and deal | A spouse or a business partner going into the business with them. They get the drip campaigns, the invitations and often the meetings, and at the legal stage their details go straight onto the franchise agreement, so the fields have to be right rather than roughly right | Their own contact, associated to the primary’s lead and deal with a Co-applicant label. Up to five on one deal, and only ever one stage between them |
| Deal to broker, introduced by | Brokers go dark the moment they hand a candidate over. If the deal knows which broker introduced it, the updates back to them can be automated. Broker deals also carry commission | The broker contact associated to the deal with an association label of Broker, which can be applied automatically |
| Broker contact to broker company | Brokers sit inside networks and reporting is wanted at both levels | Standard contact to company, with a Broker flag set to Yes on both so they stay easy to segment and never get mistaken for candidates |
| Contact to lead source | Organic, referral or broker. Tom wants separate conversion rates per source | Property set at creation and carried for life |
| Lead and deal to brand | Every report splits by brand, and brands rotate in and out | A dropdown on the lead and the deal rather than a linked object. A new brand is a new option on the list, which anyone can add. The contact carries a multi-select version so a person chasing two brands is not flattened to one |
| Lead and deal to state | Each brand is only registered to sell in certain states | Held on the lead and the deal, not just the person, since the same candidate can be pursuing different states. The send guardrail stays in FranConnect for now |
| Lead and deal to FranConnect ID | The sync key behind every incremental import. It sits on the lead and the deal, not the contact, because FranConnect holds a record per enquiry | Unique identifier property. Contacts dedupe on email instead |
In FranConnect the co-applicant is a separate record carrying its own status. Moving the primary only moves the co-applicant if somebody remembers to tick Update Co-Applicants, and when that is missed the two drift apart and have to be reconnected out of the record history. Associating them to one lead and one deal removes the problem rather than reproducing it, because there is only one stage to move.
The co-applicant also arrives late. Two or three meetings often go by before a spouse comes into it, so they are added part way through and pick the campaigns up from that point rather than from the start.
The same person can be a co-applicant on two brands at once, with two different developers, on one email address, and expect to receive both sets of marketing. Nobody is going to hand over a second address for it. It is the same shape as the two brand model on the primary, so it should hold, but it is worth testing rather than assuming.
Lead and deal stages
Taken from your data dictionary, so this is the real list with your own definitions against it. The split has moved since the last version. The lead pipeline now carries the whole qualification run, all the way through validation and the FDD, and a deal only opens once a candidate is genuinely heading for Discovery Day.
Four completed milestones, then the deal opens at a different stage per brand
It is not one stage, it is four of them completed: Intro Call Scheduled, Validation, Introductory Webinar and FDD Review. They are marked in the lead table below. Once all four are done the deal is created and the lead closes as converted, carrying the brand, the state, the source, the owner and the inquiry date across, plus the broker and co-applicant associations where there are any.
Which stage the deal opens at depends on the brand. Another Nine opens at Founders Call. Menchie’s opens at Pre-Discovery Day.
A skipped stage breaks the trigger. HubSpot stamps a date every time a record enters a stage, so “completed” is readable with nothing extra to build. But it only stamps a stage the record actually passed through. If a lead is moved straight from Intro Call Scheduled to FDD Review, two of the four never get a date and the deal never creates. So either those four are enforced in order, or the workflow reads something other than the stage date on the ones that get jumped. Worth deciding which, because it is the difference between a rule that holds and one that quietly misses people.
The two calls are identified by the email that goes out, rather than by a calendar entry, so we need the subject line for the Founders Call email and for the Pre-Discovery Day email. Monique is sending those over.
Lead stages, the qualification run
Everything up to the point a deal is created. The four milestones are highlighted.
| Stage | What it means | What fires |
|---|---|---|
| New Lead | The lead enters the database | Triggers the next stage, First Attempt at Initial |
| First Attempt at Initial | Intro email and SMS sent, with a calendar link | After 5 days, move to the next stage if no meeting is booked |
| Second Attempt at Initial | Reminder email and SMS, with the calendar link | After 5 days, move to the next stage if no meeting is booked |
| Third Attempt at Initial | Reminder email and SMS, with the calendar link | After 5 days, kill the lead if no meeting is booked. Task to Cammie to set it to Dead in FranConnect, and the “No response close file” email goes out |
| Intro Call ScheduledMilestone 1 | The first meeting is booked | |
| No Show | Did not turn up for a meeting | |
| ValidationMilestone 2 | Email sent with the link to the video library validation calls | Task to Cammie to send three Zoom validation invites |
| Introductory WebinarMilestone 3 | The second meeting is booked | |
| Franchise Application | Email sent with the link to the franchise application | |
| Wealth Building | Still to define | |
| FDD Prep Call | Email sent about the FDD | |
| FDD ReviewMilestone 4 | A call is booked to review the FDD | |
| Financial Modeling Review | Review the proforma | |
| Real Estate | Email sent on territory and mapping | |
| Operations | Email sent on operations | |
| Marketing | Email sent on marketing | |
| Labor Model | Email sent on the labor model | |
| Technology | Email sent on technology |
The three initial attempts run on a 5 day cadence, so a lead that never books is worked for 15 days and then closed with the no response email. That is the one part of the lead pipeline that runs entirely on its own.
