Freshsales is a sales-oriented CRM platform produced by the company behind Freshworks, the customer engagement platform. In 2012, burdened by a major vendor’s price for a CRM that had support for APIs, and using valuable developer resources simply to maintain their system of additional integrated platforms, Freshdesk built their own CRM with the built-in features their salespeople preferred. Freshdesk was founded in 2010 by current CEO Girish Mathrubootham in Chennai, India.
Intended Customers Small to Midsize Businesses
Money Back & Free Trial 30-Day Free Trial of Estate Plan, No Credit Card Required
Free Version Yes; Free up to 10 users
Most Popular Plan Garden; $25/user/month
Features
| Sales Force Automation | Integrates with FreshDesk, Segment, Google Calendar | Free Email Address | Purchase Local and Toll-Free Numbers | Email Tracking & Metrics |
| Contact Management | Advanced Lead Scoring | Mass Emails | Email Templates & Customization | Automatic Profile Enrichment with Social Media and Photo |
| Task Management | Email & Phone Integration | Automatic Lead Assignment | Visual Sales Pipeline (Drag-and-Drop Interface) | Email Scheduling |
| Lead Management | One-Click Calling | Smart Fields | Calendar Sync with Gmail | 360-Degree Customer View |
| Deal Management | Personalized Welcome & Voicemail Messages | Event Tracking | Customer Segmentation | Mobile App for iOS and Android |
| Appointment Management | Record Calls | Customized Reports |
All Available Plans & Services Prices reflect monthly prices per user when billed month-to-month and when billed annually.
Help & Support Options
Freshsales is geared towards high velocity sales teams - rather than a few big clients, these teams would have a large number of moderately-sized clients. With so much activity on different accounts, combined with the modern data needs and responsibilities of a salesperson, sales teams need a platform that combines multiple applications into one. The platform that’s easiest to use and saves users the most clicks per task wins out. Towards this end, Freshsales is a competitive sales-oriented CRM - it’s got an open, straightforward UI, integrated phone and email, lead management, a deals pipeline, event tracking, a mobile app - all the features you’d expect for a sales CRM. The pricing is competitive; while users can get a barebones version of the platform for free up to ten users, the main functionality comes from email tracking, templates, notifications and Google calendar integration. The ‘360 degree customer view’ presents comprehensive customer details in one place - their contact information, correspondence history, and sales history. The deals pipeline can be customized by stages and can automatically arrange leads by progress and allows manual arrangement through drag and dropping leads. Leads can be imported through CSV files, web forms or emails, but unfortunately, Freshsales does not automatically pull contacts in from Google, which is a handy feature of other CRMs like Insightly. Aside from the importation options, contacts can be added manually, but starting with the Garden plan users can enjoy Auto Profile Enrichment which draws information and photos automatically from social media. The Garden plan is Freshsales’ most popular plan. Users get the email tracking features with associated metrics, the email templates, the configurable lead assignment by size, industry and territory. It falls short of the in-app event tracking and website events tracking. Therefore the Garden plan seems best suited for sales teams selling services or a products without a need (or desire) for a highly nuanced online sales or marketing presence. Note that some CRMs with built-in phone features offer unlimited calling for certain plans; Freshsales does not. Users must pay $1 per phone line and then calling rates apply. In contrast, an even more heavily sales-oriented CRM such as Close.io - which was also developed as an internal solution for salespeople - is more expensive but allows unlimited calling with more automated features out of the box. Companies that spent a lot of time on the phone may prefer the predictable albeit higher fees of Close.io to those of Freshsales, which would fluctate depending on phone activity. On the other hand, Freshsales offers more ‘traditional’ CRM features than Close.io, and notably offers a mobile app, which Close does not. Freshsales integrates with Freshdesk, Segment, and Google Calendar. Zapier and access to the developer API can handle many other integrations. If sales is a major part of your business and you’re looking for a lightweight but fairly functional CRM, Freshsales offers nice functionality for the price. It’s not highly customizable, but it’s easy to setup, friendly on the eyes, and incorporates enough email functions - templates, scheduling, metrics, logging - for a nice balance between phone and email sales correspondence. They’ve got a 30-day free trial, no credit card required, which is more than most CRMs. If you’re in the market for a sales CRM solution, it’s worth giving a shot.
