Papa Murphy’s Utilizes Salesforce Software-as-a-Service as a Key Ingredient in Its Recipe of Success

Largest take ’n’ bake pizza chain uses Force.com Platform-as-a-Service to create and deploy a highly tailored franchising solution.
SAN FRANCISCO .- Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that the fifth largest pizza chain in the country is using Salesforce to increase the success of its expanding franchise business. Using the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, Papa Murphy’s International developed and deployed a highly customized solution that allows it to track and manage franchisor information from initial inquiries to contract signing, through site construction and on an ongoing basis for store operations. Salesforce.com partner CenterStance helped deploy the solution for Papa Murphy’s.

Papa Murphy’s is one of the 43,600 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2008. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.

Papa Murphy’s was able to customize and implement their Salesforce CRM applications very rapidly, including Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Marketing, Salesforce Customer Portal and Salesforce Mobile for its franchise sales staff. In addition, Papa Murphy’s is using Force.com to customize Salesforce and tapped into the AppExchange to add additional functionality including Salesforce for Google Adwords. Finally, after a short training session, the company found users were quite comfortable with Salesforce and eager to use it and adoption has already exceeded expectations.

“We have a very mobile workforce, and we needed a way for them to capture, access, and use information to increase the success of both our company and our franchisees,” said Brian Fisher, director of business technology at Papa Murphy’s. “Salesforce gave us exactly what we needed, since we could leverage existing features and also tailor the solution for our particular business. Our staff especially enjoys the ability to access Salesforce from their Blackberries, which eliminates the need to start up their computers constantly while on the road.”

With this proven success for its franchise sales team, the company next rolled out Salesforce to its construction group and operations team. It took less than three months to design, implement and train employees on the custom objects, forms, applications and processes that have streamlined their internal operations. Fisher estimates that with other technology options available to his team, this project would have taken at least a year to rollout. He was truly impressed with the time saved on development and staff training. Now Papa Murphy’s has a single, centralized location in which to manage all aspects of its franchise business.

Papa Murphy’s is also using Salesforce Customer Portal for its internal help desk needs. Emails sent to the help desk automatically create a case, and the IT team can use Salesforce to assign resources and track the issue to resolution.

“Salesforce is so easy to use, and requires so little IT support, that we’ve tapped it for all aspects of our business, both internally and externally,” added Fisher. “We’ve increased productivity and improved communications, and now have a highly efficient way to manage the growth of our franchise business. Salesforce is proving to be instrumental to our ongoing success.”