Deal stages, heading for Discovery Day
Short on purpose. By the time a deal exists the candidate has already been qualified through the lead pipeline, so what is left is the run at the event and the legal work after it.
| Stage | What it means | What fires |
|---|---|---|
| Founders CallAnother Nine starts here | A manual step. Two emails to create, currently in draft | Task to Monique to create the founders intro |
| Pre-Discovery DayMenchie’s starts here | A meeting set to discuss Discovery Day | |
| Discovery Day | Attending Discovery Day in person | |
| BVerify Diligence | Still to define | |
| Post Discovery Day | A meeting set to debrief Discovery Day | |
| Funding Pending | No email or SMS. Waiting on funding | |
| Franchise Agreement | In the legal process | Task to Tom to build the legal packet |
| Closed Lead - Sold | Email sent, and a LinkedIn post goes out | Task to Monique to send cake and track the bank wire |
The offer letter and its 30 day clock sit across Discovery Day and Post Discovery Day. Section 5 holds the dates and A9 in section 8 drives the follow-up.
The event the whole pipeline points at
Every brand runs a Discovery Day roughly once a month and skips one only when nobody is ready for it, which is rare. It is in person, at the brand, and the candidate is paying to be there. Tom goes when he has enough candidates going, so one month he attends and the next his colleague does. The week before is its own piece of work: a prep call each, travel and hotel checked, questions answered, and Tom telling them what to do and say to get the most out of two days they have paid for.
Then the brand decides, in person, whether it wants them. Nine times out of ten the offer letter goes out within 24 to 48 hours, and it runs 30 days before it lapses. Accepting it opens the legal stretch and the full franchise agreement, and once legal is finished the franchisee leaves Brand One and goes to the brand. So Discovery Day is not one date to record. It is a prep window, an event, a short wait and a hard 30 day clock, and each of those wants something firing off it.
Every brand wants a list of its own candidates attending its own Discovery Day, because Brand One is effectively their sales team and they have none of their own. That is a report today, built off the registration each candidate completes with the brand. The better version is a dashboard the brand can look at itself: what is coming in, where it sits, who is attending next, and how many got through financing and legal afterwards. It is Brand One’s call rather than Burgess Media’s, but it is worth them hearing it.
Holding and exit stages, on both pipelines
These seven exist identically on the lead pipeline and the deal pipeline, so a record can go dead as a lead or dead as a deal. Worth knowing when the reporting is built, because anything counting dead or on hold has to look at both.
| Stage | What it means | What fires |
|---|---|---|
| Dead Lead | Not deleted. Dormant and still reachable | Sends the close file email if wanted |
| FDD Pending Registration | No email or SMS. Waiting on the US state registration | Task to Monique, a monthly check of each brand’s registrations |
| On Hold - Inactive | A holding stage | Task after 90 days to check in |
| Do Not Contact | Removed from the mailing subscriptions | Goes onto the exclusion list |
| Recycle | Still to define. Back to the top when the timing changes | |
| Pre B1 Lead | Still to define | |
| Dormant Brand | Still to define |
The validation block is answered. Real Estate, Operations, Marketing, Labor Model, Technology and Financial Modeling Review stay as stages rather than becoming a checklist, and each now has its own email against it. They sit on the lead pipeline, not the deal.
Five stages still have no definition: Wealth Building, BVerify Diligence, Recycle, Pre B1 Lead and Dormant Brand, each marked Required, Optional or Not in Use. Worth deciding which survive before the pipelines are built, so the new ones start clean rather than inheriting everything.
