Total Frustration Leads to Launching a Better CRM Platform
Recently I posted an article called “Salesforce Alternatives in the CRM Software Market”, with one of the five explored being Freshsales CRM. I was very impressed with what I uncovered, which has lead me into digging a little deeper into this comprehensive solution.
F
ounded in Chennai in 2010, Freshworks,which was formerly known as Freshdesk, has been steadily adding to its suite of products to surpass its North American rivals Zendesk and Desk. Their suite of products feature a variety of cloud-based software solutions like Freshservice, a cloud-based service desk and IT service management solution and Hotline.io, an in-app support and engagement platform geared toward mobile-first businesses.
Known for its online customer support and help desk software, in June 2016 they launched “Freshsales” — a customer relationship management (CRM) solution and sales system, designed for sales representatives working in ‘highvelocity environments’.
Sales teams often require multiple integrated systems to complete all the tasks at hand like handling leads, managing accounts, email and phone integrations as well as user behaviour tracking, lead scoring and reporting. With this in mind, Freshworks came up with Freshsales to simplify things and do away with the need for multiple tools by offering an all-in-one solution.
The creation of Freshsales, was in great part inspired by the company’s own frustrations with acquiring new customers for its customer engagement solution. As the company CEO and Founder, Girish Mathrubootham, explained during the podcast of the product launch, the sales team in the company was using CRM solutions that weren’t able to handle all aspects of the sales process together under one platform. After several hundred thousand dollars spent piecing together a system that wasn’t delivering, the company decided to build Freshsales.
"For years, our sales team struggled to integrate all the products we needed into one of the leading CRM tools — but in the end, it was still just an expensive manual dumping ground for data.” Mathrunootham also stated that “As a fast-growing SaaS business, we needed a solution that empowered our sales team with context based on user activity, prioritized leads based on engagement, and enhanced sales rep productivity. Sick of cobbling together a system that had already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, we decided to build Freshsales.”
The Freshsales platform is a comprehensive solution that has email, phone, event tracking, lead management, deals pipeline, reports, mobile and integrations. In creating Freshsales, Freshdesk saw "a large opportunity in the SMB long tail’ and added all the functionality in one place without the enterprise cost and the integration complexity that comes with it.”
Here are just a few of the features that Freshsales CRM provides:
Phone - The one click to call allows users to place calls directly from Freshsales without any extra software or hardware installation cost, no set-up charges or wasting time dialing phone numbers. Administrators can view the entire conversation history, assign numbers to teams and log calls automatically. Sales reps can personalize welcome and voicemail messages, forward calls, know who’s calling and record calls.
Email - Email tracking lets sales reps see who has opened and clicked links on emails, when and how many times. It also comes with features to send personalized bulk emails with templates, email metrics, email scheduling, calendar sync and email-to-lead which automatically links to the record of the appropriate lead or contact.
Track Events - Get in-depth customer insights with website and in-app tracking so you can plan conversations with prospects that are smart and relevant. This tool also gives you activity timeline, behavior-based segmentation and advanced lead scoring, which is combined with the features of the email to deliver a complete picture of the customer’s engagement.
Manage Leads - This 360-degree customer view provides all of the details about your customers, including conversations, deals (open, won or lost), touchpoints with your company, as well as any scheduled appointments or tasks that need to be carried out. Additional features include lead scoring, auto profile enrichment, auto lead assignment, and segmentation and organizations of teams based on different criteria, including geography, deal size, product divisions, and more.
Visual Sales Pipeline - Every deal can be seen across the different stages of the sales process. It can be sorted and filtered by expected close date so better decisions can be made to move the deal up the sales ladder or take other actions. Deals can be viewed at a glance with simple drag and drop navigation and action oriented follow-ups. The sales process can also be customized to analyze lost deals and identify bottlenecks.
Reports - Reports can be generated with the default options provided by Freshsales, or you can build your own custom reports on leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities. The insights the reports provide can be used to adjust the course of any campaign and improve outcomes. The visual sales reports deliver the information in a way that is easy to digest for topics such as revenue analytics, lost deal analysis, pipeline reports, territory reports and email metrics.
Mobile - Every piece of data a sales rep can access on his or her desktop must be available on that reps mobile device too. Freshsales delivers all the information about your leads, contacts, accounts and deals no matter where you are. This includes adding notes that can be quickly shared with other team members when you are out and getting directions to the location of the customer.
Integration - The integration brings Freshdesk, Segments and Google Calendar to support tickets, send events and never miss an appointment.
Ending Notes
While the company is valued at an estimated $1.5 billion, Freshworks has been riding an incredible wave of growth with new locations, acquisitions and products along with the hiring of AppDynamics’ former VP of Finance and Treasury, Suresh Seshadri, as it's Chief Financial Officer who helped AppDynampcs prepare for its IPO, going public is imminent.
Freshsales CRM has grown exponentially since it's launching, it's powerful yet user-friendly features, simple and highly intuitive UI, and its ability to scale with growing sales teams has really put them in direct competition with Salesforce.
Natalie Evans
Natalie Evans has over 16-years in the tech industry and currently works as the event coordinator and tech reporter for CMS-Connected, keeping up-to-date on what's happening in and around the Content Management industry.