Today’s Freshsales review is exploring one of the better-known customer relationship management (CRM) tools built specifically for sales teams. Offering extensive automation and intelligence, Freshsales helps companies to streamline their processes and close more deals.
The functionality of Freshsales is specifically tailored to the needs of evolving sales teams in a digital environment.
Freshsales is also a part of a more comprehensive selection of tools from the “Freshworks” ecosystem, which companies can leverage to enjoy extra functionality. For instance, you can combine Freshsales with “Freshdesk” for customer engagement via helpdesk functionality, or Freshservice for IT support.
Here’s everything you need to know about Freshsales.
What is Freshsales?
Winner of multiple awards for sales teams automation and optimization, Freshsales is a CRM software specifically suited to sales transactions. The Freshsales ecosystem comes to us from Freshworks – a company known for offering state-of-the-art software as a service, or “SaaS” tools.
Freshworks launched in 2010 starting with the “Freshdesk” environment, and gradually implementing new tools like Freshservice, and eventually Freshsales (2016).
With Freshsales, companies can close deals faster with a 360-degree view of their customers, pulling in data and information from every point in the sales cycle. You can track interactions between clients and team members and automate time-consuming tasks to make your staff more efficient. Freshsales is also surprisingly easy to use, given its wide selection of features.
Like many of the leading software options on the market today, Freshsales leverages disruptive technology like AI and automation to improve business outcomes. The intuitive, customizable, and highly flexible interface makes it an excellent choice for people who might not have a lot of experience with the best CRM software.
What’s more, Freshsales integrates with a wide variety of existing business tools, like email and phone technology, so companies can easily communicate directly with their contacts from the CRM. With a mobile app, users can stay productive on-the-go, and there’s even a relatively affordable selection of pricing packages to choose from, ideal for different sizes of business.
Freshsales Key Features
Part of what makes Freshsales so compelling to so many users, is it’s flexibility, and scalability. The ecosystem is constantly adding new features and functionality to make life easier for users. There’s a beginner-friendly interface with AI technology already built-in, and a smart selection of chatbots available to help bolster your human service strategy.
Freshsales makes it easy to collect information about your target audience, understand user intent, and put the data you gather into use. There’s even a huge range of customization options. Everything from the main navigation menu to the interface is available to customize to suit the needs of your specific sales team. Let’s take a look at some of the most exciting features offered by Freshsales:
- Custom sale activities (with tracking)
- Contact lifecycle stages
- Custom fields for data collection
- Multi-currency and multi-language sales
- Custom modules and automation rules
- Auto-assignment rules
- Sales sequences
- Territory management
- Intelligent assignments
- Holiday routing
- Profile enrichment (automatic)
- Email templates
- Workflows
- Activity timelines
- Chat campaigns
- Email, phone, WhatsApp, business chat, video, and SMS
- Sales pipeline creation
- Product catalog
- Sales goals
- CPQ management
- Weighted pipelines
- Next best action AI
- Deal insights
- Predictive contact scoring
- Lead generation bot
- Sales cycle and velocity reports
- Complete role-based access
- Voice notes
- Analytics dashboard
- Automatic call logging
If all that wasn’t enough, it’s just the beginning. Freshsales also allows you to access further tools and integrations through API access, a comprehensive marketplace, and Zapier connectivity. There are also a host of native integrations with leading tools like Xero, QuickBooks, and Outlook.
Freshsales Ease of Use
With such a huge list of features to explore, it’s easy to assume using Freshsales would be a complicated experience. However, the reality is it’s much simpler than you’d think. Freshsales allows users to customize their experience to suit their specific needs, which is a great way to improve ease of use. The custom sales activities feature is particularly impressive.
With custom sales activities, you can plan engagements and appointments with customers, get reminders of upcoming events, and track performance. Every salesperson has various steps they need to complete when engaging with customers and turning them into loyal long-term fans. The Sales Activities environment ensures users can track every kind of activity taken to carry a deal forward.
You can start tracking sales activities and identify the ones that increase your sales the most with powerful reports. You’ll also get all the insights you need to streamline your processes and start closing deals faster this way too.
There’s access to custom sales activities, based on the individual sales processes of your team, and you can even leverage AI-based insights, with the “Freddy AI” built into your sales data. This helps to determine next-best actions for every campaign.
Outside of the custom sales activities, Freshsales offers a range of other customization options to make life easier for sales teams. For instance, contact lifecycle stages allow you to track each contact’s journey from an aligned interface. There’s multi-currency and multi-language settings, and custom roles and permissions available to set up for your business requirements.
Overall, everything is surprisingly straightforward. You can also group users into teams, which is ideal in an environment where more people will be working remotely and may need to access the same insights as their colleagues from any environment.
Automation
Automation is a big part of boosting sales team efficiency these days. With more challenging customer journeys to consider than ever before, business leaders need to make sure they’re implementing the right strategies to help their teams thrive.
Freshsales is brimming with automation functionality, including auto-assignment rules, so you can decide exactly which agents deal with which customers. There’s also territory management, so you can categorize contacts based on relevant criteria for each sales agent.