The automations
Foundational, before anything client facing goes out
| # | Automation | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Send as Tom | Cammie and Monique log in as themselves and send under Tom's address. The candidate should only ever see Tom. This is the single most important thing to get right, so it is set up and tested first. The data model and the pipeline are built on the assumption it works. |
| A2 | Email and calendar | Tom's Outlook connected, meeting links moved into HubSpot, Calendly retired. |
In the build
| # | Automation | Trigger | What happens | Built by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A3 | Stage change follow-up | Deal or lead stage change | Templated one-to-one email in Tom's voice, sent as Tom. Roughly half go as-is, half get a personal line from Cammie | Monique |
| A4 | Stall alert | Time in stage passes a threshold | Task to Monique or Cammie, and optionally an outbound touch. Time in stage is the single most valuable number the portal can produce, and thresholds vary by stage | Monique |
| A5 | Post-call tasks | Tom finishes a meeting | Standard follow-up tasks created against the record. Three to five per call, mostly templated, across ten calls a day. Today this is a handwritten pad swept by hand | Monique |
| A6 | Task back to Tom | Something only Tom can do | Assigned to Tom: legal, contracting, closing. Roughly three or four out of every ten meetings. This becomes his end-of-day list | Monique |
| A7 | The untouched view | Always on | One place showing what has been touched, by whom, and what has not. Replaces reconstructing it across five systems | Monique |
| A8 | Co-applicant enrolment | A co-applicant is associated to the lead or deal | They pick up the drip campaigns and the meeting invitations from that point rather than from the start, which is right, because they usually arrive two or three meetings in | Monique |
| A9 | Discovery Day run-up, and the 30 day offer clock | Discovery Day date set, then the offer letter issued | The prep week fires off the date: a prep call booked with Tom, a task to check travel and hotel, and a chase on the brand’s own registration until it is done. Then the offer expiry is set 30 days out, with reminders as it runs down and a task to Tom before it lapses | Monique |
The stage has to be the first thing you see. Cammie owns knowing where every lead and deal sits and moving them along, so the stage belongs at the top of the record rather than buried in a property group.
HubSpot’s own AI summary earns its place here. The remarks come across as notes and there are roughly a dozen on every active lead, so a running summary of what has actually happened on a record is doing real work rather than being a novelty. Worth turning on and checking against a few real records early, since Monique is planning to lean on it.
On hold, and quoted separately whenever you want them
Named here so nothing gets lost. Each can be picked up whenever you want it, quoted at the time.
| # | Automation | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| A10 | Broker progress updates | Automatic notification to the introducing broker as their candidate moves: meeting held, next meeting booked, gone quiet, moving to legal. Brokers invest heavily in these leads and then lose visibility the moment they hand one over. This is the fastest route to standing with them, and it is why the broker is associated to the deal with a label rather than just recorded as a source. |
| A11 | Post-close nurture | Three month anniversary email in Tom's voice to closed franchisees, who are the strongest referral source there is. Easier to build once there is real closed data to send to. |
| A12 | Gone-quiet sequences | Re-engagement for candidates who have stalled, enrolled from a workflow. |
| A13 | Dormant reactivation | When a new brand arrives, market to the dormant and the closed. Waits on the broker credit question. |
| A14 | Pre-qualification gate | Candidates earn their way onto the calendar through forms, videos and a real application before a one-to-one. Worth testing, though some of the disclosure has to be one-to-one by law, so this can only ever gate the front end. |
| A15 | Meeting notes onto the record | Plaud already produces the transcript, summary and task list on every call. There is no native HubSpot integration, so the realistic route is Zapier, or manual for now. Worth scoping once the record structure is settled. |
| A16 | FDD compliance guardrail | Blocking a send into a state where the brand is not registered, and warning when one has already gone. Stays in FranConnect for now. Replacing it in HubSpot is important rather than optional, and the state registration data behind it sits with Brand One. |
| A17 | Brand-facing dashboards | An external view per brand: the candidates coming in, where they sit, who is attending the next Discovery Day, and how many got through financing and legal afterwards. Brand One’s call rather than Burgess Media’s, and named here so it does not get lost. |
Who builds what
The build splits three ways, which is what keeps anything from being done twice or missed. This also lives on the shared ClickUp board.
