Excellent
Freshsales CRM offers a lightweight and simple solution for SMBs that want to get up and running quickly. Sensible pricing tiers, an AI assistant, and customization options make it even more appealing for folks who value ease of use.
WHAT WE LIKE
- Good customer support
- Low price point
- Easy onboarding
COULD BE BETTER
- No "forever free" plan
- Dashboard customization limited
SCORE
- Ease of Use 9.3/10
- Support 9.7/10
- Pricing 9.3/10
- Features 9.7/10
What is Freshworks?
Freshworks CRM is a next-generation customer engagement platform that combines the best features of a sales CRM with powerful marketing automation features. This helps businesses foster a stronger relationship with their customers, which in turn increases retention and improves sales. It’s perfect for businesses that want their sales and marketing teams to attract and manage leads and close deals using only one, cohesive software. Salespeople will have access to information and tools to help them know who they are selling to, while marketing people can better understand their target customers.
Freshworks CRM is made up of three modules to address your specific business requirements. If you need to focus on sales, Freshworks CRM Sales Cloud can be an excellent choice. It’s an end-to-end solution for sales teams when it comes to attracting leads, automating sales processes, gaining insights on the best deals to go after, and closing deals.
With built-in communication tools like email, instant messaging, and telephony, sales professionals can nurture customer relationships in one place, making them more organized and efficient in performing their daily activities. For instance, client calls can be made by simply clicking contact numbers directly on the platform. Plus, the auto-profile enrichment feature automatically adds publicly listed information about your leads and contacts so you don’t have to waste time searching and updating information manually. Details on a customer’s profile appear on a single page to help you reply with more context when conversing with clients.
On the other hand, if you want to boost your marketing results, Freshworks CRM Marketing Cloud can help. Using its reports dashboard and analytics tools, you can gain insights about your customers’ behavior. You can use this information to develop new products and services or deliver more personalized buyer experiences. Moreover, automation tools for email communication can help make a marketer’s life easy as it sends targeted and relevant content to nurture prospects and turn them into qualified leads.
Finally, if you need a platform that can strengthen the partnership between your marketing and sales teams, consider Freshworks CRM Customer-for-Life Cloud. It breaks down silos by integrating Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud functionalities, which makes it possible for your sales and marketing people to have a 360-degree view of customers.
For example, if your marketing team wants to run a targeted campaign, they can refer to the conversations between sales reps and customers to identify what pain points need to be addressed. Salespeople, meanwhile, can get real-time updates on sales-ready leads since marketing can upload them directly into the CRM. With Freshworks CRM Customer-for-Life Cloud, you can align sales and marketing activities so each department receives the right customer insights at the right time across all touchpoints.
Freshworks CRM integrates with well-known business apps like Hubspot, Mailchimp, Quickbooks, and Slack. This makes it easy to use with software your team might already be using. It also has API access for those who need to develop custom integrations and mobile support features, including offline capabilities.
Is Freshworks right for your business?
Freshworks CRM (formerly “Freshsales”) is one of many offerings from Freshworks. It has great features for managing a team of salespeople, and as such, it is generally a good CRM software option for larger companies that need to keep a number of salespeople working efficiently.
So if you need powerful sales and marketing tools and want to boost the effectiveness of your team, this is geared toward you.
(The Appointments & Tasks tab gives you an overview of upcoming tasks. Source: Freshworks.)
That said, because it has an affordable basic version with robust features, small companies with minimal sales teams (or sole proprietors) will get a lot of value out of this platform. It’s not a free CRM software, but it has a lengthy free trial and the initial price point is very low.
Overview of Freshworks Features
- Contact and account management
- Sales and marketing activities
- CRM customization
- Email marketing campaigns
- Marketing email deliverability
- Marketing journey builder
- Sales pipeline management
- Data administration
- Sales sequences
- Phone
- Chat
- SMS and instant messaging integration
- Freddy AI insights
- Website integration
- Data security
- Reports dashboard
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS
Overview of Freshworks Benefits
Strongly connect your sales and marketing teams
Marketing people do a lot of work in running campaigns for lead generation and maintaining engagement with leads to keep them warm. Salespeople are also equally responsible for converting leads into paying customers by sending them emails, follow-ups, or setting product demos. All these activities produce a lot of scattered customer information and insights if your sales and marketing teams use different business tools to complete their work.
Freshworks CRM breaks sales and marketing silos and provides visibility throughout the customer journey. It deeply integrates sales CRM features with marketing automation so all the data and tools you need to better understand your customers can be easily accessed in one location using just one software solution. The platform strongly connects sales and marketing to help your teams create meaningful and personalized customer journeys.
Have relevant conversations with customers
It’s hard to connect with customers and deliver excellent service when data is scattered all over the place. Freshworks CRM’s contact landing page stores all customer information and interaction on a single page so salespeople get a unified view of all activities related to a specific client. The Activities Dashboard and Activities Timeline make it easy to track the buyer’s journey by showing assigned agents handling a task or what stage the customer is at in the buying process.
Marketing, on the other hand, can also use interaction history to dive deep into a customer’s engagement level. They can review the context of the interactions, get context from those, and then plan their customer messaging accordingly.
Improve sales pipeline management
Important files, data, and tasks can easily get buried under other matters when things get busy in the workplace. Freshworks CRM uses a visual sales pipeline so that your sales and marketing team can have an overview of the progress of each deal or campaign.