Sales sequences are one of the most impressive automation options from Freshsales. Essentially, they allow companies to engage with customers and prospects using automated campaigns. You can create touchpoint opportunities for SMS, phone calls, reminders, and emails. There’s also the option to automate sales sequences with specific delivery timelines.
Freshsales provides a range of templates to help you get started as a beginner. You can access everything from templates to nurture leads, welcome emails, follow ups, and cross-sell or upsell campaigns. For a small business, sales sequences are an excellent way to ensure more conversions.
Freshsales also offers web forms, for capturing your leads. You can access these without any coding knowledge at all. Plus, there are automations to keep your team on track too. You’ll be able to use features like:
- Territory management to categorize contacts for better salespeople assignment.
- Holiday routing to ensure calls are still handled during holidays.
- IntelliAssign to auto-assign chat conversations within your team based on skill level.
- Auto profile enrichment, to learn more about accounts and contacts.
- Email templates for creating and editing email templates based on changing trends.
- Workflow automation to cut manual labor in half.
- Chat campaigns for engaging customers at just the right moment.
To improve everything from follow up to lead management, the Freshworks CRM for sales integrates with your existing tools. You can link to CRM systems, as well as tools like Zapier and Quickbooks.
Communication and Contact Management
Like most CRM systems, Freshsales comes with contact management features to help you reach your customers and nurture relationships.
There’s email marketing integration and email tracking, so you can keep on top of bulk emails and individual messages. You can also track metrics for phone calls, chat notifications, WhatsApp, Apple business chat, and more.
Freshsales even integrates with Zoom, so you can launch and schedule Zoom meetings within your CRM solution. To ensure you have context for everything from sales forecasting to nurturing emails, you’ll have a complete view of your unified customer information.
The contact management environment is a user-friendly interface with a unified view of your customer information. You can use it to track summaries of your customers, or dive deeper into the CRM tool for custom reports on individual consumers.
There’s even a comprehensive deal pipeline, where you can check out contact interactions held between your clients and sales or marketing teams.
AI and Analytics
Beyond your visual sales pipeline and CRM solution, startups with Freshsales also get access to a host of disruptive tools, like the Freddy AI. This AI solution learns from your sales campaigns and CRM data to give your customer support team or sales team better guidance.
You can use Freddy for convenient deal insights, as well as to automatically delete duplicate contacts in your account. The system will also detect when people are out-of-office and notify you to re-schedule a meeting and allow you to predictively score contacts on a range of factors.
The comprehensive sales forecasting solution from Freshsales comes with calendar event suggestions, sales forecasting, and more, to ensure you can make the most intelligent deal decisions.
No matter your company size, you can also use Freshsales to configure comprehensive reports, using either pre-existing templates, or designing from scratch.
Freshsales offers sales cycle and velocity reports, as well as sales activity reports, and custom analytics for granular insights into your campaigns.
Governance and Mobile
Similar to many market leading tools like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, and Salesforce, Freshsales offers a range of governance options, to ensure you can keep your data as secure as possible. You can add users to roles, specify permissions, and define control levels in one place.
The Freshsales CRM also enables audit logs, for tracking important compliance information, and provides role-based access controls, and field permissions.
For users on the move, the technology also comes with an Android and iOS app. This allows users to access everything from marketing automation tools to voice reps on the go. There’s an analytics dashboard for your sales reps, notifications on important information, and access to the majority of Freshsales contact options, such as SMS and Zoom meetings.
If your employees are using Freshsales on the move, they can also access automatic call logging for compliance purposes, and add their own custom apps to their ecosystem, like tools for capturing LinkedIn information or other social media insights.
Freshsales Pricing
Freshsales pricing is interesting because it’s one of the only CRM solutions to offer a completely free version. The free solution includes contact management, contact lifecycle stages, built-in email, chat and phone numbers, 24×5 support, and a mobile app.
If you want to access bonus features like audit logs and AI based insights, you’ll need one of the three paid plans. Options include:
- Growth: $15 per month/user when billed annually: This includes everything in the free package, plus a visual sales pipeline, AI-powered predictive contact scoring, sales sequences, product catalogs, and custom reports.
- Pro: $39 per month/user: Includes everything in Growth, plus multiple sales pipelines, time-based workflows, AI-powered deal insights, chat campaigns, and WhatsApp Business.
- Enterprise: $69 per month/user: Everything in Pro, plus custom modules, auto-profile enrichment, AI-based forecasting, a dedicated account manager and audit logs.
While the free plan is fantastic for beginners, it’s somewhat problematic because it doesn’t include reporting – one of the most important tools for any CRM.
Freshsales Review: Verdict
There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to choosing the right CRM and sales management system. With tools ranging all the way from Freshcaller for phone calls, to gmail integrations, Freshsales has a lot to offer. This Sales CRM is great for smaller to mid-sized businesses looking for technology providers that won’t break the bank.
As you saw throughout this review, Freshsales has a number of essential capabilities to offer, like call recording and lead scoring. It also goes above and beyond in some areas too, like artificial intelligence and automations. However, the free plan is a little basic, so may not be suitable for long-term use.
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