- Portal foundations: association, lifecycle and owner settings
- Send as Tom, set up, tested and handed over (A1)
- Data model mindmap
- Property specification across Contact, Company, Deal and Lead, then built from the sheet
- Lead stages and the lead to deal conversion rule
- The relationship model and association labels, including the co-applicant label and how it rides with the primary
- The FranConnect field mapping and the import file spec
- Four imports: contacts, brokers, direct deals, broker deals
- Record layouts across Contact, Lead and Deal, first pass
- Account defaults, users, seats, permissions
- Email and calendar connection, meeting links (A2)
- Email templates and folders
- Record layouts, the final edits, with the stage sitting at the top of the record
- The short list of dropdown options Burgess Media actually uses, rather than everything FranConnect defines
- The subject lines for the Founders Call and Pre-Discovery Day emails, which is how those two calls get recognised
- Deciding which of the five undefined stages survive: Wealth Building, BVerify Diligence, Recycle, Pre B1 Lead and Dormant Brand
- Turning on HubSpot’s AI record summary and checking it against real records
- The deal pipeline, its required fields, and the written definition of each stage. The definitions are done and are in section 7
- The terminology mapping table
- Workflows: stall alerts, task creation, thresholds (A3 to A7)
- Sequences, and triggering them from a workflow
- Dashboards and reporting
- Deciding the records that cannot be matched with certainty
- The commercial calls on broker credit, when a real case turns up. Whether there is a time limit on it, and what happens when a candidate returns through a different broker
- Broker progress updates (A10)
- Post-close nurture (A11)
- Gone-quiet sequences (A12)
- Dormant reactivation (A13)
- Pre-qualification gate (A14)
- Plaud integration (A15)
- FDD guardrail (A16)
- Brand-facing dashboards (A17)
- AI credit usage
We connect our Claude workspace to your portal using a private app key, created by us as portal admin, and use it to create the properties straight from the specification sheet rather than keying them in one by one. Nothing gets mistyped and the internal names match the import file exactly. That connection is used for properties only. Imports and associations are done in HubSpot the normal way, and the key is removed at handover.
Systems in play
How the data moves between the two systems
Every step here is manual for now. Nothing writes back to FranConnect on its own.
Every platform, and what happens to it
| Platform | What it does today | What happens to it |
|---|---|---|
| FranConnect | The legacy CRM. Holds the records and the stages, and a stage change there is what fires the branded drip emails, the status emails and the FDD sends. Also runs the state registration check before an FDD can go out. | Stays Keeps its job while the branded email lives there. Stage changes are keyed back into it. |
| HubSpot | Not yet in use. | Becomes the hub The record, the pipeline, the tasks, the templates and the reporting. |
| monday.com | The leads board, the contacts escalation, the deals with value and close probability, and the quarterly dashboard against the annual target. | Retiring The structure carries into HubSpot. The maintenance does not. |
| Remarkable | Tom's handwritten notes and next steps, ticked off by hand. Visible to Monique and Cammie, and the only current record of what is outstanding. | Stays Tom keeps writing on it. Monique and Cammie read the outstanding actions off it and enter them into HubSpot, by hand for now, so the tracking sits in one place. |
| Plaud | Records every call and produces the audio, transcript, a custom summary, a task list by owner, and a ready-to-send recap email. | Stays Already paid for the year and doing a good job. There is no native HubSpot integration, so getting the output onto the record means Zapier, or manual for now. |
| Outlook | All of Tom's client email. | Stays, connected Connected to this portal so the conversation sits on the record. |
| Calendly | How candidates book time with Tom. | Going dormant Meeting links move into HubSpot. |
| Outlook Calendar | The schedule. On Brand One's Exchange server, alongside the email. | Stays, connected Meetings log against the record instead of being the starting point of a search. |
Boundaries and setup
What sits outside this portal
- No marketing email from Burgess Media. No drip campaigns, no branded sends, no FDDs. That stays where it is, and the plan is to keep benefiting from it rather than rebuild it. Burgess Media sends one-to-one sales email in Tom's voice.
- No website connected. The brands are not yours, so there is no tracking code and no marketing contacts.
- No onboarding pipeline. The moment the contract is signed the franchisee goes to the brand's operations team. The only ongoing touch is the relationship one.
Licensing
One Sales Enterprise seat for Tom, which is what carries unbranded meeting links and sequences that can be triggered from a workflow, plus two Core seats for Monique and Cammie. Pro and Enterprise cannot be mixed on the same hub, which is why the split sits this way. Enterprise includes AI credits, best pointed at anything that keeps candidates moving.
Timing
- Cammie started on 1 September and is shadowing Tom while she learns the process. What she is pointed at in HubSpot Academy depends on what the portal looks like.
- Tom comes into the portal once it is set up to suit his process. Cammie comes in after that, when there is something ready for her to learn.
- FranConnect is renewed until August 2027, so the double running period is finite.