The Freshworks Deals page, for example, is presented in a Kanban board layout where users can quickly see the status of each deal. You can customize deal categories based on your company’s pipeline. For example, you can make categories for new deals, deals under negotiation, upcoming meetings with clients, and admitted deals.
Aside from tracking deals, the visual pipeline allows you to add tasks, set up meetings, make calls using the built-in phone dialer, and send emails on any deal card. It’s also possible to filter deals based on the agents handling them, which comes in handy when doing reports or checking the performance of your team members.
Increase engagement and retention
Highly engaged customers are willing to spend more on your products and are more likely to remain loyal to your brand. But as your organization grows, it can be difficult for marketers to keep up and provide a high-quality customer experience for every buyer.
This is where Freshworks CRM can make a difference. Its powerful features such as email marketing, marketing automation, and customer segmentation work together to empower your marketing team to meet the ever-evolving expectations of customers.
Email marketing tools, for example, can help you nurture customer relationships via beautifully designed emails with targeted, personalized content. Email automation, meanwhile, can help counter the time-consuming nature of email marketing by allowing you to set predefined rules for sending out emails. You can target recipients based on demographics, previous engagement with your company, behavior, etc. You’ll never miss an opportunity to engage with your customers and convert them.
Find the best sales lead
Leads are important to sales, but how can you know which ones are promising and will lead to a close?
Freshworks CRM has Freddy AI. Powered by artificial intelligence, Freddy AI provides lead scoring and insights into the best leads based on sales-ready buying signals and behaviors. AI-driven insights allow your salespeople to spend more time on taking actions to make a sale and less on guesswork. Through lead scoring, they can see which leads need follow-ups and nurturing and which ones are ready to buy.
Technical details
| Deployment | Devices | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hosted Open API |
Windows Linux Web-based |
Email Live Support Training Phone |
| Customer Types | Pricing Model |
|---|---|
| Small Business Medium Business Large Enterprises |
Monthly payment Annual Subscription |
| Language Support |
|---|
| English, Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Dutch ,Portugese, Polish |
Freshworks Pricing Overview
| Free Trial | Growth | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| √ | $35 | $85 | $149 |
Pricing information for Freshworks is supplied by the software provider or retrieved from publicly accessible pricing materials. Final cost negotiations to purchase reshworks must be conducted with the seller.
Like most CRMs, Freshworks CRM’s pricing is on a per-user, per-month basis. You choose from four tiers with an increasing amount of features, with a steep discount for paying up front for the year. First, we’ll list the annual price, followed by the monthly price.
Garden is $29/month per user ($35 billed monthly). This version comes with extras such as 250 bulk emails per user per day, workflow automations, teams, and advanced reports.
Professional is $69/month per user ($85 billed monthly). This expands bulk emails to 1,000 per user per day, gives you more workflow automations and sales sequences, advanced customization options, and event tracking.
Enterprise is $125/month per user ($149 billed monthly). This is for the real heavy users, with 5,000 bulk emails per user per day, up to 50 teams, IP whitelisting, audit logs, a data center, and a dedicated account manager.
This pricing structure makes Freshworks CRM a good option for a small business because the basic version comes at a low price and includes enough features for a sales team to do their jobs.
However, the steep penalty for signing up month-to-month (about 50% higher) is a downside. It might be a good idea to sign up month-to-month at first and then, when you are confident the software is right for you, spring for the annual contract.
You can sign up for a 21-day free trial, with no credit card required.
Freshworks CRM offers something for everyone?
With a generous list of features and a reasonable pricing structure, Freshworks CRM does a good job of offering something to businesses of all sizes.
It’s an affordable CRM for small business owners who just have a few users and only need basic CRM features, but enterprise companies with extensive needs who are willing to pay the higher price have the option to get something more powerful.
It certainly seems more suited to companies with teams of salespeople since many of its features are geared toward that dynamic, so if you’re a small business and you’re the only salesperson, a lot of features may not be useful to you. But most of the features will come in handy.
Frequently Asked Questions for Freshworks CRM
Is Freshworks CRM affordable?
Freshworks CRM scores high in the affordability area, with its basic version at a price that most small businesses can afford. There’s also a 21-day free trial, which is a generous period of time to try out the software (and you don’t have to enter any credit card information). The only downside is a steep penalty for paying month-to-month instead of annually.
What features does Freshworks CRM offer?
Besides basic CRM features, Freshworks CRM has a few unique elements. Its lead scoring system makes it easy to see which clients are closest to a sale and should therefore get more attention. It does a good job with managing teams of salespeople, although most of those tools are only available in the higher-priced versions. And it has lots of reports to choose from so you can do a deep dive into your sales performance.
Is Freshworks CRM easy to use?
Freshworks CRM is intuitive, with a simple menu to the left of the screen that makes navigation easy, and a dashboard that puts your tasks front and center. Reports are easy to access and generate. And a lot of typically manual tasks are automated, which helps save time.
Does Freshworks CRM offer good customer service?
Freshworks CRM does an outstanding job when it comes to customer support, making it easy to reach the support team via phone, email, or live chat, and offering extensive self-help options like videos and articles.
Freshworks CRM does a solid job of providing a nice balance of price and features, so small businesses and large enterprises alike can enjoy the platform. However, there are other options out there that may be a better fit for your company, so check out The Blueprint's reviews of other CRM software options before making a purchase decision.
