Welcome to Moe’s!
 
You may not know the name Raving Brands but you probably know their colorful and uniquely branded restaurants - Mama Fu’s, Flying Biscuit, PJs Coffee, Monkey  Joe’s, Planet Smoothie, Boneheads, Doc Green’s, Shane’s Rib Shack and Moe’s (although they are in the process of selling Moe’s). Almost as recognizable as the theme restaurants are the “wrapped” cars that display the brand colors and logos that many of the principals and employees drive. The parking lot at HQ is quite a colorful scene! 

In the spring of 2007 Raving Brands became an enthusiastic client of Salesforce.com and EnablePath after hiring both to help them manage their franchising business. They have been great to work with and are now an installed successful client, although we are still waiting for someone to send us a Chocolate Elvis!

Company Overview
 
Raving Brands, based in Atlanta, was founded in 2000 and has grown nationally to almost 700 locations. The majority of the locations (known in Raving Brands speak as “concepts”) are owned and operated by franchisees. The model of ownership can be complex, with some franchisees owning a single location and others owning the rights to multiple brands in designated geographic regions.  

While the locations make their money by selling great food and keeping customers happy, the parent company is responsible for creating and refining the brands as well as adding new franchisee’s and locations.  Given the meteoric growth and recognition that the company has enjoyed, managing franchise requests and opportunities across regions and brands is no small feat. Enter Salesforce.com & EnablePath.

The Players

Dana Mead is Senior Director Franchise Sales and Lead Marketing and began looking into a new lead management system in early 2007.

Coleman Youmans is Lead Generation Supervisor and works closely with Dana.  Coleman is the person most responsible for driving the implementation of Salesforce.com to success. 

Greg Laderman is the Account Executive for Salesforce.com who first initiated contact with Raving Brands and qualified the opportunity as a good fit for both Salesforce.com’s technology and EnablePath’s services. 

Challenges

The project materialized from the daily frustration and endless cycles of time that Coleman and Dana experienced working within the legacy system they inherited. According to Coleman, “We were ahead of our system in terms of reporting, tracking and the ability to customize the application to fit our needs. 

The system just wouldn’t keep up.” Adds Dana, “We also wanted to manage and customize the system ourselves without having to call customer service, which was poor with the previous application provider.”

Specifically, Raving Brands was not able to:

• Track franchise sales and inquiries by segment (concept) or geography 
• Track a lead from inception through the franchising process through owning a single concept to becoming a multiple concept owner 
• Produce and analyze dependable information due to poor reporting capabilities 
• Use any sort of workflow automation to process requests for information, contracts and hand-offs internally 
• Track or compare ROI from different lead generation sources (such as websites inquiries or trade shows)

Technology Requirements

In addition to being able to address the above limitations, Raving Brands also had requirements that the new system must:

• Fully integrate with Outlook 
• Allow users to work when they are off line 
• Allow the ability to import historical data from other internal applications

Solution Provided

Following an extensive evaluation Raving Brands chose Salesforce.com’s Enterprise Edition and EnablePath as their Implementation Partner. 
 
Results

After completing a five week implementation process, Raving Brands went live on July 9th, 2007.  According to Coleman, the benefits are numerous:

• “The system has delivered everything we hoped and more and we are especially excited about the ease of use and flexibility the system offers.  We are 95% complete in getting the application exactly where we want it and are now tweaking minor processes as we learn more.”   
• “We love the reporting tools and are now tracking leads, lead sources and are able to run ROI reports based on marketing campaigns” 
• “We have seen dramatic improvement in internal routing of information between regions and functional areas.  The manual processes of routing have disappeared, resulting in substantial time savings, which was a bonus that we didn’t fully anticipate”
• “We can now track almost anything, from lead flow to who is using the system”

Conclusion

Raving Brands is “incredibly excited” about the ease of use and flexibility of the system and the new efficiencies that are being delivered.  Raving Brands is no longer “ahead of the system” and anticipate that other departments within Raving Brands will soon have an interest in extending the capabilities into their functional areas.  The system aids productivity rather than inhibit productivity.  Raving Brands is now a happy referencable customer to both Salesforce.com and EnablePath (and graciously consented to allowing EnablePath to recap their story).