How Raintree Leverages Technology To Help Brands Grow

As recently as two years ago, the franchise sales and development experts at Raintree were growing frustrated with the tools available to them in the franchise industry. For Brent Dowling, Raintree’s CEO, the unsophisticated ways of recruiting, marketing and selling to franchise prospects were something he’d dealt with since first getting into the industry, and it was time for a change.

“It got to the point where our team was frustrated with the options, realizing they were five to 10 years dated,” Dowling said. 

It was then that Raintree took matters into its own hands and set out to find a technology partner that could help the company succeed in accordance with its vision. After an immense amount of research and trial-and-error, the company found what it was looking for in Zoho, a customer relationship management software that provided precisely the integrated sales solution Raintree needed to take not only its business, but its brands’ business, to the next level. 

“Over the last two years, we’ve built a custom franchise sales CRM out of Zoho, which has allowed us to pull in about seven different applications and tools to create a streamlined way of intelligently automating our sales process,” Dowling said. “It was, by far, the best option for us and our brands.”

Technology plays a critical role in Raintree’s work growing franchise brands of all sizes, and now, it has the perfect platform through which to maximize the efficiency—and effectiveness—of its efforts. 

“It’s a night and day difference from what we were doing before to what we’re doing now,” said Lana Mazin, Director of Brand Development for Raintree. “Zoho is extremely intuitive as far as the reporting and talking about analytics goes. It’s so crucial for us to be able to quantify the work that we’re doing as a team internally for Raintree—we’re way more efficient. I can clearly see how this is going to impact our brands on the financial side of things, as well.”

Because of Zoho’s customizability, the Raintree team was able to connect the third-party applications it needed to, eliminating the need to switch between multiple programs and the CRMs of different brands during the course of one’s workday. Zoho allows Raintree to localize all of its team’s different email addresses and inboxes, too, making for an incredibly streamlined tech hub

“The level of technology available through Zoho is something Raintree hasn’t seen,” Mazin said. “We’re still finding new ways that we can utilize the technology to help us increase conversions—we use Zoho campaigns to primarily market to our database of over 100,000 leads, and if we didn’t have Zoho to do so, it’d be chaotic, to say the least. With this system, though, we can track every touchpoint.”

From Dowling’s perspective, if a franchise brand is considering partnering with Raintree, using Zoho’s CRM is practically a must. Simply put, because the Zoho program is so integral to how Raintree works successfully as a company and how we get results for each other, it’s sort of a  dealbreaker, especially when you consider how Raintree has grown from a very small company to the position it currently occupies, one where numerous brands, Jamba and Famous Dave’s among them, are engaging the franchise sales solution to take their entire franchise growth program over. 

“I think it’s no coincidence that our growth has happened in line with our implementation of Zoho,” Dowling said. “Our technology is a big part of the reason the franchise world is looking to Raintree right now as perhaps the leader in innovation, and really, the leader in how to successfully recruit franchise owners.”